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

Henry J. Stern, who presided over New York City’s emerald empire for 15 years as commissioner of parks and recreation under two mayors, surpassing all but Robert Moses in tenure and enhancements to the city’s green spaces and playgrounds, died March 28 at his home in Manhattan. He was 83.

Mr. Stern was the commissioner under Edward I. Koch from 1983 to 1990, and under Rudolph W. Giuliani from 1994 to 2002. Despite shrinking budgets, vandalism, litter, lawsuits and opposition by special interests, Mr. Stern was generally credited with making the city’s vast archipelago of parks, playgrounds, ball fields, swimming pools, recreation centers and beaches cleaner, safer and more attractive and accessible. He also managed to add 1,600 acres of parkland, bringing the city’s total to more than 28,000.

Janet E. Lieberman, who made college education more accessible to struggling high school students and recent immigrants, died March 19 in San Francisco. She was 97.

An educational innovator, she was the guiding spirit of LaGuardia Community College in Queens from its inception. She not only helped shape the mission of LaGuardia, a two-year college that now enrolls some 45,000 students from 150 countries, she also established collaborations with other educational institutions to attract high school students who had struggled academically, or had to hold down jobs while taking classes, or who could not afford a four-year college.

Dr. Lieberman won the 1989 Charles A. Dana Award for Pioneering Achievement in Higher Education, and the 2004 Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Higher Education.

Michel Bacos, a French pilot who refused to abandon the Jewish passengers of his hijacked plane when they were taken hostage at the Entebbe airport in Uganda in 1976, an ordeal that ended with one of the most daring rescue missions ever undertaken, died March 26 in Nice, France. He was 95.

Mr. Bacos, a veteran Air France pilot was the captain on Flight 139 on June 27, 1976, en route from Tel Aviv to Paris, with an intervening stop in Athens. A group of terrorists associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a radical German group boarded the plane in Athens. Eight minutes into the flight, one of them pointed a gun at Mr. Bacos’s head, and ordered him to pilot the plane to Benghazi, Libya, for refueling, and then to Entebbe, where the passengers and crew were taken hostage. The captors separated the Jews and Israelis from the rest of the group. When the roughly 150 non-Jewish hostages were released, Mr. Bacos and his crew declined to leave.

The crisis ended when dozens of Israeli commandos stormed the airport by night, arriving in a motorcade disguised to look like that of Ugandan leader Idi Amin. Three hostages, seven terrorists and 20 Ugandan soldiers were killed in the operation. Another hostage, who had been taken to a Ugandan hospital, was later murdered.

Honors for Mr. Bacos included the Legion of Honor, his country’s highest decoration, awarded for his courage in Entebbe.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose older brother, Yonatan, was killed while serving with the Israeli commando unit that freed the hostages, wrote on Twitter: “I bow my head in his memory and salute Michel’s heroism.”

Marian Sulzberger Heiskell, a New York civic leader and philanthropist, who led campaigns to create the Gateway National Recreation Area and restore the grandeur of theaters on 42nd Street, and who was a member of the family that controls The New York Times, died March 14 at her home in Manhattan. She was 100.

As the granddaughter, daughter, wife, sister, aunt and great-aunt of six successive publishers of The Times, and as the wife of Andrew Heiskell, the chairman of Time Inc., Mrs. Heiskell moved in the circles that dominated New York’s philanthropic and social world.

Marian Effie Sulzberger was the last surviving member of her generation of the Sulzberger family. Her siblings were Ruth Sulzberger Holmberg, who was the publisher of The Chattanooga Times for 28 years, and who died in 2017; Judith P. Sulzberger, a physician, who died in 2011, and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who died in 2012. He was publisher of The Times from 1963 to 1992 and chairman and chief executive of the company from 1973 to 1997, when he became chairman emeritus.

Mrs. Heiskell stepped down as a director of The Times in 1997, but remained a principal owner of the company under a trust that passed to the four children that was intended to preserve family control of the company. In succeeding years, Mrs. Heiskell maintained an office at The Times, dining in the cafeteria with staff members and conferring with her brother, the chairman  emeritus, and her nephews, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. and Arthur Gregg Sulzberger.