Rob Reiner, who rose from an early career as a sitcom star to direct a run of film classics that included “When Harry Met Sally…” and “The Princess Bride,” died at age 78 along with his wife, Michele Singer. 70, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Los Angeles authorities say the two were found dead in their home on Dec. 13 in what they are investigating as a homicide.

Describing his Jewish childhood to The Forward, Rob Reiner recalled his Yiddish-speaking grandmother and his own Yiddish instruction. He described the experience as “home shuling.”

Beginning in the 2000s, Reiner’s work and public life were largely concerned with activism and civics. He cofounded the marriage equality group American Foundation for Equal Rights, and made several documentaries, one about Christian nationalism. The Reiners formed a partnership at home, on movie and television sets, and in their activism.

“As a Jew, you see what nationalism can do. You see the results of it,” he said, referring to a trip he and his wife had made to Auschwitz, where her mother was an inmate and the rest of the family was murdered. “And so for us who are Jewish by birth, we know what the dangers are, and hopefully this film can at least be a little bit of a teaching tool to everybody.”

Robert J. Samuelson, an economics columnist for Newsweek and The Washington Post who explored, in reader-friendly vernacular the perils of inflation, the fiscal consequences of entitlement spending, and the slow-motion crisis of the bulging national debt, died on Dec. 13 in Bethesda, MD. He was 79.

Upon retiring in 2020, Mr. Samuelson wrote a final column assessing his career: “So far as I can tell,” he wrote, “nothing that I have written has ever had the slightest effect on what actually happened. I’m resigned to this. No one elected me to anything. In our system, the people rule, not the pundits; and that’s how it should be.”

Norman Podhoretz, the long-time editor of Commentary magazine and a lion of neoconservatism, died on Dec.16 in Manhattan. He was 95.

His intellectual odyssey took him from an ardent embrace of the left to a condemnation of a world order that in his eyes had become spineless in the face of Soviet expansionism and, later, Islamist militancy.

In his 35 years at the helm of Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee, Mr. Podhoretz transformed the magazine from as distinguished journal of social and political criticism into a more controversial and influential voice. “Norman laid the groundwork for the muscular democratizing version of neoconservatism,” said Jacob Heilbrunn, a scholar of the movement.

The Podhoretz doctrine reached its influential peak in the administration of President George W. Bush, who awarded Mr. Podhoretz the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. He was also a foreign policy adviser to Rudolph W. Giuliani’s aborted campaign for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.

Emily Faust Korzenik, who in midlife became part of the first generation of women ordained as rabbis in the United States and who in 1985 presided over the first bar mitzvah in Krakow in decades, died on Dec. 15 at her home in Scarsdale, NY. She was 96.

Ordained in 1981, for 25 years, she presided over the Fellowship for Jewish Learning, a congregation in Stamford, CT. Four years after her ordination, she led a bar mitzvah ceremony at the Tempel Synagogue in Krakow, Poland. Krakow’s Jewish community had been devastated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Only a few hundred Jews, mostly older adults, remained in the city out of a prewar population of nearly 60,000. The bar mitzvah was the first in Krakow in more than 20 years, and it brought a renewed sense of life and hope to a moribund Jewish community.

Rabbi Korzenik had been recruited for the task by a Connecticut woman, who had just returned from Poland bearing an unusual request. The woman had asked an older woman in Krakow what American Jews could do for the impoverished Jewish community there. The older woman answered: “Bring us a bar mitzvah.” It would be a symbol of renewal in a country whose rabbinate had been decimated, and in a city in which only two synagogues remained, out of 300 before the war.

Rabbi Korzenik had been working to prepare a 13-year-old boy for his bar mitzvah. His great-grandparents had come from Poland, and he and his parents agreed to travel to Krakow. The decision was not without controversy, in this country and in Poland. Orthodox Jews objected on grounds that women could not be rabbis and, in Poland, rabbis there tried to disrupt the service by forcibly removing Rabbi Korzenik’s tallit. Rabbi Korzenik persisted, and the congregants were on her side. With a nod from Rabbi Korzenik, the young lad began to read his Torah portion. All was quiet.

[A personal note: “I was the feature editor of a group of Westchester County community newspapers when Rabbi Korzenik returned from her groundbreaking trip to Poland. She graciously granted me an interview, telling me that in spite of the strife, she never wavered in her determination to fulfill what was asked of her for the family and for the Jews of Krakow. The full story, which appeared in The Scarsdale Inquirer in October 1985, was awarded first place for feature writing that year by the New York Press Association.”]

Selma van de Perre, a valiant Jewish secretary who during WWII covertly transported suitcases bulging with cash, identity cards and ration books to Dutch resistance agents, died on Oct. 20 in London. She was 103.

She was 17 when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. She joined the Dutch resistance, adopted aliases, and dyed her hair blond to help her pass as a non-Jew. She forged documents, helped Jewish families find shelter in Christian homes, and delivered secret papers to a contact at Nazi headquarters in Paris which she infiltrated by flirting with a German guard.

She was discovered in June 1944 and sent to the Herzogenbusch concentration camp, where she helped sabotage the gas masks that inmates were forced to make for German troops. Later, she was transferred to Ravensbrück, where she endured beatings and starvation.

After the war, she made it first to Sweden then to England, where she was reunited with her two brothers, who had served in the British army. There she learned that her father, mother, sister, grandmother, aunt, uncle and two cousins had been murdered by the Nazis.

In 1983, Mrs. van de Perre was awarded the Resistance Memorial Cross by the Dutch government. Since 1995, she had returned every year to Ravensbrück as part of a program to remind students of what had happened there.

In spite of her grievous losses, Mrs. van de Perre expressed awe in her memoir, I Am Selma, at how many people became heroes during the war. “I can still hardly believe that people who should have remained unremarkable ended up memorialized on lists and monuments” she wrote. “We were ordinary people plunged into extraordinary circumstances.”

Alvin Kass, a revered rabbi who was the youngest chaplain in New York Police Department history and who went on to become its longest-serving, died on Oct. 29 in Manhattan. He was 89.

Rabbi Kass, the department’s chief chaplain, had intended to become a lawyer. He was just two weeks away from beginning his first year at Harvard Law School on a scholarship, when he decided to transfer to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He was ordained there as a Conservative Rabbi in 1982. “I decided to minister to people’s spiritual needs rather than legal ones,” he said.

Rabbi Kass ministered to the grieving families of the 23 police officers, two of them Jewish, who were killed in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. He conducted Rosh Hashanah services in a makeshift synagogue at LaGuardia Airport for emergency workers who had flown in from around the country to assist local police officers, firefighters, and medical technicians. He attended the funeral of every police officer who died that day.

Arline Bronzaft, a pre-eminent environmental psychologist who studied the effects of urban noise, suggesting that one reason New York City never sleeps is its cacophony of glaring car horns, ear-splitting pneumatic drills, screeching subway car wheels, gluttonous garbage trucks, warbling sirens and loud, inconsiderate neighbors, died on Oct. 29 in Manhattan. She was 89.

For five decades, Dr. Bronzaft argued that noise was not only exasperating but also harmful to people’s physical and emotional well-being, making them more irritable, aggressive, depressed, tense and vulnerable to dementia and stunting the academic growth of school children.

Last year, New York City’s 311 help line logged some 750,000 phone calls from people complaining about noise. Dr. Bronzaft helped the city revise its noise code in the mid-2000s. The revised code recalibrated limits on everything from barking dogs to nightclub music decibel levels.