Evelyn M. Witkin, whose discovery of the process by which DNA repairs itself opened the door to significant advances in the treatment of cancer and genetic defects, died on July 8 in Plainsboro Township, NJ. She was 102.

In a career that began in the late 1940’s, early in the field of genetic research, Dr. Witkin explored the ways in which radiation both damaged DNA and generated a repair mechanism, what she came to call the SOS response. Her insight into the SOS response shed new light on how solar radiation and chemicals in the environment affect humans’ genetic makeup.

In 1983, she became the director of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University, where she stayed util retiring. In 2021, on her 100^th birthday, the Waksman Institute renamed one of its premier research laboratories for her.

Marvin Wulf, a constitutional lawyer who reshaped the American Civil Liberties Union into a more aggressive litigator, argued 10 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and supported the future Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in bringing a landmark sex discrimination case, died on July 8 at his home in Manhattan. He was 95.

As the legal director of the ACLU from 1962 to 1977, Mr. Wulf turned the organization from one that mostly filed friend-of-the-court briefs in others’ cases into one that directly filed suit on behalf of people who said their civil liberties had been violated.

Mr. Wulf hired the future U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to co-direct the ACLU’s newly created Women’s Rights Project, which focused on sex-discrimination cases. Ms. Ginsburg won five of the six sex-discrimination cases she argued before the court during her time there.

Marga Minco, a Dutch novelist who was one of the last of a generation of European Holocaust authors whose works are widely considered literary classics, died on July 10 at her home in Amsterdam, at 103.

In her writing, Ms. Minco describe the stark crisis of Jewish life in the Netherlands during WWII, based on her own experiences. She described incremental shifts to her life as Nazi persecution degraded and dismantled the Jewish community.

Because the protagonist of one of her stories is a young Jewish girl in hiding, and the book is written in diary form, she is often compared to Anne Frank. “In the Netherlands, Marga Minco is for the older generation just as famous as Anne Frank,” said Victor Schiferli, a fiction and poetry specialist with the Dutch Foundation for Literature. Her novel, Bitter Herbs, has been translated into 20 languages.

Last month, our congregation bid farewell to one of our dedicated members. Pamela Panepinto-Birman,

who passed away in Fort Lauderdale, established together with her husband Paul, the Paul and Pamela Birman Technology Fund, which helped our synagogue leap forward significantly. She was a warm and caring friend to many of us. We wish Paul to be comforted by God and our community. May Pamela’s memory be for a blessing.

-Rabbi Gadi Capela

With Holocaust restitution having paved the way, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is exploring the provenance of items in its collections in search of looted art.

The move to return art, particularly art stolen by the Nazis during WWII, acknowledges controversy in recent years over the acquisitions processes that bring valuable artifacts from across the globe into collections here in the United States. In the past few years, the Met has returned objects to Nepal, India and Egypt, most stemming from Jews fighting to reclaim art stolen from them by the Nazis.

According to an article in The New York Times, Melissa Rivers, daughter of the late Joan Rivers, is donating her mother’s extensive collection of jokes to the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, NY, where the jokes will be accessible to all.

Melissa Rivers told The Times that the Smithsonian Institution had been interested in the collection, but said it would not be on permanent display. She said her mind instantly went to the final shot of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in which the golden Ark of the Covenant is locked inside a crate and placed in a vast warehouse with hundreds of other crates. She said she didn’t want to see that happen.

The museum is planning an interactive exhibition that will center on the comedian’s catalogue of jokes from the 1950s to 2015, and will also include clothing, jewelry and photos from her life.

Amitai Etzioni, the Israeli-American sociologist who drew wide attention as well as derision by fathering the Communitarian movement, a vision of society in which people care less about their own rights then about one another and the common good, died on May 30 at his home in Washington, D.C. He was 94.

Barely a decade after landing in America, having fled Nazi Germany with his parents, he was writing books, articles and provocative commentaries on the nuclear arms race, European security, the Vietnam War, America’s racial and educational problems, energy and inflation policies, and even popular worries over pornography, student unrest, and topics ranging from sex therapy to Hollywood hoopla.

But of all his pursuits, none hit home with greater force than “communitarianism,” which he named, interpreted and promoted for two decades. Though the idea seemed simple, its implications spread out in all directions. Individual liberty and equality were the foundations, he said, but these depended on the good character of people who willingly embraced the responsibilities of citizenship.

Communitarian ideas have had a modest revival in recent years in some intellectual circles, but Mr. Etzioni expressed concern that the school of thought was being largely ignored. “Despite my confidence that the message I have hammered out would do the world a lot of good,” he said, “no one seems to be listening.”