It is with sadness that The Shofar reports the death of former shul member Victor Friedman on Feb. 5. Our deepest condolences to his wife, Leah, their children and grandchildren.

Lee Mendelson, an Emmy-Award-winning producer who was instrumental in bringing the holiday staple, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” to television in 1965, died on Christmas morning at his home in Hillsborough, CA. He was 86.

More than 15 million households viewed the show the night it premiered, and it remains a holiday television fixture. Mr. Mendelson also produced television movies and shorts, including “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving,” and “It’s Your 50^th Christmas, Charlie Brown,” for which he won his 12th Emmy Award.

David Stern, who during a 30-year run as commissioner of the National Basketball Association masterminded its transformation from a league in peril to a multibillion-dollar industry and the first American sports league to thrive internationally, died Jan. 1 in Manhattan. He was 77.

The NBA was lagging behind the National Football League and Major League Baseball in both revenue and television profile when Mr. Stern took over. By the time he stepped down, in 2014, he had overseen the league’s growth from fears of extinction in the late 1970s to a

$5 billion enterprise. Television revenues increased more than 40-fold in that span, crossing the $1 billion threshold.

He succeeded largely by keeping the focus on the NBA’s biggest names — Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley — understanding that it was they who gave the sport its worldwide appeal, the New York Times said. [NBA photo]

George Sakheim, one of the last surviving interpreters at the International Military Tribunals in Nuremberg in 1946, died Dec. 5 at a hospital in Lansdale, PA, near his home in Gwynedd.

During his time in Nuremberg, Mr. Sakheim translated German documents into English, interpreted the interrogations of Rudolf Höss, Hermann Göring, and other Nazi leaders, and provided simultaneous translation of testimony during the trials in Courtroom 600.

He was a teenager when he emigrated from Germany to New York, and was drafted by the Army in 1943. Because he spoke German, he was sent to Camp Ritchie in Maryland, where he went through a training program in interrogating prisoners of war. He fought in Normandy, and began to translate interrogations of German prisoners to find out where the Nazis were producing missiles and rockets and to learn the locations of minefields, enemy artillery and tanks.

In early 1945, Mr. Sakheim was among the soldiers who liberated the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp in Nordhausen, Germany. “This could have been me,” he said of the camp filled with corpses in an interview for The Jewish Exponent, a weekly newspaper in 2015, “if my mother hadn’t decided to move us out of Berlin in the spring of 1933.

Diane Terman Felenstein, who represented celebrities as a publicist before gaining renown herself with a best-selling financial advice guide for women, died Dec. 8 at her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She was 79.

Inspired by the Beardstown Ladies, as group of women in their 60s and 70s who had formed an investment club to pick stocks, Ms. Terman Felenstein wanted women to be knowledgeable about finances in general to help safeguard their futures. The book encouraged women to take a bigger role in guiding their family finances, and it was a hit, covering topics like investments, retirement, estate planning, insurance, and even marriage and divorce.

“If you don’t do proper planning, you’re going to be left holding a paper bag,” Ms. Terman Felenstein was known to say. “We say, ‘If you’re left holding the bag, there ought to be money in it.’”

Jerry Herman, the composer-lyricist who wrote Hello, Dolly!, Mame, La Cage aux Folles, and a handful of tuneful musicals and rousing show tunes, died Dec. 26 in Miami. He was 88.

“All these years that I’ve been writing Broadway musicals” he once revealed, “whenever I’ve had to write a real hit-‘em-in-the-gut show tune, I always pictured it in the voice of Judy Garland. Invariably, my work came out more theatrical and exciting because of that little trick.”

Jerry Herman was nominated for nine Tony Awards, winning four times: Best Musical and Best Original Score for Hello, Dolly!, Best Original Score for La Cage aux Folles, and a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theater.