Judge Thomas Buergenthal, who said his survival in a Nazi death camp when he was 10 years old had equipped him to become a human rights lawyer and venerable judge on the Worlds Court, died on May 29 at his home in Miami. He was 89.

After the war, he settled in the United States, and was nominated by Costa Rica for a judgeship on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, from 1979 to 1991 and was its president from 1989 to 1994.  He wrote foundational books on international law; was president of the American Bar Association’s Human Rights Committee from 1972 to 1974; dean of Washington College of Law of American University  from 1980 to 1985; held endowed professorships at the University of Texas, SUNY Buffalo and Emory University, where he was also director of the Human Rights Program of the Carter Center.

Judge Buergenthal served on the United Nations Truth Commission on El Salvador in 1992, was a member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee and the Ethics Commission of the International Olympic Committee, and was vice chairman of the Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Accounts, which returned funds to Holocaust victims from bank accounts that had been seized by the Nazis.

Franz S. Leichter, a New York State legislator for three decades, whose progressive views on abortion, gay unions and the decriminalization of marijuana became law here, died on June 11in Manhattan, at 92.

First as an assemblyman and then as a state senator representing the Upper West Side, Mr. Leichter was regarded as one of the Legislature’s staunchest liberals. For him, that was a badge of honor, rooted in a deep sense of injustice imbued in him during his childhood in Nazi-controlled Vienna and as a young, motherless Jewish refugee in New York. His mother, Kathe Leichter, a leading Austrian sociologist who had pressed for equal pay and job opportunities for women, was imprisoned in Nazi Germany’s Ravensbrück concentration camp and killed in 1942.

Parks were a particular passion of Mr. Leichter’s. He co-wrote legislation that transformed four miles of derelict and rotting piers below West 59th Street in Manhattan into the strips of greenery and concrete piers that compose Hudson River Park. He was also a leading advocate for building a 10-block-long park atop a water treatment plant on the Hudson River, now called Riverbank State Park. Both are among his most revered achievements.

“Rick Wolff’s résumé is about as long as a Major League roster, his disparate professions inked by an adoration of sports and a fascination with sports psychology,” The New York Times said. He was a professional baseball player, a college baseball coach, an author of books about sports psychology, and an editor and publisher of books by athletes.

In the early 1990s, he became the psychological coach for the Cleveland baseball team now known as the Guardians, helping them rise from the American League basement to perennial pennant contenders. And for 25 years, he was the host of “The Sports Edge,” a show on the New York sports station WFAN dedicated to helping families navigate the increasingly competitive world of youth sports.

Rick Wolff died on April 10 at his home in Armonk, NY. He was 71.

Neville Sassienie spent his life moving between worlds, as an environmental activist, a seeker of spiritual truth, and a leader in the Jewish community. He died on June 15 in a village near London. He was 91.

An accountant by profession, his interest in personal development led him to become involved in the Landmark Forum, an organization offering training in personal and professional growth. Eventually, he became aware that “personal spirituality and collective social and environmental transformation went hand in hand,” The Guardian said.

He was active in the Jewish Board of Deputies and fought to raise awareness in the Jewish community of the need to care for the environment, leading to the launch in 2007 of the Big Green Jewish Website, which was a major influence in addressing the issue he cared so passionately about.

Sir Ben Helfgott, one of only two Holocaust survivors to compete in the Olympics, survived Buchenwald and went on to become a sporting legend. He died on June 16 in Britain. He was 93.

He was captain of the British weightlifting team at the Olympic Games in Melbourne in 1956 and in Rome in 1960. During the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Cardiff (1958), the survivor of the Buchenwald camp won a bronze medal and three gold medals in the Maccabiah Games in Israel.

Lisl Steiner, an Austrian-born American photographer, photojournalist, and documentary filmmaker, died June 7 in Pound Ridge, NY. She was 95.

Steiner was born to a Jewish family in Vienna in 1927. Shortly after Adolf Hitler annexed Austria, she and her family emigrated to Buenos Aires. In her 20s, she began working in documentary film, and helped produce some 50 documentaries for the foreign ministry of Argentina. Later, she went to work for a Brazilian magazine, undertaking photo assignments around Latin America. In 1960, she moved to New York and began freelancing for Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, Life and the Associated Press. She photographed Fidel Castro during a famous visit to the United Nations. Other famous subjects included Henri Cartier-Bresson, U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and the state funeral of John F. Kennedy.

In 2000, the Leica Gallery in Manhattan held a retrospective of her work.

Haim Roet, who survived the Holocaust by hiding in a Dutch village, came up with the powerful idea to memorialize Jewish victims of the Nazis by intoning their names, died on May 22 at his home in Jerusalem. He was 90.

Mr. Roet worked to spread the idea, and during the early 2000’s Yad Vashem and the Knesset made reading the names of victims an integral part of ceremonies on Yom HaShoah.

“It is so important to gather the names,” Mr. Roet said in a video made by Yad Vashem, “so they don’t remain anonymous, and that each one of them will be remembered, and have a certain place — if not in a physical grave, at least a grave within our memory and the memory of the Jewish people.”