Mimi Levin Lieber, a pioneer in the use of focus groups to shape product development and marketing at some of the country’s largest companies, and later a stalwart advocate for early childhood literacy in New York, died on Oct. 16 in Manhattan. She was 93.

She would gather a few randomly selected people around a table and talk to them about their choices in personal hygiene, underwear or dating preferences. She would then share these insights with corporate clients, like Hanes and General Mills. For 30 years, she provided a steady guide to companies trying to stay ahead of the rapidly shifting American consumer.

In 1981, Jerrold Nadler, then a member of the New York State Assembly (and now a U.S. representative) nominated her to the New York Board of Regents. She spent much of her time on the board pushing for more funding for low-income schools. She left the board in 1996 and founded Literacy Inc., a nonprofit that promotes reading in lower-income neighborhoods in New York. Today the group, known as LINC, works with dozens of schools and public libraries across the city.

Pauline Bart, a feminist sociologist who wrote with rigor about gender inequities in healthcare and violence against women, died on Oct. 8 at a hospice facility in Raleigh, NC. She was 91.

Dr. Bart documented the ways in which society’s gender biases had harmed women. While teaching women’s studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, Dr. Bart began to focus on rape because so many of her female students told her they had been assaulted, many by men they knew.

Dr. Bart was the co-editor with Eileen Geil Moran of Violence Against Women: The Bloody Footprints (1993), and the co-author with Patricia H. O’Brien of Stopping Rape: Successful Survival Strategies (1985). She and Linda Frankel wrote The Student Sociologist’s Handbook, first published in 1971.

Dr. Aaron T. Beck, whose pragmatic, thought-monitoring psychotherapy became the centerpiece of a scientific transformation in the treatment of depression, anxiety and other related mental disorders, died Dec. 1 at his home in Philadelphia. He was 100.

Dr. Beck was a young psychiatrist trained in Freudian analysis when, in the late 1950s, he began prompting patients to focus on distortions in their day-to-day thinking, rather than on conflicts buried in childhood, as therapists typically did. He discovered that many people generated what he called “automatic thoughts,” unexamined assumptions like “I’m just unlucky in love” or “I’ve always been socially inept,” which can give rise to self-criticism and despair.

Dr. Beck found that he could undermine those assumptions, gradually improving people’s mood. His work provided the architecture for what is known as cognitive behavior therapy, which has become the world’s most extensively studied form of psychotherapy.

Muriel Lezak, a neuropsychologist who wrote a landmark textbook in the early days of her discipline that became an essential guide to the description of brain injuries and disorders, died Oct. 6 in a memory care facility in Portland, Ore. She was 94.

Dr. Lezak became interested in patients with frontal lobe damage, which affects creativity, reasoning and the ability to relate to people and to plan and organize. As she dealt with interns and other medical personnel, she realized there was no book in her evolving field that comprehensively reviewed the major disorders caused by brain dysfunction and injury, or the techniques, tests and procedures to evaluate patients. Her book, Neuropsychological Assessment, published in 1976, filled that gap.

At the VA hospital, where she worked until 1985, she started a support group to help military wives cope with the altered behavior of their brain-injured husbands. “The people they were married to were no longer there; it was somebody else who was similar, looked pretty much the same, but was no longer the person they were able to love and interact with comfortably,” she said.

As early as 1982, Dr. Lezak sounded an alarm about the effect of head injuries incurred by athletes. “A seemingly harmless blow to the head can cause a serious injury,” she said, citing soccer players in particular because they use their heads to hit the ball.

Aaron Feuerstein, a Massachusetts industrialist who became a national hero in 1995 when he refused to lay off workers at his textile plant after a catastrophic fire then spent hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild it, died Nov. 4 at a hospital in Boston. He was 95.

Mr. Feuerstein’s company Malden Mills, was by the mid 1990s among the last large textile companies in Massachusetts. Most other companies, faced with competition from lower-wage states and cheap imports, had either closed or moved production out of the state. Malden Mills was a shining exception. Then, on Dec. 11, 1995, a boiler in one of the factory’s plants exploded. Nevertheless, Mr. Feurerstein handed out holiday bonuses and announced that he would immediately reopen as much of the plant as he could, replace the buildings he had lost, and continue to pay the idled workers.

By the first weeks of January, hundreds of his employees were back at work, and just 20 months later, he opened a new $130 million complex.

Mr. Feuerstein’s father founded the Young Israel synagogue in Brookline, Mass., where his family lived. A fire there destroyed much of the building, and Mr. Feuerstein donated $1 million to rebuild it.

Rabbi Earl A. Grollman, a prolific writer on grief who became widely known for ministering to those mourning the death of loved ones in the 9/11 attacks, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and other times of loss, died Oct. 15 at his home in Belmont, MA. He was 96.

He appeared on many television programs, and he ministered to people of all faiths, encouraging frank conversations about a difficult topic.

Rabbi Grollman was the spiritual leader of Beth El Temple Center in Belmont, MA. He retired to focus on counseling and writing, producing more than two dozen books about death and grieving. “Obsessing about death can lead to paralysis, while ignoring it can squander opportunity,” he told The New York Times in 1994. “The important thing about death is the importance of life. Do what you have to do now. Live today meaningfully.”

Helene Fortunoff, who built a multimillion-dollar jewelry empire with outlets across the New York region and a flagship store on Fifth Avenue, died Nov. 8 in Miami Beach. She was 88.

Mrs. Fortunoff started her career in 1953 working at her husband Alan Fortunoff’s family business, which at the time was a small mom-and-pop enterprise selling housewares in Brooklyn. In 1957, she proposed adding a jewelry line, and she spearheaded the family’s entry into that sector. Fortunoff would become one of the largest retailers in the region. By 2003, it had six stores that specialized in fine jewelry, crystal and silver giftware.

Mrs. Fortunoff received numerous awards. She was the first recipient of the National Jeweler Award for retailing excellence. She was also the first female member of the United States Carat Club, a private group organized by De Beers. In 2006, she received the Jewelers of America Gem Award for lifetime achievement.