The Shofar joins the membership in mourning the death of Gayle Krueger, sister of shul member Miriam Gabriel, on March 28. May her memory be for a blessing.

Martin Pope, a physical chemist whose fundamental work on molecular semiconductors led to the development of organic light-emitting diodes, which are used in digital cameras, mobile phones, solar panels and televisions, died March 27 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 103.

In the early 1960s, Dr. Pope published one of his most important papers, “Electroluminescence in Organic Crystals,” which reported that electricity could be used to generate light from an organic compound called anthracene. “That was a milestone that has found root in the high-performance displays we’re seeing today,” said Richard Friend, as physicist at the University of Cambridge.

Dr. Pope’s insight into some of the strange quantum mechanical phenomena shown by another organic compound, tetracene, also turned out to be well ahead of its time. In a paper published in 1969, he demonstrated the possibility of producing two excited molecules, or excitons, in a tetracene crystal after just one photon of light was absorbed in it. The result, Dr. Pope said, “proved that the efficiency of converting light into useful electric current is greatly increased.” The practical application of the discovery is that it offers a way to improve the efficiency of solar cells.

In 2006, the Royal Society awarded Dr. Pope the Davy Medal, given annually to a scientist whose research helped bring about extraordinary advances in any field of chemistry. In a 2011 interview, Dr. Pope said he was surprised by the practical application of his discovery. “At the time I carried out my research, I did not have the faintest idea that it would become of worldwide importance.”

Lee E. Koppelman, a planning visionary who during four decades fought to impose a regional agenda for economic development and environmental conservation across Long Island, died March 21 at Stony Brook University Hospital. He was 94.

As executive director of the Nassau-Suffolk Regional Planning Board from 1965 to 2006, Mr. Koppelman was instrumental in preserving tens of thousands of acres of farmland and open space in Suffolk County, protecting coastal wetlands and the underground water supply, creating Suffolk County’s park system, and preserving the vast Pine Barrens forest.

As an appointee beholden to elected county executives, Mr. Koppelman wielded little direct power. But as a nonpartisan expert planner, he won the respect of politicians, preservationists and developers. When Mr. Koppelman resigned as executive director in 2006, Mitchell H. Pally, vice president of the Long Island Association, a business and civic group, said, “There‘s been no one more significant to Long Island in the last 40 years.” 

On July 1, 1939, about three moths after Nazi troops entered Prague and three days before Vera Diamantova’s 11th birthday, she was bundled onto a train bound for Britain with hundreds of other Jewish children. 

Vera survived. As Vera Gissing, she became a translator in England and raised a family there. She would often recount the moral courage of the parents who sent her and her older sister to safety, the English couple who offered her sanctuary, and Nicholas Winton, the young London stockbroker who had anonymously organized convoys known as Kindertransport to evacuate vulnerable children, most of them Jewish, by train from what was then Czechoslovakia. Vera Gissing died on March 12 in a nursing home in Wargrave, a village in Southeast England. She was 93.

“There would have been no possibility of me surviving had I stayed behind, if my parents did not have the moral courage to let us go,” Mrs. Gissing said in an interview in 2006  “The scene at Prague station will be with me forever. The forced cheerfulness of my parents — their last words of love, encouragement and advice. Until that moment, I felt more excited than afraid, but when the whistle blew and the train pulled slowly out of the station, my beloved mother and father could no longer mask their anguish.”

Vera’s mother had queued up for four days to apply for the Kindertransport; then, one evening, she announced to her husband at dinner that the girls had secured seats and would be going to England. “There was a deathly silence. Father looked shocked and terribly surprised,” Mrs. Gissing said. “All at once, his dear face seemed haggard and old. He covered it with his hands, while we all waited in silence. Then he lifted his head, smiled at us with tears in his eyes, sighed and said, ‘All right, let them go.’”

All but three of the 16 relatives young Vera left behind would perish in the Holocaust. Her father was fatally shot while on a death march from the Terezin concentration camp in December 1944, and her mother died from typhoid two days after she had been liberated from Bergen-Belsen.

Estelle Harris, who hyperventilated her way into the hearts of millions of “Seinfeld” fans as George’s mother, Estelle Constanza, died April 2 in Palm Desert, CA. She was 93.

In 27 episodes, from 1992 to 1998, Ms. Harris embarrassed and harangued her TV son, George, played by Jason Alexander, and his father, Frank, played by Jerry Stiller. During her meltdowns, Ms. Harris deployed a “screech that had the urgency of a hyena in its death throes,” The New York Times said. “Ms. Harris knew how to make outrage into a joke.”

Ms. Harris’s success in the role led to other opportunities to play the shrill and unhinged, including in the “Toy Story” movie franchise, for which she provided the voice of Mrs. Potato Head, also “Our To Sea” with Jack Lemon and Walter Matthau, and “My Giant” with Billy Crystal.

At the height of the popularity of “Seinfeld,” Ms. Harris found herself with the kind of celebrity that drew looks on the street. “Black people, Asians, WASP’s, Italians, Jews — they all say, ‘Oh, you’re just like my mom,’” she told The New York Tribune.

Gerda Weissmann Klein, who as a teenager survived the Holocaust before becoming an author, activist, Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, and subject of a 1995 Oscar- and Emmy-winning film, died April 6. She was 97. 

When the Nazis occupied her native Poland, she was shuffled through three concentration camps, and was one of 4,000 women sent on a forced death march through Poland, Germany and what is now the Czech Republic. She survived the war; her parents and brother died.

Her autobiography, All But My Life, was made into an HBO documentary short, “One Survivor Remembers,” which won an Emmy and an Oscar.

In 1997, President Bill Clinton appointed Weissman-Klein to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s governing council. She was also selected as the keynote speaker at the United Nation’s first annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2006.

In 2008, she and her granddaughter, Alysa Cooper, founded a national nonprofit to educate students on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. The work continues. 

And in 2011, President Barack Obama chose Weissman-Klein to receive the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. On that day, she said, “I pray you never stand at any crossroads in your own lives, but if you do, if the darkness seems so total, if you think there is no way out, remember, never ever give up.”

Nehemiah Persoff, a character actor whose gravelly voice and knack for conveying an air of menace magnified his portrayals of a bevy of sinister types, died April 5 in San Luis Obispo, CA. he was 102.

For decades, Mr. Persoff was one of the most recognizable faces on television, seen on hundreds of shows, including “Gunsmoke,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Route 66,” “Mission Impossible,” “The Twilight Zone” and “Columbo.” Later he had roles on “Law & Order” and “Chicago Hope.”

On film, Mr. Persoff appeared in “Yentl,” “Voyage of the Damned,” “An American Tail,” “Al Capone,” and “Some Like It Hot.”

He also appeared in live theater, and in 1975 was awarded the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for his supporting role in “The Dybbuk” at the Mark Taper Forum. Other stage shows included “I’m Not Rappaport,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” and a one-man show about Sholem Aleichem.