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…
(JTA) — Rabbi Moshe Tendler, an expert in Jewish law and medical ethics, died Tuesday at age 95. A dean of the rabbinical school and a professor of Jewish medical ethics and biology at Yeshiva University, Tendler was considered an expert in issues of Jewish law and medical ethics. But he was most famous for…
This is an excerpt from “I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl” (2004), edited by Judea and Ruth Pearl. Ruth Pearl died July 20, 2021 at the age of 85. Growing up as a Jewish child in Baghdad left me with recurring nightmares of being chased by a knife-wielding…
דער בעל־שׂימחה האָט יאָרן לאַנג געדינט ווי דער רעדאַקטאָר פֿונעם ייִדישן פֿאָרווערטס.
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