Dr. Mitchell S. Rosenthal, the founder of Phoenix House, the largest private nonprofit therapeutic drug-treatment program in the United States, died on Nov. 14 in Manhattan. He was 87.

Dr. Rosenthal, a psychiatrist, popularized a regimen of abstinence and group therapy in a communal residential setting where people could recover from drug and alcohol addiction, as well as address other behavioral problems. He started Phoenix House in 1967 in a former flophouse on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The program grew from there into a nationwide network that by the 1990s had residential treatment centers in 10 states and in some prisons. Programs in Britain, the Netherlands and Israel were established on the Phoenix House model.

Jay M. Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College who spent more than 50 years traveling the world to observe solar eclipses and, with 74 sightings, probably witnessed more of them than any other human in history, died on Nov. 20 at his home in Williamstown, MA. He was 70.

He was more than just an eclipse fan. He studied the corona, the outermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere, which, being one-millionth as bright as the sun itself, is best studied when the rest of the sun is obscured by the moons — during an eclipse. A focus of his work was testing theories about the corona.

While his contributions to astronomy were many, Dr. Pasachoff was equally adept at encouraging amateurs to share his passion for the night sky.

He and his wife, Naomi, are immortalized in the names of a pair of asteroids: 5100 Pasachoff and 68109 Naomipasachoff.

Sonia Handelman Meyer, whose memorable black and white street photography around New York City in the 1940s and ‘50’s reflected her training at the Photo League, a left-leaning collective of photographers who believed their work could change poor social conditions, died on Sept. 11 at her home in Charlotte, NC. She was 102.

She joined the progressive New York-based Photo League in 1943, learning about socially-engaged photography in workshops from one of its founders, Sid Grossman, and other teachers. She soon began making her way around the city, capturing the humanity of ordinary people doing ordinary things.

When the Photo League closed, Ms. Handelman Meyer found work as a morgue librarian at Dell Publishing, a clinical photographer at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, a photographer for the public relations firm Ruder and Finn, a substitute teacher, and a college textbook editor at Prentice Hall.

Her photos have since been exhibited in the United States, Germany and Poland, and are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum of New York the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio and the Mint Museum in Charlotte.

Rita Gardner, who in a long cabaret theater career earned a place in stage history in 1960, when she originated the role of Luisa in the musical “The Fantasticks,” died on Sept. 24 in Manhattan. She was 87.

Ms. Gardner was in her mid-20s and not particularly well known when she responded to an audition notice for “The Fantasticks.” She sang the song she had once used to win an “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” contest, “Over the Rainbow.” She got the part. The show ran for 42 years, eight of them with Rita Gardner.

Donald Blinken, a financier, patron of the arts and Democratic party donor who became an ambassador to Hungary, helping to inspire the career in politics and diplomacy of his son, Antony, the current U.S. Secretary of State, died on Sept. 22 at his home in East Hampton. He was 96.

Donald Blinken was appointed ambassador to Hungary by President Bill Clinton in 1994. It was not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, and Mr. Blinken promoted democracy, integration with the West, and the construction of a market economy.

Before Mr. Blinken became ambassador, his government postings included membership in a judicial nominating panel named by President Jimmy Carter, and appointments to the State University of New York’s Board of Governors by Gov. Hugh L. Carey and Gov. Mario M. Cuomo.

Ilse Nathan and Ruth Siegler, sisters and Holocaust survivors, died 11 days apart — Ilse Scheuer Nathan at her home in Birmingham, on August 23, at age 98, and Ruth Scheuer Siegler in a hospital on Sept. 3, at age 95.

The family’s odyssey through the Nazi killing machine began in August 1939, when the sisters traveled with their mother to the Netherlands, where Mr. Scheuer had escaped a year earlier after Kristallnacht. The war started in September and Dutch borders were closed to those seeking passage to England. Their journey began in Westerbork, a transit camp, where they stayed for two years before being transferred to the Theresienstadt labor camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. In early 1944, they were transferred to Birkenau, and then again to camps in Stutthof and Praust, Poland.

In February 1945, with Soviet forces approaching, the few surviving prisoners were abandoned and freed. They returned to the Netherlands and arrived in the United States in 1946, married fellow survivors, and lived near each other for the rest of their lives. Both sisters became active in Holocaust education, speaking to school and community groups.

David Gottesman, a protégé of Warren Buffett who built a powerful Wall Street investment house, First Manhattan, which manages more than $20 billion for its clients, and who presided over it for a half-century, died on Sept. 28 at his home in Rye, NY. He was 96.

Mr. Gottesman began First Manhattan in 1964 with the profits from a venture in which he bought Computer Systems Inc., a bankrupt maker of computers used on missile ranges. Unrealistic projections led to a three-year blood bath of red ink, but the company succeeded in designing a computer to regulate the output of oil refineries. Schlumberger Ltd., a major oil field company, sought to buy Computer Systems, but Mr. Gottesman and his investors retained 20 percent. The company soared in value when shares were later offered to the public.

But it was his investment in Mr. Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, of which he was a board member, that constituted the bulk of Mr. Gottesman’s fortune. “There probably has never been a better return on any stock held for 44 years in the history of Wall Street,” Mr. Gottesman wrote a decade ago, calculating at the time that his shares had grown to 6,000 times their initial value.

Mr. Gottesman’s charitable donations included a bicycle path circling Jerusalem, and the Gottesman Hall of the Planet Earth at the American Museum of Natural History.