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.

Leonard A. Cole, a dentist who became an expert on biological weapons and who chronicled in troubling detail a secret U.S. Army program that turned millions of Americans into unwitting germ-warfare guinea pigs in the 1950s and ’60s, died on Sept. 18 in Ridgewood, NJ. He was 89.

Dr. Cole’s dental practice was firmly established when he began a second career s a political scientist, looking into the clandestine military tests. The program, which ran from 1949 until President Richard M. Nixon halted it in 1969, involved releasing ostensibly harmless bacterial and chemical agents in the New York City subway, over the skies of San Francisco, and in dozens of other places to test the country’s vulnerability to biological and chemical attacks. His book, Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ Warfare Tests Over Populated Areas,” published in 1988, offers an in-depth examination of the Army program.

Dr. Cole retired from dentistry in 2000 but continued to write books. To balance his various endeavors, Dr. Cole said in an interview with the online publication Authority Magazine last year that he gave his “undivided attention” to whatever he was doing at the moment. He said that a friend had once told him he was the best dentist among political scientists, and the best political scientist among dentists.

Judah Samet, who survived the Holocaust and decades later avoided the deadliest antisemitic attack in United States history by mere minutes, died Sept. 27, in Oakland, CA. He was 84.

Mr. Samet survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as a child during WWII, and was in the parking lot of the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 when a gunman entered the building and killed 11 people.

He had, indeed, lived a remarkable life, his nephew Larry Barasch, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “He grew up in Hungary, survived the Holocaust, became orphaned upon leaving the camps, moved to Israel and found his mother. He joined the Israeli Defense Forces as a paratrooper and radio man, fought side-by-side with General Moshe Dayan for Israeli independence. He immigrated to Canada, married Barbara Schiffman and became a well-known jeweler in Pittsburgh, working for my grandfather, Irving Schiffman.”

He was a long-time member of the Tree of Life congregation and was an active participant in services for some 40 years. On Oct.27, 2018, he arrived late to the Shabbat service at Tree of Life, and was still in the parking lot when the gunman entered the synagogue.

Mr. Samet did not speak about his experience during the Holocaust for nearly 60 years. But over the past two decades, he spoke to tens of thousands of students about his experiences. He told people it was important to him, as a survivor, to give direct testimony because soon there would be no one to tell the story of the Holocaust.