Gerald M. Levin, a media executive who ran the world’s largest media company, Time Warner, and who became an architect of its merger with America online, the world’s largest internet company, then headed by Steve Case, died on March 13. He was 84.

The merger was widely considered the worst corporate marriage in American history. AOL’s stock price slid more than 30 percent between the deal’s announcement in January and its approval that December by the Federal Trade Commission, pushing AOL’s proposed $165 billion purchase of Time Warner — in stock and assumed debt — down to $112 billion.

By the start of 2002, AOL Time Warner’s market value was around $127 billion. That year, the company posted a net loss of $98.7 billion, a record for a U.S. company. Mr. Levin resigned in 2002.

Blame for the failure was placed on a variety of factors, including the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the cultural differences between Time Warner’s old media and AOL’s new media, and a clash of egos between the two CEO’s.

Len Sirowitz, an award-winning advertising art director whose creative work in the 1960s included memorable print ads for the Volkswagen Beetle — like one declaring, “Ugly is only skin-deep” — and a campaign for Sara Lee, which introduced “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee,  died on March 4 at his home in Manhattan. He was 91.

“It was quite early in my career that I began to realize that my message needed to not only be bold and daring, but it must stem from the truth…and touch people’s emotions,” he told Dave Dye, who runs the advertising blog “From the Loft.”

Mr. Sirowitz was the senior vice president and associate creative director of Doyle Dane Bernbach. During his tenure, he was voted art director of the year several times by Ad Weekly, and was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame.

Josette Molland, a French Resistance fighter during WWII, eventually captured by the Nazis, who deported her to concentration camps for women, died Feb. 17 at a nursing home in Nice.

The horrors she endured took a visual form in the retelling. Many years after her liberation and return to France, she was worried that the story wouldn’t be told. She began to make a series of paintings depicting her life at Ravensbruck and Holleischen. “I use them to explain to young people in the schools what the human race is capable of, hoping that my testimony will awaken their vigilance so they don’t have to live what I did,” she wrote in an autobiography.

The paintings are frank, leaving little to the imagination. There is no emotion, and the faces are nearly expressionless, powerful in their fairy-tale-like simplicity, The New York Times said.

David Seidler, a screenwriter whose Oscar-winning script for “The King’s Speech” — about King George VI conquering a stutter to rally Britain at the outset of WWII — drew on his own painful experience with a childhood stammer, died on March 16 on a fly-fishing trip in New Zealand. He was 86 and lived in Santa Fe, NM.

On winning the Academy Award for best original screenplay for “The King’s Speech” (2010), Mr. Seidler said from the Hollywood stage that he was accepting on behalf of all stutterers. “We have a voice; we have been heard,” he said.

Ben Stern, a survivor of nine concentration camps, who spearheaded a defiance against a rally organized by a band of Nazis in Skokie, Ill., in 1977, died on Feb. 28, at his home in Berkeley, CA, where he had moved from his residence in Illinois. He was 102.

          The threat of Nazis rallying in his midst was intolerable to him, to many of his fellow Skokie residents, and to local government leaders. Efforts to block the demonstration failed. The Supreme Court denied the request for a stay, clearing the path for the Nazis to demonstrate.

Although Skokie lost the legal fight, the village was spared the Nazi rally The group moved the event to Chicago, knowing that a rally in Skokie would face a counterdemonstration, which Mr. Stern had helped to plan and which was expected to draw about 50,000 people.

In Chicago, an estimated 5,000 turned out to protest the really. In the end, the demonstration outside a federal building included 29 Nazis and lasted 10 minutes, The Los Angeles Times reported.

Mr. Stern was quoted saying “Today you prove we stand together against the threat of Nazism.”

Joseph I. Lieberman, the independent four-term U.S. senator from Connecticut, who was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000s, becoming thew first Jewish candidate on the national ticket of a major party, died on March 27 in New York City. He was 82.

Mr. Lieberman served 10 years in the state Senate, the last six as majority leader before running the open U.S. House seat for the New Haven area. Following that loss, he ran for state attorney general and swept to victory. He won reelection four years later and then took o U.S. Sen. Lowell P. Weiker, Jr., a three-term liberal Republican.

In Washington, Mr. Lieberman became known as a serious-minded legislator, adept at working with colleagues on both sides of the aisle. In private life, Mr. Lieberman was a strict observer of Orthodox Jewish practice. He kept a kosher4 diet, prayer daily, and declined to campaign on the Sabbath. He brought moral certitude to his public life as well, denouncing gratuitous sex and violence in films, television shows, and pop music. One of Mr. Lieberman’s enduring themes was that religion in general, not just the Jewish faith, deserved a more prominent place in public life.

In his 2012 farewell Senate speech, he said, “The greatest obstacle I see standing between us and the brighter American future we all want is  right here in Washington. It is the partisan polarization of our politics that prevents us from making the principled compromises on which progress in a democracy depends.”

 The Shofar joins the membership in mourning the deaths of two long-time shul members: Bill Adams on Feb. 15, at his home in Silver Spring, MD; and Alice Nadel on Feb. 23, at her home in Cutchogue.

May their memories be blessed. We extend deepest condolences to the families.