By Forward Staff
Avrom Sutzkever, who died January 20 at the age of 96, was not only a great Yiddish poet but is acknowledged as being one of the great poets of the 20th century.
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By Masha Leon
The Mina Bern that I knew could always rise to the occasion and stop a show — without even trying. Bern, who died January 10 in New York City at age 98, was a dominant figure in Yiddish theater for several decades and brought its emotional richness to audiences around the globe. She also directed and starred on Broadway and landed roles in a dozen movies.
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By Menachem Wecker
David Levine, who drew idiosyncratic portraits of thousands of celebrities, politicians, artists, and other newsmakers, died on Dec. 29. The Brooklyn-born artist’s caricatures and watercolors appeared in Esquire, New York Magazine, Newsweek, The Nation, The New Yorker, Time and the New York Review of Books, where he started drawing in 1963.
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By JTA
The Bostoner Rebbe, Rabbi Levi Yitzhak Horowitz, the first American-born Hasidic leader, died December 5. He never fully recovered from a heart attack that he suffered during the summer. He was 88.
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By Ed Greenstein
Yochanan Muffs, a scholar of Bible, law and Semitic languages whose books illuminated the legal and social meaning of emotions such as love and joy in the lives of Jews in antiquity, succumbed to Parkinson’s disease on December 6.
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