Esther Pollard, the wife of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard died Jan. 31 at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Israel. She was 68.

Born in Toronto as Elaine Zeitz, she devoted her life to bringing about the freedom of her husband. She met Jonathan Pollard on an Israel trip when they were teenagers. When she heard he had been arrested, she started writing him letters. They were married in 1993.

They moved to Israel a year ago, following the removal of his parole restrictions that prevented him from leaving New York. Jonathan Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst was sentenced to life imprisonment and served a 30-year term for passing classified information to Israel.

Harvey G. Stack, the patriarch of the family firm that calls itself the nation’s largest rare coin business, died

on Jan. 3 in New York. He was 93.

Mr. Stack joined Stack’s Rare Coins as a teenager in 1947, 14 years after his father and uncle had transformed what his great-grandfather had founded in 1858 as a foreign exchange house in Lower Manhattan into a dealership devoted exclusively to collectible currency.

Before retiring in 2009, he developed a standardized grading system for appraising coins, and he expanded demand among hobbyists by urging Congress to approve the U.S. Mint’s enormously popular 50 State Quarters Program which, beginning in 1999, honored each state with a commemorative coin in the order in which they had ratified the Constitution or were admitted to the union.

“History shows that rare coins of good quality have outperformed the Dow Jones industrials, real estate, and almost every other form of investment,” he said. But he counseled patience and pointed out that returns depended on two major factors: quality and rarity. What he looks for, he said, are coins that are “a little away from what a fellow can ordinarily find in his pocket or in mama’s shoe box.”

Dan Einstein, a Grammy-winning independent record producer who championed the careers of John Prine and Steve Goodman, died Jan. 15 in Nashville. He was 61.

He made his mark in the record business in the 1980s and ‘90s with two labels: Oh Boy Records and Red Pajamas Records, both Grammy winners. The labels were not the only independents, but the marketing was unique, relying on mail-order sales, grass-roots publicity, and innovative consumer engagement.

In a second-career move, most people in Nashville knew Mr. Einstein as the proprietor, with his wife, of Sweet 16th, the award-winning bakery they opened in 2004. Referring to themselves as “your East Nashville sugar dealer,” the Einstein’s earned accolades for their baked goods as well as their generosity to hungry neighbors and to those who had lost homes when tornadoes ravaged Nashville in 2020.

Laurel Cutler, a female advertising executive in the testosterone-driven “Mad Men” era of 1960s New York, died Nov. 28 at her home in Manhattan. She was 94.

During her five-decade career on Madison Avenue, Ms. Cutler was the only women on Fortune magazine’s list of 11 “seminal thinkers” of the 1980s. Ladies’ Home Journal called her one of the 50 most powerful women in America in 1990, noting that she could get her phone calls returned. The Advertising Federation of America named her “Woman of the Year” in 1985 and “Man of the Year” 10 years later. She was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame in 2011.

Laurel Cutler’s brother, Lloyd Cutler, became a highly successful lawyer in Washington and counselor to Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. In her memoir, she recalled a reception in Washington where she was introduced to Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, as “Lloyd’s sister.” At that, Edward N. Ney, chairman of Young & Rubicam, stepped in to tell Mrs. Graham, “In our world, he’s Laurel’s brother.”

Steve Schapiro, a photojournalist and social documentarian who bore witness to some of the most significant political and cultural moments and movements in modern American history, starting in the 1960swith the struggle for racial equality across the Jim Crow South, died on Jan. 15 at his home in Chicago. He was 87.

Over a six-decade career, Mr. Schapiro trained his camera’s eye on an astonishing array of people across the American landscape as he sought to capture the emotional heart of his subjects, whether they were narcotics users in Harlem, migrant workers in Arkansas, or movie luminaries in Hollywood.

Mr. Schapiro’s photographs have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and elsewhere. They have also been collected in books about Hollywood movie sets, including those for “The Godfather,” “Taxi Driver,” and “The Way We Were.”

“I think we are on the way to a day when cameras as we have known them will be obsolete,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 2016. “We will be using just cellphones to take photos.” But he added, “I will ever believe it is the photographer who counts, not the camera.”

Israel S. Dresner, a New Jersey rabbi who ventured into the Deep South in the 1960s to champion civil rights, befriended the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and was jailed multiple times for demonstrating against racial segregation, died on Jan. 13 in Wayne, NJ. He was 92.

By the time Rabbi Dresner joined the civil rights movement, he was already a veteran of political protests, having been arrested at 18 in 1947 outside the British Empire Building at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan in a protest against Britain’s refusal to let the Exodus, a ship loaded with Holocaust survivors, land in British-controlled Palestine, an incident that inspired the novel of the same name by Leon Uris in 1958 and a subsequent film.

Rabbi Dresner was in his mid-20s when, in 1954, he enrolled at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the Reform rabbinical seminary in Manhattan. He was ordained in 1961.

Rabbi Dresner was an early supporter of Soviet Jewry, opposed the war in Vietnam, and supported the rights of the poor, women, immigrants, religious and ethnic minorities, disabled people, and gay men and lesbians.

Last month, in an interviews with WCBS-TV in New York, Rabbi Dresner said, “I want to be remembered as somebody who not only tried to keep the Jewish faith but also invoked the Jewish doctrine from the Talmud, which is called ‘tikkun olam’ — repairing the world — and I hope that I made a little bit of a contribution to making the world a little better place.”