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.

Alan J. Hruska, a corporate litigator who had a second, wide-ranging career as a founder of the independent publishing house Soho Press, also a novelist, director and producer of plays and films, died on March 29 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.

Even before he retired from his day job at Cravath Swaine & Moore in New York City (in 2001, after four decades there), he had published his first novel. Soon after, he founded Soho Press, welcoming unsolicited manuscripts from little-known writers.

At Cravath, he oversaw a wide range of civil litigation, and was named senior counsel in 2002. He also served as secretary of the New York City Bar Association.

Joseph Kalichstein, an Israeli American pianist and member of the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, died on March 31 in Manhattan. He was 76.

Across his career of more than 50 years, critics agreed that Mr. Kalichstein had “an uncommon naturalness,” The New York Times said, whether in his earlier solo recitals or his later appearances on the chamber music circuit with his piano trio. “He had a sense of line and timing that set him apart even as a young virtuoso.”

As a soloist, he won the prestigious Leventritt Competition in 1969, which led to appearances with the New York Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra. As a chamber musician, his trio recorded much of the core repertoire, including the complete Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Brahms trios, as well as a set devoted to Ravel, for which Mr. Kalichstein contributed a moving account of the solo “Pavane Pour une Infante Défunte,” The Times said.

Mr. Kalichstein consulted for the Kennedy Center after 1997 and was artistic director of its chamber music series until his death. He became a member of the piano faculty at Juilliard in 1983 and added a chair in chamber music studies in 2003.