Howard Golden, who as Brooklyn borough president for a quarter-century pressed to strengthen the borough economically, and defended it against slights real or perceived in the years before it experienced a gentrifying revival, died on Jan. 24 at his home in the Kensington section of Brooklyn. He was 98.

Mr. Golden’s career in politics developed as he moved up in Brooklyn’s Democratic party. He was a city councilman from Borough Park for seven years before being chosen to fill the borough president’s post temporarily when it became vacant on Jan. 3, 1977. He won election to his first full term later that year. His 25-year run ended on Dec. 31, 2001.

Mr. Golden remained a lifelong champion of Brooklyn, his pride in the borough unshakable. In a speech in 2000, he said, “There are two kinds of people in this world — those that come from Brooklyn, and those that wish they did.”

Arno A. Penzias, whose astronomical probes confirmed what became known as the Big Bang theory, died on Jan. 22 in San Francisco. He was 90.

Dr. Penzias shared the 1978 Novel Prize in physics with Robert Woodrow Wilson for their discovery in 1964 of cosmic microwave background radiation, remnants of an explosion that gave birth to the universe some 14 billion years ago, now the accepted explanation for the origin of the universe.

Dr. Penzias was born in Munich in 1932. In 1939, he and his brother, Gunter, were put on a train as part of the Kindertransport, the British rescue effort that brought some 10,000 children to England. The family reunited in New York in 1940.

Dr. Penzias’s path to stumbling onto the answer to one of humanity’s most central questions started when he joined Bell Laboratories as a member of its radio research group in Holmdel. There he saw the potential of AT&T’s new satellite communications antenna, a giant radio telescope known as the Holmdel Horn, as a tool for cosmological observation.

Lawrence L. Langer, a literary scholar who found the Holocaust an event so vast and evil that it defies moral framing, died on Jan. 29 at his home in Wellesley, MA. He was 94.

Across some 15 books and monographs, Dr. Langer insisted on an interpretation of the Holocaust as a moral black hole. Reason, Humanism and Enlightenment values had no function in the concentration camps, he said.

At Simmons College, he created what is believed to be the country’s first academic course on literature and the Holocaust. He also set to work on his first book, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, which was a finalist for the 1976 National Book Award, and is today considered a founding text in the field of Holocaust studies.

Robie Harris, a children’s book author and former teacher whose writing about sexuality made her among the most banned authors in America, died on Jan. 6 in Manhattan. She was 83.

Her best-known book, It’s perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies Growing Up, and Sexual Health (1994) with its explicit illustrations, has been pulled from library shelves all over the country. Detractors called it pornography; supporters said it is a frank and honest guide to sexuality for children and teenagers. It has sold more than a million copies, and has been translated into 27 languages. In all, she wrote more than 30 children’s books, but Normal drew the most attention.

Rabbi Matisyahu Salomon, a spiritual counselor at America’s largest yeshivas who spearheaded a crusade to warn observant Jews of the risks posed by the internet, died on Jan. 2 in Lakewood, NY. He was 86.

Rabbi Salomon was dean of students during his three decades at Beth Medrash Govaha, a religious school in Lakewood with an enrollment of more than 9,000 students, where he guided thousands of young men in ethical and pious conduct.

A decade ago, he led a campaign to warn observant Jews that new technologies were threatening observance of the laws, traditions and principles that are the backbone of their Ultra-Orthodox faith, beguiling pious Jews with videos, images and temporal content that would distract them from their family life, daily religious obligations, and pursuits like Torah study. In 2012, a rally in support of the concept packed Citi Field with 20,000 believers.

Anthony Epstein, a British pathologist whose chance attendance at a lecture on childhood tumors in Africa began years of scientific sleuthing that, with his colleague Yvonne Barr, led to the discovery of the virus known now as Epstein-Barr, and opened expansive research into its links to cancers and other ailments, died on Feb. 6 at his home in London. He was 102.

Dr. Epstein’s work in the 1960s to isolate the virus — a type of herpes — set the foundation for sweeping studies into viral and biological triggers for cancers, such as Hodgkin’s lymphoma, multiple sclerosis, lupus and, most recently, so-called long covid.

In 1991, at Oxford Brookes University in Oxford, England, Dr. Epstein was discussing the events leading to the Epstein-Barr discovery with Dr. Denis Burkitt, who had discovered a mysterious tumor in African children and had delivered the lecture that had so intrigued Dr. Epstein. “It was a series of accidents, really,” Dr. Epstein said. “Lucky quirks.”

“But you have to have two things,” said Dr. Burkitt. “You have to have the accidents, and you have to have the mind that can interpret them and look behind them and see their meaning.”

Rabbi Jules Harlow, who brought poetry and music to the style of prayer in Conservative Judaism, died on Feb. 12. He was 92.

Rabbi Harlow’s major works — prayer books for daily, Sabbath, festival and High Holy Days use — became the standards for worship in Conservative synagogues in North America. Several of his books sold well over 100,000 copies each, according to the Rabbinical Assembly, which published them.

Rabbi Harlow aspired to make the prayer book accessible to those who did not speak Hebrew, translating into English the rhyme and meter of the original Hebrew into Siddur Sim Shalom.

[Siddur Sim Shalom is the prayer book used at our synagogue here in Greenport.]