Lew Fidler, a one-time Democratic City Councilman from Brooklyn, died May 5, two days after he was discovered while unconscious in a Queens movie theater.

According to the New York Post, Fidler was discovered inside the theater around 11:30 p.m. on April 3. He was taken to Elmhurst Hospital, where he died around 12:30 p.m. on May 5 without having regained consciousness.

He served in the City Council until 2013, and was a Democratic District leader until his death. He regularly organized the largest Tots Giveaway for underprivileged children during the holiday season, according to kingscountypolitics.com/.

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Taub, the Israeli-based Grand Rabbi of the Kaliv Hasidim, died at age 96 on April 28 at his home in Jerusalem. His funeral took place the same day, and thousands of Hasidim came to mourn.

A Holocaust survivor, Rabbi Taub devoted himself to exhorting the Hasidic world and those outside it to remember the approximately six million Jews killed by the Nazi regime during WWII. He also reached out to less observant Jews to reconnect them with their faith by urging them to recite the Shema Yisrael prayer regularly, leading such recitations himself.

According to the New York Times, Rabbi Taub was born in 1923 in the Transylvanian town of Marghita, now in Romania. He had six siblings. His father, Rabbi Yehuda Yechiel Taub, was a prominent Hasidic leader.

The family was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, and all six siblings were killed. Rabbi Taub was subjected to chemical experiments by Mengele that left him sterile. He spent time in other concentration camps, including Bergen-Belsen. After liberation, he was reunited with his wife, Hana Sara, in Sweden, The Times said.

According to the London-based weekly newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle, Rabbi Taub was once asked why the recitation of the Shema prayer was so important. He replied that just before he was liberated at Bergen-Belsen, Nazis had been throwing Jews into burning pits.

“I cried out the Shema Yisrael and said: ‘Ribbono shel Olam (Creator of the World), this might be, God forbid, the last time I will be saying Shema Yisrael. Soon I will be with the rest of my family in heaven. If you give me life, then I promise You that I will say it time and again…”

Lori Gilbert-Kaye was shot while attending Passover services at Chabad of Poway, CA, on April 27. She was attending the Saturday Yiskor service in remembrance of her mother when she was confronted by a lone gunman, John T. Earnest, 19. Mrs. Gilbert-Kaye was killed, and several others in the synagogue, including the rabbi, were injured.

Ira Neimark, who started in retail as a department store pageboy and went on to build Bergdorf Goodman into the standard  for luxury shopping, died April 18 in Harrison, NY. He was 97.

As the leader of Bergdorf Goodman for more than 17 years, starting in 1975, Mr. Neimark helped transform it into an arbiter of high fashion that catered to the richest New Yorkers and wealthy visitors from around the world.

He his opinion, the ideal Bergdorf customers should be “the women who went to the best restaurants; the women who stayed in the best hotels; the women who belonged to the best clubs; the women who went to the best resorts.”

Sydney Brenner, a South African-born biologist who helped determine the nature of the genetic code and shared a Nobel Prize ion 2002 for developing a tiny transparent worm into a test bed for biological discoveries, died April 5 in Singapore. He was 92.

Dr. Brenner was a central player in the golden age of molecular biology, which extended from the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 to the mid-1960s. He then showed in experiments with a roundworm known as C.elegans, how it might be possible to decode the human genome. That work laid the basis for the genomic phase of biology.

Among his many honors, in addition to the Nobel, was the prestigious Lasker Award in medical science, given to him in 1971. For a short time, he had been director of the Cambridge Laboratory of Molecular Biology, but he did not much enjoy working as an administrator, the New York Times said.

Dan Robbins, a package designer who helped to conceive what became known as paint by numbers, died April 1. He was 93.

Paint-by-numbers kits opened up art to the masses. As the packaging on one kit promised, “Every man a Rembrandt.” In 1955, sales hit 20 million kits.

“I never claim that painting by number is art,” he said. “But it brings that experience to the individual who would’t normally pick up a brush, not dip it in paint. That’s what it does.”

Tens of thousands from every major Hasidic sect crowded the streets of Borough Park, Brooklyn, for Rabbi Portugal’s funeral on April 2. Rabbi Portugal, the grand rabbi of the tiny Skulen Hasidic sect, had died the day before at age 95, in Baltimore. He may have been the last of the Hasidic grand rabbis who had survived the ordeals of the Holocaust and the Iron Curtain. He gained a reputation of compassion, a spare life, and doing God’s work.                                                                                                        Getty Images