Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, who taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary for more than three decades and left an indelible mark on generations of rabbis and Jewish scholars, died on Dec. 11. He was 73.

Beyond the numerous eulogies that have been written for him, the rabbi’s reflections on life and faith endure. “What draws me back to Hashem, if not to my life as a whole, is Psalm 23: ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I fear no evil for you are with me,’” he wrote in his last Facebook post. “Wherever I am, God is there, too.”

Cora Weiss, active for more than half a century in support of gender equality, international peace, the anti-Vietnam War movement, civil rights and nuclear disarmament, and who helped organize some of the important mass demonstrations of the 1960s, died on Dec. 8 in Manhattan. She was 91.

In 196`1, when she was raising her children in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, she heard about Women Strike for Peace, a new group organizing demonstrations against nuclear weapons testing. She joined.

“In my experience with Women Strike for Peace, we got things done,” she said. Within a few years, Ms. Weiss had become co-chairwoman of the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and had helped organize one of the largest antiwar protests in the United States.

A lifelong supporter of the United Nations, Ms. Weiss was particularly proud of her work in helping to draft United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, which affirmed the importance of the role of women in the peace process and protecting their security, unanimously adopted in 2000.

Later in life, as president of the Hague Appeal for Peace, she became involved in global peace education. “I’ve decided that it’s the only sustainable thing,” Ms. Weiss said. “You can march, you can protest, you can make phone calls, you can write letters. But education is the closest thing, I think, to a sustainable form of social change.”

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.”