May he rest in peace.

The Shofar joins the membership in extending condolences to Rochelle Garmise and her family on the death of Stuart Garmise, brother of our beloved shul member, the late Alan Garmise. Stuart died on Feb. 28, and was buried in New Jersey on March 4.

Rose Girone, believed to be the oldest survivor of the Holocaust, died in North Bellmore, NY, on Long Island, on Feb. 24. She was 113. Her secret to longevity, she said: dark chocolate and good children.

Rose Girone was eight months pregnant and living in Breslau, Germany, in 1938, when her husband was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. She secured passage to Shanghai, only to be forced to live in a bathroom in a Jewish ghetto for seven years. Once settled in the United States, she rented whatever she could find while supporting her daughter by knitting. She made friends with other refugees, including a Viennese Jewish businessman who helped her turn her knitting into a business. It would be a lifeline for decades to come. Eventually, she had saved enough money to open a knitting store with a partner in Rego Park, Queens, and she opened a second store in Forest Hills. She continued to work and teach knitting until she was 102.

There are about 245,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors alive around the world, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. “This passing reminds us of the urgency of sharing the lessons of the Holocaust while we still have firsthand witnesses with us,” said Greg Schneider, the organization’s executive vice president. “The Holocaust is slipping from memory to history, and its lessons are too important, especially in today’s world, to be forgotten.”

M. Paul Friedberg, a landscape architect whose playgrounds, pocket parks and plazas transformed areas of New York City, died on Feb. 15 in Manhattan. He was 93.

Mr. Friedberg grew up in rural Pennsylvania, but he believed in the promise of cities to create happier, healthier societies with inviting public parks and plazas. In New York and other cities across the country, he became the go-to designer for reinvigorating public space. He tucked vest-pocket parks into vacant lots and the dead space between buildings. He set plazas on top of parking garages, and playgrounds on rooftops.

“I think we tend to destroy the creative side of human nature, and in play is where we are most creative,” Mr. Friedberg said in his oral history. “There are people whose whole life is dedicated to play, and those are the people we call artists.”

Refugee, prisoner, wine merchant, spy: Peter Sichel was many things in his long, colorful life, but he was probably most often identified as the man who made Blue Nun one of the most popular wines in the world in the 1970s and ‘80s. At its peak in 1985, 30 million bottles of this slightly sweet German white wine were sold.

By the time Mr. Sichel took charge of his family’s wine business in 1960, he had lived a long, clandestine life. As a 19-year-old German émigré to the United States who volunteered for the U.S. Army the day after Pearl Harbor, Mr. Sichel was recruited to join the O.S.S. as part of an effort to build an American intelligence-gathering force where none existed. For 17 years, first in the Office of Strategic Services during WWII, and then in the Central Intelligence Agency — from its formation in 1947 until he resigned in 1959 — he played a crucial role in gathering intelligence for the United States. He died on Feb. 24 at his home in Manhattan, at 102.

Selwyn Raab, an investigative reporter for The New York Times and other news organizations who, in exacting detail, explored the Mafia’s many tentacles, died on March 4 in Manhattan. He was 90.

As a boy on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Mr. Raab saw the mob up close. There, he told Time magazine in 1974, he was “surrounded by the kind of legendary criminals you read about — bookmakers, con artists, Jewish and Italian gangsters.”

“I grew up with guys I later covered,” he said.

The mob had his enduring attention, and it led to his definitive 765-page book on New York wiseguys, Five Families: The Rose, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires, published in 2005.

Mr. Raab received many honors for his work, including the Heywood Broun Award from the New York Newspaper Guild, and an Emmy for his work on “The 51st State,” a WNET program that dealt with New York City issues. He joined The Times in 1974 and worked there for 26 years.

Uri Shulevitz, a polish-born children’s book author and illustrator who survived a harrowing childhood traversing Europe to escape the Nazis, and wove those experiences into his works, died on Feb. 15 in Manhattan. He was 89.

Mr. Shulevitz published more than 40 books. He received a Caldecott Medal and other Caldecott honors. A painter as well as an illustrator, he exhibited his work in numerous galleries and museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Jewish Museum in New York. The New York Times Book Review ranked his book, titled Chance, among the 25 best children’s book of 2020, and it cited Mr. Shulevitz in lists of the 10 best-illustrated children’s books of the year in 1978, 1979 and 1997.