Marilyn Golden was a college student on a summer backpacking trip in Switzerland when she fell from a tree after a rotting limb snapped. Her back was broken. She spent two years of rehabilitation at Houston Medical Center and had used a wheelchair ever since.

Ms. Golden would devote the rest of her life to championing civil rights for people with disabilities, all the while rejecting as “ridiculousity” the notion that people like her with disabilities deserved pity.

As policy analyst for the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, a leading national organization in the field, Ms. Golden played an important role in the drafting, passage and implementation of the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990.

Ms. Golden died at age 67 on Sept. 21 at her home in Berkeley, CA.

David H. Komansky, the former chairman and chief executive officer of Merrill Lynch, who helped build the company into a global financial behemoth, died Sept. 27 at New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. He was 82.

A postal worker’s son who grew up in the Bronx and later dropped out of college, Mr. Komansky brought worldwide ambitions to his tenure as chief executive of the firm from 1996 to 2003. He bought businesses in the United Kingdom and invested in operations in Europe, Asia and Australia. In 1995, as Merrill’s president, he negotiated the $810 million acquisition of Britain’s largest independent stockbroker, Smith New Court. In 1997, Mr. Komansky oversaw Merrill Lynch’s acquisition of Mercury Asset Management of Britain, one of Europe’s largest investment firms, for about $5.3 billion. He also struck a deal with HSBC to provide online banking and investment services, which have since become an everyday offering from banks.

“When I would visit him in the office, I always loved coming down to the lobby with him,” Mr. Komansky’s daughter Elyssa Williams wrote to The New York Times in an email. “He knew who every single person in the building was, and would call them by name.”

Neal Sher, 74, a lawyer who for 11 years ran the federal office that rooted out WWII-era Nazis in the United States and moved to revoke their citizenship and deport them died Oct. 3 at his home in Manhattan.

Mr. Sher joined the newly-formed Office of Special Investigations, the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting department, as a litigator in 1979 and became its director four years later. Its targets were often individuals who had lied to enter the United States after WWII to conceal their Nazi past.

The cases Mr. Sher prosecuted or oversaw included those of John Demjanjuk, who was accused of having been a death camp guard and deported to Germany; Archbishop Valerian Trifa, who, as part of the antisemitic Iron Guard of Romania, was reported to have instigated a pogrom in 1941 against Jews in Bucharest; and Arthur Rudolph, who was accused of “working slave laborers to death” in the V-2 rocket factory in Germany before becoming the project manager of NASA’s Saturn 5 rocket program, which was critical to the Apollo spaceflights. Mr. Trifa was deported to Portugal, and Mr. Rudolph surrendered his citizenship and agreed to go to West Germany rather than fight deportation.

In 1986, Mr. Sher recommended that Kurt Waldheim, a former secretary-general of the United Nations, be denied entry to the United States because of his service as a German Army lieutenant in the Balkans during brutal campaigns against Yugoslav partisans and mass deportations of Greek Jews to death camps. Attorney General Edwin Meese III put Mr. Waldheim — who had been elected president of Austria by then — on a list of people who were barred from entering the United States.

Rabbi Moshe Tendler, a singular authority on medical ethics in the Jewish world, died Sept. 28 at a hospital in Rochelle Park, NJ. He was 95.

Rabbi Tendler was both a master of the Torah and a trained microbiologist. In articles, three books, speeches, and frequent legislative testimony, Rabbi Tendler made influential statements on a number of controversial issues — the clinical definition of death, organ transplantation, permissible circumcision techniques, stem cell research and more — that shaped how the larger Jewish community addressed these questions.

Rabbi Tendler’s more than 80-year association with Yeshiva University began when he entered its Talmudical Academy, a high school. He later took up rabbinical studies at the university’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. Drawn to biology from childhood, Rabbi Tendler, while studying at Yeshiva, simultaneously took evening courses at New York University. There he received a bachelor’s degree in biology and then a master’s degree before eventually earning a doctorate at Columbia.

Yeshiva hired him as a biology instructor in 1952, and within a few years, he was appointed assistant dean in charge of student affairs. He was later named a rosh yeshiva at the seminary, a title given to the school’s leading teachers and one he held at his death. He lectured from his hospital bed by Zoom until five months ago, his son Mordecai said.

Anni Bergman, an Austrian-born psychoanalyst, who worked with autistic children and contributed to a landmark study of early childhood development, died on Oct. 2 at home in Manhattan. She was 102.

One of Dr. Bergman’s innovations in the treatment of autistic children was to add a helper to the mix: a therapeutic companion, who could help the child navigate his or her world. One example involved a child who wanted to take down all the items from the shelves of a grocery store. She knew that behind the child’s impulse was a need to establish her own sort of order on the world.

Inge Ginsberg, who fled the Holocaust, helped American spies in Switzerland during WWII, wrote songs in Hollywood and, in a final assertion of her presence on earth, made a foray into heavy metal music as a nonagenarian, died July 20 in a care home in Zurich. She was 99.

She was the frontwoman for the band Inge and the Tritone Kings, which competed on television on “Switzerland’s Got Talent,” entered the Eurovision Song Contest and made music videos. Whatever the venue, Ms. Ginsberg would typically appear in long gowns and pearls and flash the two-fingered hand signal for “rock on” as she sang about the Holocaust, climate change, mental health and other issues.