Goldschmied, who died April 5 at 82, following a battle with cancer in a hospital in Castelfranco Veneto, Italy, credited himself with founding or developing at least 50 brands, including Diesel, AG, Replay, Gap 1969, A Golde, and Goldsign.

 He was just an infant in 1944 when his Italian Jewish father was arrested by the Nazis.

 Goldschmied’s mother, Sofia, was in hiding with his sister at the time of his birth on Nov. 29, 1943, in Vico Canavese, Italy. The Nazis had invaded Italy just months earlier.

 His father, Livio, had joined the Italian resistance after the Nazis took over. When he tried to visit his wife, daughter, and newborn son, he was apprehended en route. One of six people with his last name deported by the Nazis via Milan’s central station, he was ultimately sent to Auschwitz, where he was killed several months later.

 According to a testimony made by a survivor to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust center, Livio was denounced by a midwife and received permission to visit his son briefly after his arrest. The testimony, which cannot be independently verified, said he had rejected an offer to move to the United States to work with the physicist Enrico Fermi because he would not have been able to bring his family, and had also declined an opportunity to escape from the train that took him to Auschwitz.

 Following the war, Goldschmied moved with his mother to Trieste. He later spent a stint pursuing skiing in the 1960s in Cortina, the ski resort in the Southern Alps.

 He did not speak readily about his family’s Holocaust history, and unlike his sister, he did not connect with his Jewish heritage. Diana was responsible for installing Stolpersteine, small memorials embedded in sidewalks documenting the Jews who lived at that address before the Holocaust, to commemorate their family members who were murdered.

 “Like my father, my brother was a man of great intelligence and extraordinary intuition,” Diana told the Italian-Jewish news outlet Moked. “However, he did not want to talk about our family history. I think memory was working inside him, though.”

 Goldschmied got his start in fashion in the 1970s, when he launched his shop, King’s Shop, in Cortina d’Ampezzo, and started a denim line, Daily Blue.

 “That first production was going to a fabric store in my hometown, buying crazy fabrics for a very high price and going through manufacturing with my tailor,” Goldschmied told Women’s Wear Daily in 2023. “The product was extremely expensive, and in some way, I created a premium denim by accident.”

 In 1981, Goldschmied went on to found the Genius Group, a collective that backed emerging labels like Diesel, Replay, and Goldie.

 Among Goldschmied’s innovations throughout his career were the development of the stonewash technique, experimenting with Tencel fibers, creating super-stretch denim and pioneering sustainable production methods as early as the 1990s.

 “He was the architect of a global staple,” Mariette Hoitink, the co-founder of House of Denim, told Women’s Wear Daily. “Adriano didn’t just design jeans; he orchestrated the greatest transformation in the history of apparel. He was the singular force who elevated denim from rugged workwear into a global fashion staple.”

 Goldschmied is survived by his wife, Michela; his daughters Sara, Marta, and Glenda; two grandchildren; and his sister.

 “Adriano and I led very separate lives,” Diana told Moked. “I rediscovered my Jewish identity. He took a different path, but everyone carries the past within them.”

 Weiss died on Tuesday, March 3 surrounded by family at her home in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, following a year-long battle with cancer. She was 60.

 Weiss’ death strikes another blow for the leadership of the Reform movement, which has also buried two leaders of HUC who died prematurely while Weiss worked there — Rabbi Aaron Panken, then the seminary’s president, in 2018, and Rabbi David Ellenson, its past president, in 2023. The school of sacred music, meanwhile, is named for another luminary of the movement who died prematurely at 59 in 2011.

 Born on Sept. 9, 1965, Weiss was raised in San Diego where her family belonged to Temple Emanu-El. In 1987, Weiss received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and was ordained as a rabbi at HUC in 1993.

 Weiss joined the HUC faculty in 2000.

 During her tenure at the school, Weiss led multiple initiatives including a curricular redesign, the launch of the Virtual Pathway for Rabbinical students, and the creation of the Seminary Hebrew Program.

 Weiss received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004, where her research centered on metaphor and biblical poetry, scholarship that informed her later work including her 2006 book, Figurative Language in Biblical Prose Narrative: Metaphor in the Book of Samuel.

 In 2008, Weiss won the National Jewish Book Awards Book of the Year as the associate editor of The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, the first comprehensive collection of Torah commentary written entirely by female scholars. Sen. Elissa Slotkin chose the text to be sworn in on last year.

 In 2016 and 2020, Weiss led a nonpartisan, interfaith initiative titled “American Values, Religious Voices” that brought together 100 faith leaders to write letters to former President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump as well as Congress during the first 100 days of their administrations. The letters were later published as two books.

 Weiss described the initiative at the time as “a national,
nonpartisan campaign created from the conviction that scholars who study and teach our diverse religious traditions have something important to say about our shared American values.”

 In 2018, Weiss was appointed as HUC’s provost, becoming the first female rabbi to ordain rabbis in the Reform movement.

 Weiss is survived by her husband Alan; her two children, Rebecca and Ilan; her father, Marty; her siblings, Mitch, Laura, and Roger; her sister-in-law Catherine; and her nieces, nephews and cousins.

 “The state of the Jewish union in America is strong, but it is being tested,” said Fingerhut. “We are united in our commitment to America and to Jewish life, even as we worry about the real threats of violence and the growing acceptance of antisemitic rhetoric.”

 During his remarks, which was billed as JFNA’s inaugural “State of the Jewish Union” address ahead of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address the following week, Fingerhut issued six recommendations to Congress which centered on increasing security for Jewish communities.

 They included providing federal support for security personnel, expanding FBI capabilities to counter domestic terrorism, increasing support for local and state law enforcement, prosecuting hate crimes aggressively, and holding social media companies accountable for amplifying antisemitic rhetoric.

 “Jewish children and teens are facing growing risks online, including antisemitic harassment, bullying, and extremist content,” said Fingerhut. “We recognize the difficulty of legislating in this field, but states are moving forward, and it’s time for Congress to move forward as well.”

 Fingerhut also called on Congress to increase funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program to $1 billion annually, and “make the program more flexible and simpler to use.” (This year, the program is requiring recipients to support federal immigration enforcement and avoid programs advancing diversity, raising concern among many Jewish groups, including JFNA.)

 At the beginning of his address, Fingerhut also emphasized the ties between the American Jewish community and Israel, which have come under scrutiny since JFNA published a survey last month which found that only one-third of American Jews say they identify as Zionist.

 “The focus of today’s talk will be about the state of Jews in America, but it is not possible to have that conversation without acknowledging and addressing the emotional, familial, and religious connection between the American Jewish community and the people of Israel,” said Fingerhut.

 Fingerhut’s remarks come shortly after Bret Stephens, the right-leaning Jewish New York Times columnist, argued during his 92NY’s annual “The State of World Jewry” speech that groups devoted to combating antisemitism, including the Anti-Defamation League, should abandon their strategy and instead focus on bolstering Jewish education and communal infrastructure.

 During Fingerhut’s address, which largely centered on the security burdens placed on Jewish communities and concern for changes to social services funding, he also pivoted to a broader vision of Jewish life beyond the need for protection alone.

 “It is important for the Congress to know that Jewish life is not only what we are protecting, but what we are building,” said Fingerhut. “It is Jewish education and Jewish experiences, but it is also human services, dignity, and belonging.”