Abraham H. Foxman, a hidden child of the Holocaust who became the chief combatant against antisemitism in the United States as national director of the Anti-Defamation League for almost three decades, died on May 10 in Manhattan. He was 86.

Mr. Foxman was born near Vilnius. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 and seized Vilnius, eventually slaughtering 100,000 Jews, the family turned over Avraham to a nanny, Bronkislawa Kurpi. His mother posed as a Christian and Avraham’s aunt. His father, after periods confined to Nazi labor camps, hid out in forests.

For four years the nanny raised Avraham as her son, had him baptized as a catholic and gave him the name Henryk Stanislaw Kurpi. Whenever he passed a church, he would make the sign of the cross, and when he met a priest on the street, he would stop to kiss his hand, the Times said.

The family survived the war, reclaimed 5-year-old Avraham, and returned Avraham to Jewish observance. The family immigrated to the United States in 1950, and Mr. Foxman attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush and stayed through the end of high school. He earned a B.A. in political science from the City College of New York and a law degree from New York University.

Some of my most satisfying moments as director of the ADL were in “witnessing people who did bad things and said vile things turn around and become better people,” he said.

So identified was Mr. Foxman with the battle against antisemitism that in 2016, when campuses of the City University of New York grappled with incidents that many Jews saw as bigoted, Eric Alterman, a professor of English at Brooklyn College, said in an opinion article, “When it comes to antisemitism, if Abe Foxman is not worried, I’m not worried.”

Edith Eva Eger, a clinical psychologist and best-selling author whose traumatic experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps — including being forced to dance for Josef Mengele, the notorious physician known as the “Angel of Death” — enabled her to identify with and treat emotionally troubled patients, died on April 27 at her home in San Diego. She was 98.

Her emotional recovery took time: For two decades after the war, she did not discuss the privations she had endured or the atrocities she had witnessed. She learned that she had to forgive herself for surviving, which she barely had. When American soldiers liberated Gunskirchen, a sub-camp of Mauthausen in Austria, in May 1945, she lay nearly motionless in a heap of corpses, weighing barely 70 pounds and suffering from pneumonia, typhoid fever, and pleurisy.

“I release them,” she told the U.S.C. Shoah Foundation in the 1990s, referring to her Nazi captors, adding: “It’s not me forgiving them for what they did to me. I think it’s mostly liberating myself, to invest my energy in the future.”

Seymour Bernstein, an acclaimed concert pianist, who later turned to teaching, his true calling, he said, died on April 30 in Damariscotta, Maine. He was 99.

In spite of rave reviews of his public performances, Mr. Bernstein was never comfortable in the limelight. “I hated the commercial aspect,” he said. “I hated the nerves.”

In the early 1950s, during the Korean War, Mr. Bernstein was drafted into the Army. Sent to Korea in the same unit as the violinist Kenneth Gordon, who later joined the New York Philharmonic, Mr. Bernstein asked their lieutenant if they could perform for the unit. They were informed that soldiers don’t like classical music, Mr. Bernstein later told the Korean War Legacy Foundation. Undeterred, he borrowed a Yamaha piano from a local music school. He and Mr. Gordon gave several concerts a day for American and international troops, and the soldiers were often in tears by the end, he said. On one occasion, shells flew overhead while he was performing a Chopin polonaise.

Mr. Bernstein continued offering private lessons and master classes, and playing the piano into his 90s. “For me, life is beginning at 90,” he said. “I’m learning to play the piano properly.”

Lionel A. Rosenblatt, a U.S. Foreign Service officer, who helped roughly 200 South Vietnamese citizens evacuate Saigon days before it fell in 1975 with a daring, unauthorized mission that prefaced a career advocating for refugees in Southeast Asia and other global hot spots, died on April 11 at his home in Washington. He was 82.

Concerned about the fate of the Vietnamese who had worked with the United States during the war, tens of thousands of whom could be vulnerable to retribution by the Communist North Vietnamese government, Mr. Rosenblatt said, “Our lives depended on their ability to help us. To up and leave them was unthinkable.”

They phoned their network of former colleagues. They scheduled meet-ups on street corners, a restaurant, a cathedral, offering passage out of Vietnam, warning that it was a risky and dangerous mission. They shepherded their Vietnamese friends to military planes leaving for Guam and the Philippines and eventual travel to the United States. On April 30, Mr. Rosenblatt and his colleague, Larry Craig Johnstone, left the country in the last American helicopter to make a rooftop departure out of the country.

Sonia Pressman Fuentes, an early women’s rights lawyer who told the feminist author Betty Friedan that women needed an advocacy group to fight for them the way the N.A.A.C.P. fought for Black Americans, planting the seed for the National Organization for Women, died on Dec. 20 in Sarasota, FL. She was 97.

In 1965, Mrs. Fuentes became the first female lawyer in the general counsel’s office at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a new agency that had been created to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Invited to speak to employers and unions about the new anti-discrimination law, Ms. Fuentes found that “any reference to women’s rights was greeted with laughter,” she wrote in a 1999 memoir.

In June 1966, Ms. Friedan and 27 others chipped in $5 each to create what became the National Organization for Women, eventually the largest feminist group in the country. NOW became the catalyst for significant change in the workplace and at home.

Later, Mrs. Fuentes worked in the private sector. She resigned after three years, unhappy there. “I was uncomfortable in the corporate world,” she wrote. “It was not the place for an outspoken, independent, liberal Jewish woman, who wanted to change the way things were done.”

Dr. Judith L. Rapoport, a child psychiatrist who brought public awareness to obsessive-compulsive disorder, died on March 7 in Washington D.C. She was 92.

            The disorder had long remained in the shadows because of the shame that surrounded its symptoms, which could include habits like checking and rechecking that appliances were off, performing counting rituals before doing something as simple as walking through a doorway, or scrubbing hands with soap and water until the skin was raw. Dr. Rapoport showed a neurological basis for repetitive thoughts, and also for their linked compulsions or pointless rituals of behavior.

            In addition to research on obsessive-compulsive disorder, Dr. Rapoport oversaw influential studies that shed light on attention deficit hyper activity disorder and childhood-onset schizophrenia.

Pedro Friedeberg, a Mexican Jewish artist who was often called “The last Surrealist,” known for his hallucinatory paintings of imaginary cities and for his absurdist furniture designs died on March 5 in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. He was 90. Born in Italy to German Jewish parents, Mr. Friedeberg moved to Mexico with his family as a child and was later hailed as an artistic force in his adopted country. He worked in various mediums, including sculpture and printmaking, but found fame with paintings and drawings that transcended the boundaries of his university architecture studies. His paintings and lithographs were intricately geometric and dreamlike, conjuring otherworldly skylines, town centers, buildings and temple-like interiors.

                     For all his other accomplishments, Mr. Friedeberg is best remembered for his hand chairs. More than 5,000 have been produced in a variety of materials, some fetching tens of thousands of dollars at auction.