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In Memoriam 2018

MARTY ALLEN, the veteran comedian who was part of the popular Allen and Rossi duo and was known for his catchphrase “Hello dere,” died Feb. 12 in Las Vegas at the age of 95.

 

 

AHARON APPLEFELD, arguably the world’s greatest writer of fiction about the world’s foremost nonfiction atrocity, the Holocaust, died in Israel on Jan. 4 at the age of 85. A Holocaust survivor himself, he captured and reclaimed the lost world of European Jewish life.

 

 

FRANK AVRUCH, a Jewish entertainer known for his portrayal of TV’s Bozo the Clown died March 20 in Boston. He was 89. Avruch played Bozo from 1959 to 1970.

 

 

MARTY BALIN, co-founder of the iconic 1960s psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane and a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, died in Tampa, Florida, Sept. 27. He was 76.

 

 

STEVEN BOCHCO, the Emmy-winning television writer and producer who was responsible for iconic series such as “Hill Street Blues,” “NYPD Blue” and “L.A. Law,” died April 1. He was 74.

 

 

ANTHONY BOURDAIN, a celebrity chef and writer who hosted popular food and travel shows on CNN, died June 8 at the age of 61. Bourdain’s father was Catholic, his mother Jewish, but was raised without religion. He once told viewers, “I’ve never been in a synagogue. I don’t believe in a higher power. But that doesn’t make me any less Jewish, I don’t think.”

 

 

RANDOLPH LOUIS BRAHAM, a two-time Jewish National Book Award winner for works on the Holocaust in Hungary and a founding member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, died Nov. 25. He was 95.

 

 

STEFANIA PODGORSKA BURZMINSKI, who as a teenager hid 13 Jews in an attic in Poland for two years during the Holocaust and married one of the Jews she rescued, died Sept. 29 in Los Angeles. She was 97.

 

 

JOSE CARO, an Argentinean immigrant to Israel who led the Raanana-based Association of Latin-American Immigrants or OLEI, died Feb. 12 at the age of 62.

 

 

SHOSHANA CARDIN, a Baltimore philanthropist who was the first woman to chair her city’s Jewish federation and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and also served as chair of the National Conference of Soviet Jewry, died May 21. She was 91.

 

 

NAOMI COHEN, a pioneering scholar of American Jewish history who was one of the first women professors of Jewish studies, died in January at the age of 91.

 

 

RABBI RACHEL COWAN, who converted to Judaism and became a pioneer in the Jewish healing movement that provides spiritual resources and wisdom to help people deal with the suffering that surrounds personal loss and serious illness, died in Manhattan in August at the age of 77.

 

 

MILOS FORMAN, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Amadeaus,” died April 13. He was 86. Born in Czechoslovakia, his parents were Protestant and members of the anti-Nazi underground who were killed during the Holocaust. He later learned that his biological father was a Jewish man with whom his mother had an affair, and who survived the Holocaust.

 

 

MAX FUCHS (left), an American soldier who helped lead a historic Shabbat service in Germany during World War II, died July 3. He was 96.

 

 

JONATHAN GOLD, who was the first restaurant critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, died July 21 in Los Angeles. He was 57.

 

 

WILLIAM GOLDMAN, a novelist and screenwriter who twice won the Oscars for his work on “All the President’s Men” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” died Nov. 16 in Manhattan. He was 87.

 

 

JAIME GUTTENBERG, ALYSSA ALHADEFF, MEADOW POLLACK, ALEX SCHACHTER and SCOTT BEIGEL were among the 17 students and staff killed in a shooting rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14.

 

 

ELAINE HOLSTEIN, whose son, Jeffrey Miller, was one of the four unarmed students killed by Ohio National Guardsman on the campus of Kent State University during an anti-war protest, died May 26 at age 96. She had been the last surviving parent of the four Kent State victims, three of whom were Jewish.

 

 

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, a conservative champion of Israel and the dean of neoconservative columnists in Washington, died June 21. He was 68.

 

 

RABBI LYNNE LANDSBERG, co-founder and co-chair of the Jewish Disability Network and senior adviser on disability rights at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, died Feb. 26 at the age of 66.

 

 

CLAUDE LANZMANN, a French Jew and one of the world’s foremost makers of documentary films about the Holocaust, including the nine-hour-long documentary “Shoah,” died July 5 in Paris. He was 92.

 

 

WALTER LAQUEUR, a Holocaust survivor and one of the 20th century’s most prominent scholars, died Sept. 30 in Washington, D.C.  He was 92.

 

 

LEON LEDERMAN, a Jewish-American physicist who won a Nobel Prize for his research on subatomic particles and later sold the prize to pay for medical expenses, died Oct. 3 in Rexburg, Idaho. He was 96.

 

 

STAN LEE, who as one of the masterminds behind Marvel Comics created such mega-popular comic book franchises as Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and the X-Men, died Nov. 12 in Los Angeles. He was 95.

 

 

JUDITH LEIBER, the famous handbag designer and her husband, abstract painter GERSON LEIBER, died within hours of each other on April 28. She was 97 and he was 96.

 

 

BERNARD LEWIS, a leading Middle Eastern and Oriental studies scholar, died in New Jersey, May 19 at the age of 101.

 

 

RICHARD PIPES, author of a monumental series of historical works on Russia and a top advisor to the Reagan administration, died May 17 in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the age of 94.

 

 

RABBI DAVID POSNER, a spiritual leader at the flagship Reform Temple Emanu-El in New York City for four decades, died Oct. 20. He was 70.

 

 

CHARLOTTE RAE, who was nominated for Emmy and Tony awards and won acclaim playing the housemother Edna Garrett on the sitcom “The Facts of Life,” died Aug. 5 in Los Angeles. She was 92.

 

 

JUDGE STEPHEN REINHARDT, dubbed the “liberal lion” of American jurisprudence and an outspoken advocate on Jewish as well as legal issues, died March 29 in Los Angeles. He was 87.

 

 

PHILIP ROTH, whose notorious novels about the sex drives of American men – such as Portnoy’s Complaintand Goodbye Columbus– gave way to some of the most probing examinations of the American Jewish condition in the 20th and 21st centuries, died May 22. He was 85.

 

 

CONNIE SAWYER, the film and television actress, nicknamed “The Clown Princess of Comedy,” died Jan. 21 at the age of 105.

 

 

RICHARD SIEGEL, an educator who advocated for Jewish culture and arts and co-edited the seminal Jewish Catalog series of guides to “do-it-yourself” Judaism, died July 12 in Los Angeles. He was 70.

 

 

NEIL SIMON, the Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award- winning playwright known for such Broadway hits as “The Odd Couple,” “Barefoot in the Park” and “Lost in Yonkers,” died August 26 in New York City at the age of 91.

 

 

PROF. DAVID S. WYMAN, author of The Abandonment of the Jews, the definitive study of America’s response to the Holocaust, died March 14 in Amherst, Massachusetts. He was 89.

 

 

The Victims of the Tree of Life Massacre

We remember the 11 victims who died on a Shabbat morning in October in a mass shooting at Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood.

They include:

Joyce Fienberg, 75, of Oakland; Richard Gottfried, 65, of Ross; Rose Mallinger, 97, of Squirrel Hill; Jerry Rabinowitz, 66, of Edgewood; Cecil Rosenthal, 59, and David Rosenthal, 54, were brothers who lived together in Squirrel Hill; Bernice Simon, 84, and Sylvan Simon, 86, of Wilkinsburg, were a married couple; Daniel Stein, 71, of Squirrel Hill; Melvin Wax, 88, of Squirrel Hill; Irving Younger, 69, of Mount Washington.

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