(JTA) — Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, the powerful leader of Israel’s haredi Orthodox community who was known as the “Prince of Torah,” has died. Kanievsky was 94 and died after collapsing at his home in Bnei Brak, the center of haredi life in Israel where he was regarded with reverence. The son of a major rabbi…
Ken Duberstein, believed to be the first of several Jewish Americans to serve as the White House chief of staff, died on Wednesday at the age of 77. Duberstein, a Brooklyn native, served former President Ronald Regan in the last year of his second term. He previously worked as an assistant to the president for…
Auschwitz survivor Mel Mermelstein, who died Jan. 28, at 95, was a modest, unprepossessing man. Whatever celebrity he achieved in life — winning a historic legal campaign against Holocaust deniers, seeing his life dramatized in a television movie starring Leonard Nimoy — he used to further the greater goal of keeping alive the memories of…
Sheldon Silver, the former Speaker of the New York Assembly who was serving a 6 1/2-year sentence on federal corruption charges, died Monday at a federal medical center in Massachusetts after battling cancer and kidney disease. He was 77. An Orthodox Jew born to Russian immigrants, and Democrat from the Lower East Side of Manhattan,…
Louis Sneh, who survived Auschwitz to become a successful businessman, a great-grandfather and a tireless activist for Holocaust commemoration, died Jan. 16 at the age of 94. Sneh, who died at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., cheated death many times in his life. Raised in the Hungarian village of Mezőkovácsháza, he was 16 years…
The hardest job he ever had, Bob Saget used to tell me, was serving as emcee of our annual synagogue gala. He could never just say the first thing that would pop into his mind, he explained, because it would inevitably be a joke that was too risqué for a synagogue event. He constantly had…
Peter Bogdanovich, the bandana-throated, Oscar-nominated director-writer who was a bridge figure between New Hollywood and the Hollywood Golden Age has died at 82. Encompassing such classics as “The Last Picture Show,” “Paper Moon” and “What’s Up, Doc?” Bogdanovich’s career ranged from intimate dramas to broad screwball comedies. He later charmed new audiences as Dr. Melfi’s…
If ever there was someone who had cause to be embittered, it would be Izzy Arbeiter, who died Friday at the age of 96. He was 14 when the German occupied his town in Plock, Poland in 1939. Soon came the ghettos, then the torturous goodbye to his parents and little brother who would be…
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