Laurence H. Silberman, a conservative federal appeals court judge and advocate of judicial restraint whose opinions on gun rights, press freedom, the Affordable Care Act, and other crucial issues resonated widely and sometimes presaged Supreme Court decisions, died on Oct. 4 at his home in Washington, DC. He was 86.

Judge Silberman was unanimously confirmed by the Senate for six federal posts; was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President George W. Bush in 2008; and three times was shortlisted by Republican presidents for the Supreme Court.

Theo Richmond, a British documentary filmmaker who depended on words rather than images to create what he called “the most worthwhile thing I’ve ever done” — an acclaimed book, Konin: A Quest, that captured the quotidian life and precipitous death of the Jewish population of his parents’ hometown in Poland after the Nazi invasion — died on August 25 in London. He was 93.

Over the course of seven years, Mr. Richmond conducted some 400 interviews in Poland, Israel, Florida, Nebraska, Texas, Montreal and Brooklyn, racing against time to collect memories from former residents of Konin, a village 140 miles west of Warsaw, near the German border.

In 1939, about 3,000 of its 13,000 residents were Jewish. By 1940, according to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, “the town was Judenrein,” or “cleansed” of Jews.

“This book is about my return journey to a place I had never been to,” Mr. Richmond wrote, “a place of which I knew nothing except that it was a part of my past and in a curiously powerful way a part of my present.”

Grace Glueck, a journalist who broke new ground by making the art world a distinct beat at The New York Times, and who then helped bring an important sex-discrimination lawsuit against the paper, her employer of more than 60 years, died on Oct. 8 at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She was 96.

In more than 3,000 articles for The Times, Ms. Glueck approached art as a reporter more than as a critic, effectively inventing the art beat at the newspaper and inspiring other newsrooms across the country to make it a journalistic standard, The Times said.

Her news articles, interviews and profiles, filled with revelatory fact and often laced with wit, became a staple of the paper’s coverage of the visual arts in New York during the 1960s and 1970s, simultaneously during the rise of the feminist movement. She helped initiate a 1974 lawsuit that accused the paper of underpayment and under-promotion of women, based on her experience when she began there as a recent English-major graduate. Her tasks were clerical, and only because Lester Markel, the paper’s Sunday editor, took notice of her work was she able to train as a reporter. The lawsuit was settled in 1978 with The Times agreeing to consider more women for top management.

Robert Kalfin, the driving force behind the Chelsea Theater Center, which for two decades beginning in 1965 presented adventurous plays not always to the liking of general theatergoing audiences, died on Sept. 20 at a hospice center in Quogue, NY. He was 89.

Mr. Kalfin thought the commercial theaters of the day were limited and unimaginative, and he strove to broaden the theatrical landscape. His mission statement: “We will do whatever nobody else is doing, and what we think people ought to see.”

After the Chelsea closed, Mr. Kalfin continued to direct in New York and in regional houses. He was still working until recently. One of his post-Chelsea projects in New York was directing a Yiddish version of “Yentl,” produced by the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater in 2002.

Leonard Kriegel, an American memoirist and essayist whose work blazed with rage at the loss of the use of his legs to polio, died on Sept. 25 in Manhattan. He was 89.

An academic and literary critic who taught for many years at the City College of New York, Mr. Kriegel was known for scholarly and popular writings that examined large historical phenomena (the struggles of the labor movement, the social construction of masculinity, the treatment of disabled people) at the level of the individual life — often his own.

Throughout his life, Mr. Kriegel’s rage provided ballast against despair. Even the onset of his illness, he recalled in an essay in “Flying Solo,” was not entirely devoid of hope. As he recounted it, his father, on learning that Leonard had contracted polio, raced upstate from his delicatessen job without stopping to change his clothes.

“He sat alongside my bed in the small hospital in Cold Spring, imploring me to live and feeding me vanilla ice cream,” Mr. Kriegel wrote. “What remains as vivid in memory today as it was more than 50 years ago is the odor that clung to my father’s hand as he fed me that ice cream. I could smell the dry-sweat prospect of my death on that hand. Yet beyond that was the smell of pickle brine and smoked salmon and chopped herring that mixed with the rich creamy taste of the vanilla ice cream. For whatever incomprehensible reason, the mixing of smells was a father’s promise to a son that he would live.”

The Shofar joins the membership in mourning the death of Rabbi Myron Fenster, who served as interim rabbi of our congregation from August 2008 to July 2012. Those who knew the rabbi will recall that he served joyously with distinction illumined by a touch of good humor. Rabbi Fenster died Wednesday, Aug. 31, and was interred at the Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, NY, following funeral services in the sanctuary of the Shelter Rock Jewish Center in Roslyn, NY.

Prior to his tenure at Congregation Tifereth Israel, Rabbi Fenster served for 36 years as spiritual leader of the Shelter Rock congregation. During that time, he also served as president of the New York Board of Rabbis, and earlier was the first American rabbi sponsored by the Rabbinical Assembly to serve as a visiting rabbi to an Israeli congregation, the Moriah Congregation in Haifa.

In the Rabbinical Assembly, he had been chairman of the Social Action and Israel Committees, served on the Law Committee that accepted gays to the rabbinate among other watershed decisions, and was editor of the quarterly magazine, Conservative Judaism. He was also co-chairman with Bishop John McGann of the Education Committee of the Long Island Holocaust Commission. A writer of note, Rabbi Fenster was widely published in Newsday, The Jerusalem Post, and Hadassah Magazine. His personal story, Up From the Straits: A Memoir, was published in 2011.

Dr. Ronald J. Glasser, an Army physician who wrote the acclaimed book, 365 Days, a scorching account of the war in Vietnam through the words of the soldiers who were wounded there, died on Aug. 26 in. St. Louis Park, MN. He was 83.

Dr. Glasser was opposed to the war when he was drafted in August 1968. He was assigned to a hospital in Zama, Japan, one of four frenetic Army hospitals in Japan that every month were receiving 6,000 to 8,000 injured troops airlifted from the battlefields of Vietnam during their 365-day tours of duty.

Dr. Glasser explained in 365 Days, published in 1971, that he had never intended to become a writer, but that he felt compelled to record what he had seen and heard at the hospital.

Reviewing 365 Days, in the New York Times, Thomas Lask said its “quiet eloquence, its factual precision, its emotional restraint braided into the horror and pain of the subject matter make it a book of great emotional impact.”

Dr. Glasser went on to write several other books, including Ward 402 (1973), The Body is the Hero (1976), Another War Another Peace (1985), and Broken Bodies, Shattered Minds (2011).