Marc Lewitinn, who spend 850 days on a ventilator, struggling with long COVID, died of a heart attack on July 23 at Palisades Medical Center in North Bergen, NJ. He was 76.

Mr. Lewitinn was an ardent supporter of Israel and Jewish causes. He raised money for Ethiopian Jews fleeing their country as refugees, and won praise from the Nazi hunters Simon Wiesenthal and Charles Kremer for helping to persuade the U.S. government to deport Archbishop Valerian Trifa, a Romanian; cleric and fascist collaborator who had moved to the United States after WWII.

In 1995, Mr. Lewitinn sued the Egyptian government to win the release of several Torah scrolls, prayer books and other religious items seized from the country’s Jewish community in the late 1950s.

Earl J. Silbert, who led the federal prosecution of the botched Watergate burglary, which secured the convictions of all five burglars and two of the break-in’s planners, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, died on Sept. 6 in Keene, NH. He was 86.

The break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington on June 17, 1972, set off a chain of events that led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon two years later.

Mr. Silbert later became a respected white collar defense lawyer, notably described as a “lawyer’s lawyer.” He was the go-to person when a lawyer got into trouble. His clients included former Attorney General Griffin Bell, when he was accused of defaming an E.F. Hutton branch manager in an investigative report on a checking scandal; former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles during the independent counsel Ken Starr’s investigation of President Bill Clinton; and Kenneth Lay, the former chairman and chief executive of the bankrupt energy firm Enron.

Art Rosenbaum, a painter and folk musician acclaimed for a half-century of field recordings of American vernacular music, including old-time Appalachian fiddle tunes and ritual music imported from Africa by enslaved people, died on Sept. 4 at a hospital in Athens, GA. He was 83.

His passion was to document a broad range of American musical traditions passed down and performed at work camps, church gatherings and rural living rooms. An important inspiration was Pete Seeger, who once told Mr. Rosenbaum, “Don’t learn from me; learn from the folks I learned from.”

As a painter, he was inspired by Cezanne and Max Beckmann, the German Expressionist.

Melvin Sokolsky, a photographer who pushed boundaries by creating fantastical tableaus that seemed to defy gravity and logic, died on August 29, at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 88.

His career in fashion photography imbued cool couture style with high-art surrealism. Later, he moved on to directing and shooting television commercials, collecting more than 25 Clio Awards. Many of his images were later shown in galleries and museums, including the Louvre in Paris, the MOMA in New York, and the Getty in Los Angeles.

Edward A. Feiner, who as the chief architect of the U.S. government revolutionized the public image of countless federal agencies by hiring renowned architects to design hundreds of courthouses, government laboratories, border stations and office buildings, died on July 1 in Falls Church, VA. He was 75.

He brought great design to projects both high-profile and obscure. His list of collaborators amounted to a Who’s Who of modern American architecture, including Richard Meier, I.M. Pei, Robert A.M. Stern, and Kohn Pedersen Fox.

One might say that Mr. Feiner took bad civic design as a personal affront. He kept photos of what he considered architectural “horrors” pinned to his office wall. Of the Jacob Javits Federal Building, he said, “You look at that building and you say why? Why would you build a piece of schlock amid landmarks?”

Mr. Feiner’s emphasis on design consciousness over budget consciousness often put him at odds with fiscal hawks in Congress. “Bad design,” he said repeatedly, “could only diminish the public’s respect for government and what it could achieve; good design, on the other hand, was critical to creating a vibrant civic culture.”

Jan Langone, a diligent food scholar who started a mail-order cookbook business from her basement that grew into one of the nation’s great cookbook collections, died August 3 in Ann Arbor, MI. She was 89.

In her lifetime, she collected food-related books and ephemera, including the nation’s first cookbook, American Cookery, written by Amelia Simmons and published in 1796. She also secured a 1971 text believed to be the nation’s first Jewish cookbook.

Ms. Longone’s collection, nearly 25,000 items strong, became the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan and the antecedent for dozens of other culinary libraries. Ruth Reichl, who presided over Gourmet from 1999 to 2009, said Ms. Longone was one of the first to understand the power of history told through the lens of cooks. “She knew the value of looking at cookbooks unmitigated by a historian’s perspective,” Ruth Reichl said.

Despite her generosity with cooking information, Ms. Longone was tight-lipped about her sources. But she always gave would-be collectors the same advice: “When you see something you want, buy it. I’ve been guilty of this mistake myself. I never regret the things I’ve bought, but I do regret some things I didn’t buy.”

Henrique Morelenbaum, considered one of Brazil’s most prominent conductors and music directors, died July 29 in Rio de Janeiro. He was 90.

“He was one of the most important personalities in Brazilian musical life over the last 70 years, as an instrumentalist, conductor, teacher and administrator. He left his mark on the institutions where he worked,” read a tribute posted by the Brazilian Academy of Music, of which Morelenbaum was an active member.

Over the course of his career, Morelenbaum conducted symphonic concerts, operas and ballets. As part of his international contemporary repertoire, he was responsible for the Brazilian premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s “Kol Nidre,” an orchestral piece named after the Yom Kippur payer. He was widely recognized for promoting Brazilian composers abroad.