Rabbi David Traub
Rabbi David Traub, 38, father of seven, was boating with his family at Greenwood Lake in Orange County when he courageously gave his life to save a pair of children struggling in the water. He saved the children, but lost thl energy to stay afloat. He submerged and never resurfaced, authorities said.
Rabbi Traub was head of the school and synagogue at Bais Medrash Elyon in Monsey, NY. His body was recovered the next day. Following his funeral, his body was taken to Israel for burial.
Danny Cohen
Danny Cohen, an Israeli computer scientist whose work in the 1960s and ‘70s on computer graphics and networks led to innovations in flight simulation, internet telephony, cloud computing, and one of the first online dates — with him — died August 12 at his home in Palo Alto, CA. He was 81.
David Cohen said of his father: “He used humor to put people at ease, to skewer ideas he thought were wrong and, as a network engineer, to confirm transmission accuracy. He said he always began his talks with a joke to check whether people could understand his mix of Israeli accent and mild speech impediment. If they didn’t laugh, he knew they either couldn’t understand him or it wasn’t a good joke.”
Morton Bahr
Morton Bahr, a national labor leader who helped his fellow communications workers survive threats to their jobs posed by digital technology and corporate revamping, died July 30 at his home in Washington. He was 93. From 1999 to 2001, Mr. Bahr was also president of the Jewish Labor Committee, a national advocacy group.
By forming partnerships with educational institutions and negotiating with management, Mr. Bahr started job retraining programs. He also secured child care benefits and flexible schedules to give employees more latitude for work, study and family.
Jeffrey Epstein
Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who was long dogged by accusations of sexual abuse of girls, hanged himself on August 10 in his jail cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, where he was awaiting trial, officials said.
Manhattan federal prosecutors last month charged Mr. Epstein, 66, with sex trafficking of girls as young as 14. Mr. Epstein’s death brought an abrupt end to a prosecution that his accusers had hoped would finally shed light on how he had been allowed to commit what they said was a string of depraved crimes for so many years — and what role his wealth, privilege and connections played.
He was arrested on July 6 at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey after his private plane landed on a flight from Paris. Federal prosecutors charged him with sex trafficking and sex trafficking conspiracy. He pleaded not guilty to the charges. If convicted, he would have faced up to 45 years in prison.
Mitchell Feigenbaum
Mitchell J. Feigenbaum, a pioneer in the field of mathematical physics known as chaos, died June 30 in Manhattan. He was 74.
At Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in the mid-1970s, Dr. Feigenbaum, using a programmable calculator, found what seemed at first a mathematical curiosity. A simple equation generated a sequence of numbers which were initially trivial: the same number over and over. But as a parameter in the equation shifted, the output became more varied. First, the numbers bounced back and forth between two values, then they cycled among four values, then eight, and so on, with the rate of the change quickening until the patterns lost repeating cycles.
The dynamics had, in the terminology of physics, passed into the realm of deterministic chaos. That is, each number of the sequence could be computed precisely, but the resulting pattern appeared to be complex and random. He calculated the rate of that quality, known as doubling, and found that it occurred about 4,669 times as quickly as the previous one. That number is now known as the Feigenbaum constant, a universal mathematical constant, like pi.
Leon Kossoff
Leon Kossoff, whose expressionistic portraits and images of urban life made him one of the most important painters of post-war Britain, died on July 4 in London. He was 92.
His main subjects were his family and friends, or models who became friends, also the many glories of London — its pedestrians, its streets, its railway and underground stations and their trains — and old master paintings in the National Gallery. In 1957, he had his first solo show with Beaux Arts. In 1981, he showed his work for the first time in the United States in an exhibition of figurative painting from Britain at the Yale Center for British Art; two years later, he had his first solo show at the Hirschl & Adler Gallery in New York. The Tate Gallery staged a retrospective in 1996, and in 2007, the National Gallery organized “Leon Kossoff: Drawing From Painting,” bringing together a large selection of his drawings of its masterpieces.
Robert Morgenthau
Robert M. Morgenthau, who waged a war on crime for more than four decades as the chief federal prosecutor for Southern New York State and as Manhattan’s longest-serving district attorney, died July 21 in Manhattan. He was 99.
In an era of notorious Wall Street chicanery and often dangerous streets, Mr. Morgenthau was the bane of mobsters, crooked politicians and corporate greed; a public avenger to killers, rapists and drug dealers; and a confidant of mayors and governors. As district attorney, he presided over a battalion of 500 lawyers, a $75 million budget, and a torrent of cases every year, from stock manipulators and extortionists to murderers, muggers, wife beaters and sexual predators, supervising a total of 3.5 million cases over the years, including highly publicized trials, like those of the subway vigilante Bernard Goetz; the Central Park “preppy” killer, Robert Chambers; and John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman.
In an interview with The New York Times in 2009, he ruminated on the night in 1944 when his Navy vessel went down with 47 of his shipmates. “I was swimming around without a life jacket,” he recalled. “I made a number of promises to the Almighty at a time when I didn’t have much bargaining power — that I would try to do something useful with my life.”
Get Social