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Tamar Fishman, 88, Judaica pioneer who designed a Hanukkah stamp

Born in 1935 in Israel, Tamar Fischmann was one of a group of late 20th-century Judaica artists—including David Moss, Betsky Plotkin Teutsch, Jay Greenspan, and Jeanette Kuvin Oren—who revived Jewish folk art traditions that might otherwise have been lost.

Fishman created intricate paper cutouts and wedding contracts, or ketubot, as well as the tapestries she designed for her synagogue, Congregation Beth El in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan gave Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin a specially commissioned paper cutout she made as a gift on the occasion of his state visit.

But in 2018, she received a commission that literally brought Fishman into the public eye: Her silhouette design of a menorah was selected for a U.S. Postal Service stamp issued jointly with Israel to celebrate Hanukkah. “You keep growing and you just don’t stop,” Fishman, then 82, said after a ceremony at the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, where she unveiled the stamp. “This is the work of my hands.”

Fishman died on August 14 in Bethesda. She was 88 years old.

Seth Bloom, 49, a circus clown on a humanitarian mission

Seth BloomHis father was a foreign service officer and his mother was a consultant to the World Food Programme. The family lived in countries as diverse as Sri Lanka and Kenya, Preserving their Jewish traditions, but also celebrating with their Christian, Buddhist and Hindu neighbors.

Bloom followed in his parents’ humanitarian footsteps, albeit indirectly: He trained as a clown, performed in major circuses and worked with his wife Christina Gelsone (above) in two-person shows known for her wit and beauty. From 2003, after the US invasion that overthrew the Taliban, In Afghanistan, he founded a troupe that used circus arts to teach health and social issues.

“I was in areas where no media came, and no one took positive pictures of laughing children and laughing mullahs or old men with donkey carts who came to watch our shows,” he told a blogger in 2016.

Bloom, 49, died Aug. 2 in Poughkeepsie, New YorkHis wife said he committed suicide after suffering from chronic pain for years.

Seth Wolitz, 86, a Yiddish scholar deep in the heart of Texas

Seth Wolitz liked to tell the story of the racist Maryland crab fishermen who nearly cut off his finger when he returned from a summer of civil rights activism in the early 1960s. Somehow this experience awakened his affection for Marcel Proust, At the beginning of his career, Wolitz was known primarily as a scholar of French literature and especially of the work of the French-Jewish writer.

Later, however, as Gale Chair and Director of Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, He became one of the leading experts on Yiddish modernism and the writer Isaac Bashevis SingerHe was also instrumental in expanding Jewish Studies at UT-Austin, She recruited faculty members and organized lectures, symposia and performances, including a major Sephardic festival in 1992.

““Jewish studies in American universities,” he once wrote, “are not natural flowers, but have had to be fought for against much opposition, have been carefully planted, cultivated and watered with Jewish money, and are still not securely anchored.”

Wolitz died in Austin on August 11. He was 86.

Shai Doron, 64, “Jerusalem’s best friend”

“Jerusalem has lost its best friend” Rabbi Joy Levitt wrote in an obituary To Shai Doronthe president of the Jerusalem Foundation, former director of the city’s popular zoo, and a pillar of Jerusalem’s environmental, philanthropic and civic life.

Doron, a fourth-generation Jerusalemite, was a protégé of the city’s legendary mayor, Teddy Kollek, and served as his chief of staff until 1993. For 25 years, Doron managed the Tisch Zoological Gardens in Jerusalem, transforming it into a major attraction and leading important projects to protect and preserve numerous animal species from extinction.

As president of the Jerusalem Foundation from 2018, he led the charity that aimed to beautify the capital and strengthen its complex public infrastructure. “He worked to advance the shared society, bridge the gap between Jerusalem’s different communities and provide equal opportunities for all,” the foundation said in a statement.

Doron died of a heart attack on July 30He was 64.

Ira Grupper, 80, an advocate for civil rights and peace in the Middle East

Ira Grouper was 13 and grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home in Brooklyn when he felt drawn to the civil rights movement. He took part in the integration-friendly New York school boycott of 1964 and left Brooklyn College in 1965 and went to Mississippi to fight for the right to vote.

Over the next 60 years, he was involved in nearly every major social movement as an activist with the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the NAACP. From 1991 to 1993, he was national chairman of the New Jewish Agenda, a progressive Jewish organization that worked for a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine despite considerable opposition from the Jewish majority.

A resident of Louisville, Kentucky, He worked for decades on the assembly line at Philip Morris’ cigarette factory, where he also served as a union representative. In his retirement He taught civil rights and Middle Eastern studies at Bellarmine University.

“You don’t get anything without fighting for it. You keep nothing without continuing to fight for it”, he said in an oral history interview in 2011“We see that every day. We see many of the gains that we won by taking something away from us.”

Grupper died on July 23He was 80.

Žilvinas Beliauskas, 66, a Lithuanian librarian dedicated to the country’s Jewish history

The Vilnius Jewish Public Library was founded in 2011 by the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture at the suggestion of Wyman Brent, a Californian book collector who is neither Jewish nor speaks Lithuanian. To achieve its goal, Demonstration of the breadth and depth of Jewish life and culture in the former center of Jewish cultural, economic and intellectual life, The library needs a outstanding director.

The library found the ideal candidate in Žilvinas Beliauskaswho had a master’s degree in psychology from Vilnius University and completed postgraduate studies at the Institute for the History of Philosophy and Logic there. Perhaps more importantly, he shared Brent’s commitment to remembering the cultural contributions of a Jewish community whose troubled history ended with the Holocaust.

“Although he was not Jewish himself, he devoted enormous energy to educating his Lithuanian compatriots about the history and heritage of Lithuanian Jews,” the San Francisco Jewish Community Library recalled in a tribute on Facebook.

Beliauskas, who also Vilnius Jewish Theatre, died on 26 JulyHe was 66.

Walter Arlen, 103, a Jewish refugee whose music grappled with his past

After fleeing the Nazis from Austria in 1938 at the age of 18, Walter Arlen initially gave up his musical talent, which had made him a rising star in his hometown of Vienna, and instead took a job in a factory in Chicago so that he could bring the rest of his family from England to the United States.

But when a psychiatrist suggested composing as a form of therapy, he turned back to music and eventually became an influential critic and advocate of classical music in Los Angeles.

In the 1980s, Arlen began writing his own music again. He composed works that dealt with the trauma of expulsion, with memories of the murder of an elderly Jew in Vienna and the suicide of several loved ones, including his mother. At the age of 95, he released an album entitled “Memories of an Exiled Wandering Viennese Jew”; four years later, he composed a score for the 1924 silent film “The City Without Jews.”

Among these to celebrate him on his 100th birthday in 2020 was a Viennese center dedicated to promoting artists like him who had been banned by the Nazis.

Arlen died last September at the age of 103but his death was only recently confirmed to the New York Times by his husband, Howard Myers, with whom he was married for 65 years.