Al Silverman, a magazine editor and publishing executive, died March 17 at his home in Manhattan. He was 92. Mr. Silverman collaborated with Chicago Bears halfback Gale Sayers on an autobiography that was adapted into “Brian’s Song,” the popular 1971 television movie about the friendship between Mr. Sayers and his dying teammate, Brian Piccolo.

Early on, Mr. Silverman was well known in sports publishing. He was a freelance writer for several sports magazines and wrote books about (or with) Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio and Frank Robinson. Later, he left the sports world and joined the Book-of-the-Month Club as executive vice president and editorial director, ultimately becoming president and chief executive before joining Viking Books as a general editor.

In his review of Mr. Silverman’s book, The Time of Their Lives, about postwar book publishing, the novelist and playwright Bruce Jay Friedman said, “It could have been written only by a ‘bookman,’ someone with printer’s ink in his blood and bones.”

Edward F. Zigler, a psychologist who in the mid-1960s helped design Head Start, the vanguard federal government program for preschool children, died Feb. 7 at his home in North Haven, CT. He was 88.

Since 1965, more than 35 million children have been enrolled in Head Start, which each year provides early education and medical services to about a million children under 5 years old at a cost of about $10 billion.

In 1976, Dr. Zigler was named a Sterling professor, Yale University’s highest professorial honor. In 2005, Yale’s Bush Center for Child Development and Social Policy was renamed the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy. He was director emeritus until his death.

Rabbi David Saperstein, senior advisor to the Union for Reform Judaism and director emeritus of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, issued the following statement: “Today. we mourn the passing of Al Vorspan, former senior vice president of the Union for Reform Judaism and director emeritus of the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism, who died Feb. 16, at age 95. Al Vorspan…was one of the ‘great ones’ of Jewish social justice work.

“Vorspan was a leading Jewish voice during the civil rights movement, in opposition to the Vietnam War, and for Soviet Jewry relocation efforts…Al Vorspan was, to many, the personification of reform Judaism’s social justice efforts.”

Lili Wronker, a Hebrew calligrapher and book illustrator, died Jan. 10 at a hospital in Mount Holly, NJ. She was 94.

Her love of Judaism found artistic expression in her Hebrew calligraphy, which appeared in fine-art books and magazines. “Her connection to being Jewish was so strong and overflowing, she couldn’t contain it, said Misha Beletsky, the art director of Abbeville Press and president of Typophiles, a New York organization devoted to typography and book design. “She had so much joy in being Jewish that it permeated her whole life.”

Neil Yerman, a renowned Torah scribe, said Mrs. Wronker stood out in the world of Hebrew calligraphers. She also illustrated dozens of children’s books.

Rabbi Yechiel Zvi Eckstein, founder and president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, died suddenly on Feb. 6 in Jerusalem. He was 67. The fellowship, under his chairmanship, raised about $500 million each year for Israel and various Jewish causes.

The Fellowship is a philanthropic organization founded in 1983. Its goal is to promote understanding and cooperation between Jews and Christians, and to build broad support for the State of Israel.

Leonard Dinnerstein, a historian whose doctoral dissertation on the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta, heralded his career as one of the nation’s foremost scholars of anti-Semitism, died Jan. 22 at his home in Tucson. He was 84. Professor Dinnerstein’s theses was published in 1968 by Columbia University Press, titled simply, The Leo Frank Case. It has never been out of print.

He received his doctorate in American history from Columbia University. He first taught at the New York Institute of Technology and at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey before moving to the University of Arizona, where he was a professor of history from 1970 through 2004, and director of Judaic Studies from 1993 through 2000. In addition to his published thesis, he is the author of three books on immigration, ethnic groups, and the Holocaust.

Morton Sobell, who was convicted in the Cold War spy trial that delivered Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to their deaths, died on Dec. 26 in Manhattan. He was 101.

Mr. Sobell had served 18 years of a 30-year term in prison, asserting his innocence until 2008, when, in an interview with The New York Times, he startled his defenders by reversing himself and admitting he had been a Soviet spy. He had been convicted in 1951 with the Rosenbergs of conspiracy to commit espionage. The government portrayed Mr. Rosenberg as the mastermind of an espionage ring that provided Soviet scientists with classified conventional weapons technology and the know-how to enable them. Mrs. Rosenberg was portrayed as her husband’s partner and accomplice. Mr. Sobell was entangled in the conspiracy, although no evidence was presented that tied him to the theft of any nuclear secrets.