Moishe Smith, a past president of B’nai B’rith  and longtime Jewish community leader, died Jan. 18 in Ottawa. He was 72.

A stalwart Jewish leader and advocate, he was the youngest-ever president of B’nai B’rith Canada (1989-1991) and the first non-U.S. citizen to be elected president of B’nai B’rith (2007-2009). He also served on the boards of the World Zionist Organization, United Jewish Appeal, the Ottawa Food Bank, Ottawa Tourism, and Restaurants Canada.

James G. Lowenstein, who as one half of a globe-trotting investigative team with Richard M. Moose wrote a series of reports for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the early 1970s that undermined President Richard M. Nixon’s assessment in Viet Nam, died on Jan. 3 at his home in Washington, age 95.

President Nixon had won the White House in 1968 with the promise of a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam — to train and equip South Vietnamese forces so that the United States could rapidly draw down its commitment there. Senator William J. Fulbright, chair of the committee, sent the two journalists to investigate. In their report, they asserted that the plans “seem to rest on far more ambiguous, confusing and contradictory evidence than pronouncements from Saigon and Washington indicate.” The war, they concluded, “appears to be not only far from won but far from over.”

Solomon Perel, a German Jew who posed as a member of the Hitler Youth to survive WWII, died at age 97. His story was dramatized in the 1990 film, Europa Europa.

Shevah Weiss, who served in the Knesset and as an Israeli ambassador to Poland, died at age 87 in the Holy Land.

Fred Terna, an artist who tried to exorcize the psychological trauma of his imprisonment in four Nazi concentration and labor camps with paintings that depicted fire, ashes and chimneys, died at age 99.                                                                                                                                                                                              From The Forward

George Zimbel, a photographer who championed ordinary people, but whose two best-known subjects — Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy — died on Jan. 9 in Montreal. He was 93.

Mr. Zimbel captured people living their lives — a sailor reading in his lower bunk on a submarine, a small boy dwarfed by a Great Dane, a little girl playing hopscotch in the street, a baby pulling on a doctor’s stethoscope. In a more famous scene, he was on Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street in Manhattan during the filming of a scene for Billy Wilder’s “The Seven Year Itch” when a fan beneath a subway grating blew Marilyn Monroe’s white dress upward, creating one of her best-known images. Similarly known is his photograph of John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline during a ticket-tape parade in Manhattan during the 1960 presidential campaign.

Carin Goldberg, a celebrated graphic designer who brought an inventive sensibility to book and album covers, died on Jan. 19 at her home in Stanfordville, NY, in Dutchess County. She was 69.

Ms. Goldberg was trained as a painter, but was a scholar of designs and typefaces, which she reimagined in elegant and witty combinations on the covers of thousands of albums and books.

She designed for CBS television, also Atlantic Records before starting her own business. She also taught design at the School of Visual Arts in New York for nearly four decades.

Mira Lehr, a versatile Florida artist who helped found an early cooperative for women artists, and whose paintings, sculptures and installations often reflected her concerns about environmental degradation, died on Jan. 24 in Miami Beach. She was 88.

She was adventurous in her artistic explorations. Some of her work used Japanese rice paper. She created mangrove labyrinths out of rope and steel that exhibition visitors could walk through. Some of her more recent works involved fire. She would burn holes in canvases or ignite strings of gunpowder on them to create the appearance of vines and other effects. Her work frequently drew on the natural world, invoking foliage, birds, jellyfish, reefs, the ocean — the beauty of nature and the threats to it.

Burt Bacharach, the pop composer, arranger, conductor, record producer, and occasional singer, whose hit songs spoke of romantic optimism, died on Feb.8 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.

Mr. Bacharach’s collaborated most frequently with the lyricist Hal David. Together they created songs like “The Look of Love,” “This Guy’s in Love With You,” “Close to You,” and the ever-popular “What the World Needs Now Is Love.”

In 1962, the team met Dionne Warwick, a gifted young gospel-trained singer from East Orange, NJ. Writing for The New York Times, Stephen Holden described that collaboration: They realized they had found the “rare vocalist with the technical prowess to negotiate the rangy, fiercely difficult melodies, with their tricky time signatures and extended asymmetrical phrases,” and they turned out a stream of hits for Ms. Warwick, like “Walk on By,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” and “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.”

He won two Academy Awards for best song: “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” and “Arthur’s Theme.” His original score for the 1969 film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” won an Oscar for best original score for a nonmusical motion picture. In 1968, the Bacharach-David team conquered Broadway with “Promises, Promises,” which ran for 1,281 performances. In 1986, the AIDS fundraising anthem “That’s What Friends Are For” won the Grammy for song of the year.