Edward J. Greenfield, whose flights of rhetoric were a hallmark of the thousands of opinions Justice Greenfield crafted during his three decades on the New York State Supreme Court, died August  26 at his home in Manhattan. He was 98.

Over the years, Justice Greenfield was involved in many notable cases. He presided over the 1975 trial in which three Black Panthers were convicted of murdering two New York City police officers. He ruled that psychiatric patients could not be subjected to drug experiments. He allowed a photographer to continue selling nude photos of the actress Brooke Shields, but scolded her mother for exploiting her.

At the same time, he gained notice for the artistry of his opinions, in which he often luxuriated in the English language, prancing off on whimsical digressions and enlivening the law with colorful asides. Given to musing on the human condition, he was as apt to cite T.S. Eliot, Mark Twain or Shakespeare as he was to cite legal precedent.

Joseph I. Kramer, who served as “country doctor” to the poor on Manhattan’s Lower East Side for three decades, died August 30 at his home in Leonia, NJ. He was 96.

Dr. Kramer had been a practicing pediatrician in a prosperous New Jersey suburb, but found it unfulfilling, he had said. He began working on the Lower East Side, where he had been born, and in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where he had grown up. He set up a practice on Avenue D, where he saw children with herpes of the brain, active tuberculosis lesions, or wounds from being pricked in the park by discarded hypodermic needles. He evolved from a pediatrician into a general practitioner, treating prostitutes, priests and bookies in addition to families. His office was in a converted ground floor apartment in the Jacob Riis housing project, seeing up to 40 patients a day. He often paid for the medicines he prescribed and for the treatments he recommended. 

After he retired, he attended a reunion of Lower East Side old-timers at East River Park. Hundreds of people would swarm around him. “He was every child in the hood’s doctor,” one former patient recalled. “I don’t know how he managed that, but he saw every one of us.”

Willie Garson, the actor best known for his role as Carrie Bradshaw’s best male friend on the hit HBO series “Sex and the City,” died Sept. 21 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 57.

Mr. Garson also drew attention for his role on the USA Network crime series “White Collar” (2009-2014) and also appeared in the films “Kingpin” (1996), “There’s Something About Mary” (1998), and “Fever Pitch” (2005). He played Lee Harvey Oswald three times, in the film “Ruby” (1992) and on the TV shows “Quantum Leap” and “MADtv.” Mr. Garson was slated to reprise the role of Sanford Blatch in the coming “Sex and the City” reboot.

George Wein, the impresario who almost single-handedly turned the jazz festival into a worldwide phenomenon, died Sept. 13 at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 95.

Jazz Festivals were not a new idea when Mr. Wein was approached about presenting a weekend of jazz in the open air in Newport, RI. But there had been nothing as ambitious as the festival Mr. Wein staged in 1954. The lineup included Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald and other stars. The inaugural Newport Jazz Festival drew thousands over two days. It made a profit of only $142.50, but merited a return engagement, establishing itself as a jazz institution.

Over the years, Mr. Wein received numerous honors and accolades, including a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, induction into the French Legion of Honor, honors by two U.S. presidents, and a lifetime achievement award from the Recording Academy.

The Shofar joins those members who knew former congregants Ron and Anne Smith in mourning the death of Caleb Smith, youngest of their three children. May the family be comforted by the outpouring of love during this saddest of times.

The Shofar sadly acknowledges the death of Elena Postolache, grandmother of our shul’s office assistant, Andrea Blaga, on August 7, in Orăștie, Romania. Andrea’s grandmother raised her during her formative years, and this loss is deeply felt, Andrea said. “She will live in my memory forever; her love breaks the barriers of time.”

Steven Weinberg, a theoretical physicist who discovered that two of the universe’s forces are really the same, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, and who helped lay the foundation for the development of the Standard Model, a theory that classifies all known elementary particles in the universe, making it one of the most important breakthroughs in physics in the 20th century, died August 30 in a hospital in Austin, TX. He was 88.

Although he had the respect, almost awe, of his colleagues for his scientific abilities and insights, he also possessed a rare ability among scientists to communicate and explain abstruse scientific ideas to the public. He was a sought-after speaker, and he wrote several popular books about science, notably The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (1977).

He wrote many other books, including on the history of science, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (2015), and three volumes totaling 1,500 pages on quantum field theory, which merges classical physics, special relativity, and quantum mechanics. The series is widely regarded as the definitive text on the subject.