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.

Albert Reichmann, the billionaire patriarch of a real estate dynasty that built the World Financial Center, became the largest private owner of commercial property in New York City. He also began the transformation of London’s derelict Docklands into the Canary Wharf cluster of skyscrapers. He died on Dec. 17 in Toronto, the family’s hometown, at age 93.

Mr. Reichmann and his brothers, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish sons of a rabbi, fled Vienna in 1938 as the Nazis were poised to plunge Europe into war. Albert’s mother had helped concentration camp inmates and refugees during WWII, and he followed in her philanthropic footsteps by supporting Jewish schools and religious institutions, primarily in Israel, Hungary, and the former Soviet Union.

Rabbi Haim Druckman, a prominent spiritual leader of Israel’s Religious Zionist movement, lifelong educator, founder of the Jewish settlement project, and politician, died here in Jerusalem on Dec. 25. He was 90.

In awarding him the Israel Prize in 2012, the country’s most prestigious civilian honor, the judges cited the significant contribution he had made in bringing together disparate factions of the Jewish people.

He recounted that his life had been saved three times: Once when Nazis entered the family’s house but failed to find them in their underground hideout; when they safely crossed a swelling river while escaping to Romania; and when one of three boats carrying refugees to Palestine was sunk by the Germans. He was in one of the two that made the journey across the Black Sea to Turkey. Having received his life as a gift three times, he said he was determined to fill it with meaning and purpose.