Jewish Life Stories: Ed Koch’s sister dies on her own terms

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Pat Koch Thaler, 92, mayor’s sister and NYU dean

Pat Koch Thaler, a former dean at New York University and the younger sister of late New York City Mayor Ed Koch, lived a long and eventful life. But it was how her life ended that made it front-page news: On Tuesday, Nov. 12, she called New York Times obituary writer Sam Roberts and explained that she would be taking her own life the following Saturday.

And she did: Suffering from cancer, Thaler, who had been living in a retirement community in Pompton Plains, New Jersey, self-administered a legal, lethal prescription on Nov. 16. She was 92.

Thaler and her two older brothers were born in Newark, New Jersey and later moved to Brooklyn. She earned a master’s degree from Bank Street College and entered a career in education that led to her becoming the dean of arts, sciences and humanities at NYU’s School of Continuing Education. “I do not believe in an afterlife,” Thaler told Roberts. “I believe the body disintegrates, and whatever remains is the spirit — that, and the memories.”

Charles Fishman, 82, a jazz impresario in Israel and Washington, D.C.

Charles Fishman’s career as a jazz promoter ran through Jerusalem and back: Born in Brooklyn in 1942, he grew up in the Zionist youth movement Young Judaea. After studying business management at NYU and representing Young Judaea in Houston and New York, he opened a jazz club in Jerusalem called Django, often bringing in major stars, including his close friend Dizzy Gillespie.

Returning to the States in the mid-1970s, he booked events at a Houston Jewish community center, worked in Washington, D.C., as a cultural ambassador for Israel and put together an ABC television special — “The Stars Salute Israel at 30!” — that featured Barbra Streisand, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a bevy of pop stars.

In 2004, he and his second wife, Stephanie Peters, co-founded the DC Jazz Festival, which this year celebrated its 20th anniversary. Fishman was proud of promoting jazz on two continents. “The Israelis really love jazz,” he said in an oral history. “It was a real attraction to them, and then of course you bring people over and it’s such an informal society and jazz musicians for the most part are so informal themselves that it was like a perfect match.” He died Nov. 12 at the age of 82. 

Yiannis Boutaris, 82, Greek mayor devoted to his city’s Jewish past 

In 2014, the mayor of the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki wore a yellow Star of David at his inauguration to protest a newly elected city councilman from the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party. “No one knows what Thessaloniki could have been,” Yiannis Boutaris told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency a few years later, “if it hadn’t lost 95 percent of its Jewish community” in the Holocaust.

A vintner by trade, he was committed to preserving and sharing the city’s Jewish history, raising money to create the Holocaust Museum of Thessaloniki and fighting (unsuccessfully) for a memorial park dedicated to Thessaloniki Jews. As a Vlach — a descendant of the indigenous population of Romania and Moldova — he wanted Greeks to remember that their country was once proudly multicultural and that there were other peoples who once thrived here. In 2016 he was honored by the American Jewish Committee at its annual Washington conference.

Boutaris died Nov. 9. He was 82.

Frank Auerbach, 93, child survivor and renowned artist

Orphaned at age 7  — his parents Max Auerbach and Charlotte Nora Borchardt were killed in Auschwitz — Frank Auerbach painted with “a fury for life and a gravitas of grief,” a critic remembered.

Born in Berlin and evacuated to England in the Kindertransport, Auerbach became one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century with his intense, intimate portraits of people, and of a London still recovering from the devastation of war. His postwar contemporaries in the “School of London” included Francis Bacon, Leon Kossoff and Lucian Freud — another Berlin-born Jew — and he was known for layering his paint with what he once called “eccentric thickness.”

Auerbach, 93, died Nov. 11 at his home in London.

Kenneth Bronstein, 85, bar mitzvah boy turned leading atheist

Kenneth Bronstein, born into an observant Jewish family, said he became an atheist on the day of his bar mitzvah. “Atheism is a conclusion, not a belief. That’s a very major difference,” he once told an interviewer. “We’ve done it through rational analysis, scientific evidence.”

As president of NYC Atheists, an organization he revived around 2000, he filed lawsuits demanding the separation of church and state, opposed state-sponsored memorials to 9/11 rescuers that had religious content and, in 2009, posted 12-foot-long advertisements on Manhattan buses reading “You don’t have to believe in God to be a moral or ethical person.” An engineer at IBM, he also collected coins — although not the ones bearing the phrase “In God We Trust.”

Bronstein died in a Manhattan care facility on Oct. 18. He was 85.