Rena Gluck, a dancer, choreographer and educator who was instrumental in creating Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, the country’s pre-eminent dance troupe, died on Jan. 13 at her home in Tel Aviv. Her twin brother, Milton Gluck, died on the same day, at a hospital in Manhattan.

In Israel, Ms. Gluck introduced a rigorous dance technique, honed through years of training with American modern-dance pioneers, including Martha Graham, who had been her teacher at Juilliard. After 16 years with Batsheva, Mr. Gluck served in various roles at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, including dean of the dance faculty, head of the dance school, chairwoman of the dance department, and professor. In 2007, she received a lifetime achievement award from the Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sport for her contributions to dance.

The Shofar joins the membership in mourning the death of Roslyn Zimmerman, sister of shul member Arthur Riegel, and of Scott Demel, son of new shul members Marc and Caren Demel. May the families be comforted by memories of joyous times spent together with their loved ones.

Barbara Walters, the pioneering TV journalist, whose interviewing skills made her one of the most prominent figures in broadcasting, died Friday, Dec. 30, at her home in New York. She was 93.

Barbara Walters began her national broadcast career in 1961 as a reporter, writer and panel member for NBC’s “Today” show before being promoted to co-host in 1974. In 1976, she joined ABC News as the first female anchor on an evening news program.

At ABC, Walters launched “The Barbara Walters Specials” and “10 Most Fascinating People” before becoming a co-host and correspondent for ABC News’ “20/20” in 1984. For more than five decades, Walters was a name to reckon with, whether speaking with world leaders on news programs in celebrities’ homes for her regular “Barbara Walters Specials” or on “The View,” a daytime talk show in which a diverse panel of women discuss the latest headlines. Her shows, some of which she produced, were some of the highest-rated of their type.

Notoriously competitive, Walters was dogged in her pursuit of big “get” interviews, including presidents, world leaders, and celebrities, and earned a reputation for bringing her subjects to tears.

She was mercilessly parodied — by Gilda Radner on “Saturday Night Live” as “BabaWawa” — and richly honored — with multiple Emmys, a Peabody, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Sometimes seen as brash, usually by men questioning her forthright demeanor, she shrugged at the criticism: “If it’s a woman, it’s caustic; if it’s a man, it’s authoritative,” she once observed.

Menahem Schmelzer, a Hungarian refugee who for more than two decades was the custodian of one of the world’s greatest collections of ancient Hebrew and other Jewish manuscripts and books as the librarian of the Jewish Theological Seminary, died on Dec. 10 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.

During Professor Schmelzer’s tenure as chief librarian, from 1964 to 1987, the seminary’s collection of almost 245,000 volumes was a primary destination for scholarly inquiry into the history and literature of the Jewish people.

It houses a rare-book room with irreplaceable contents: volumes of Talmud and Passover Haggadahs from the Middle Ages; richly decorated marriage documents from the 17th century; a 15th-century prayer book illuminated with gold leaf that had belonged to the Rothschild banking family; handwritten works by Maimonides; a Torah scroll rescued from the Spanish Inquisition.

Scholars from around the world consulted with Professor Schmelzer, often about arcane factual details, because of his familiarity with so many books and his near photographic memory.

“He could tell you what book it was in, where the book was on the shelf, and where in the book it was,” said his daughter Nomi Stillman.

Edith Pearlman, whose acclaimed 2011 collection of short stories, Binocular Vision, lifted her out of relative publishing obscurity to make her an instant if belated literary star at the age of 74, died on Jan. 1 at her home in Brookline, MA. She was 86.

“Why in the world had I never heard of Edith Pearlman?” the novelist Roxana Robinson asked in a rave review of the collection on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. “Each story was chosen to show Ms. Pearlman’s range as she brought the reader into the private worlds of characters as disparate as suburban mothers and Holocaust survivors. The characters tend to have dark secrets, and their lives are transformed from the ordinary to the unexpected in a moment,” The New York Times said.

Ms. Pearlman was nominated in 2011 for a National Book Award, and prizes followed, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN Malamud Award for excellence in the short story.

Cara De Silva, a journalist and historian of food and culinary culture who in 1996 edited a groundbreaking collection of recipes amassed by prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp, which became a surprise hit, died on Dec. 7 in Manhattan. She was 83.

Ms. De Silva was less interested in hot trends and buzzy restaurants than in the culinary byways and subcultures that defined a community that could be understood through its food. She was the perfect choice to edit In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy From the Women of Terezin,” a slim volume of recipes that had been compiled by a Jewish prisoner in the concentration camp known as Terezin  — Theresienstadt — during WWII. These were the memories of what the women of the camp had made before the war, foods richly evocative of Jewish family life.

Published in 1996 by Jason Aronson, a small company specializing in Judaica, the book became an expected hit, selling more than 100,000 copies to date. When it was published, Ms. De Silva and some friends recreated a few of the recipes for a small party in honor of the women behind them.

Ruth Adler Schnee, whose ebullient fabric designs and avant-garde home furnishings store in the heart of Detroit introduced midcentury modernism to baffled yet delighted Midwesterners, died on Jan. 5 at her home in Colorado Springs. She was 99.

Born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923, the family’s comfortable, cultured life ended in the fall of 1935 when the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jewish citizens of their rights. Ultimately, the family escaped Germany, sponsored by a family in New York City, who promised her father a job in Detroit.

Later, she married Edward Schnee and together they opened a store to showcase Ruth’s textiles as well as furniture by their friends Florence Knoll, Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen and George Nelson, and later Scandinavian designs from Marimekko, Dansk and Orrefors — familiar and much sought-after names today, but “a mystery to a public used to French provincial furniture and flowery chintzes,” The New York Times said. The couple didn’t just sell these odd objects, like Japanese hibachis, they taught people how to live with them and use them. In 2015, the Kresge Foundation honored her with its annual Eminent Artist Award.