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.

In his testimony before the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Charles Silverstein persuaded the association to change the language of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders, forging a path that ultimately ended the profession’s pathologizing of homosexuality. Dr. Silverstein died on Jan. 30 at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.

Dr. Silverstein wrote books about gay sex, and served as founding editor of The Journal of Homosexuality that worked to break down prejudices associated with being gay. In 1973, he started the Institute for Human Identity to provide health services to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender clients.

Paul Berg, a 1980 Nobel Prize-winning biochemist who ushered in the era of genetic engineering in 1971 by successfully combining DNA from two different organisms, died on Feb. 15 at his home on the Stanford University campus in California. He was 96.

Dr. Berg provided the initial links in the chain of advances that has led to the genetic engineering of new therapeutic treatments for diseases and vaccines against viruses, like Covid-19.

“Nurturing curiosity and the instinct to seek solutions are perhaps the most important contributions education can make. I have never lost the excitement of discovery,” he said.