In Memory of Gary Mokotoff
A Remembrance by Sallyann Amdur Sack
Editor’s Note: The following remembrance of Gary Mokotoff was written by his long-time collaborator and Avotaynu co-founder, Sallyann Amdur Sack. We are honored to share her words here.
I first met Gary in Jerusalem at the 1984 Jerusalem Seminar on Jewish Genealogy, which Naomi Gershan and I organized and ran for the JGS of Washington, DC. As we sat at Naomi’s kitchen table stuffing registration packets the night before we left for Israel, we talked about plans for after the event. People were coming from Australia, England, Germany, Israel and New Zealand and we decided that we wanted to stay in touch afterwards. This was before the advent of personal computers, so that meant a publication. (We also made plans to convince the two British attendees to hold a second international gathering. They did, in 1987.)
All during the seminar, Naomi and I kept an eye out for participants we thought had leadership ability, and invited them to a brainstorming session the last afternoon—complete with the ubiquitous Israeli cake-and-coffee. Gary, who owned a computer services company, had started to bring ‘family finder’ printouts to meetings of the New York JGS and was sharing them with other societies upon request, so he was asked.
We all sat around a big conference table in a quiet hotel meeting room. I was at the six o’clock position; Gary was at two o’clock. I gave a pitch for a publication and starting to my left, asked for ideas and volunteers. When it was his turn, Gary quietly offered that he ran a “computer services company” and would produce the finished product if someone gave him a printed version.
Around the table we went; no one else said a word. It came back to me. Not willing to see my “baby” die aborning, I took a deep breath and said that “for now” I would do it. For now became a partnership that lasted 38 glorious years. Gary named it AVOTAYNU, inspired by a prayer in his Rosh Hashonah prayer book. AVOTAYNU became my wonderful unpaid, second career and my three children dubbed it their “fourth sibling.”
When we returned home, Gary drove down to my home in Bethesda. He had done some research. Since we had no financial backing, we would need to make this a “for profit” venture in order to be able to deduct expenses. We each put up $500 to get started and agreed that we’d be a 50-50 partnership. I once computed “profit-per-hour and concluded that I’d make more money babysitting, but the non-monetary reward was terrific.
Gary and I spoke virtually every day, dreaming up ways to grow the new field of Jewish genealogy. He agreed to handle the production; I had the fun part, responsible for content. Thus, he became “publisher” and I became “editor.” Though we had not known each other before Jerusalem, we worked together remarkably well, conferring with one another on almost everything, but deferring to the other in his or her area.
Concerned about finding enough articles to fill an issue, I proposed that we publish twice a year. We did that for one year; then Gary pushed me to accept three times a year, and in short order, to agree to quarterly publication—exciting, rewarding, and fun-filled years.
Organized Jewish genealogy was in its infancy and those were heady times. Ideas for new projects popped up all the time. While visiting Yad Vashem during the Jerusalem seminar, Gary noticed an odd spelling for a family name. Randy Daitch had been talking to Gary about the need for a soundex that worked well for Eastern European names, as the one used by the U.S. National Archive did not. From there it was a short step for Gary and Randy to develop the Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex that became a standard for Jewish genealogy. Typical of his generosity, Gary put the Daitch name first.
Zachary Baker and others were talking about the need for a gazetteer of Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust. Yad Vashem had the Black Book of Communities Destroyed by the Nazis, but it didn’t quite fit the bill. After the movie Shoah appeared on television, I acquired the U.S. government’s U.S. Mapping Service Board of Geographic Names computer tapes. Using his cutting edge computer skills, Gary merged the Yad Vashem book with the one from Washington. Then he spent many months “cleaning up” the resultant mess. Gary titled the result Where Once We Walked, fondly dubbed WOWW. It was our first big project after AVOTAYNU and probably the one of which we were most proud. The US Holocaust Museum purchased the database; we donated the database to Yad Vashem, and we were thrilled when WOWW won the Jewish Librarians Most Valuable Reference Book of the Year.
Rabbi Malcolm Stern was our mentor and guide. He took us with him to meet the Archivist of the United States with whom we discussed lack of access to Russian and other Communist Bloc archives. When the Archives received an invitation to send some genealogists to Russia but by-passed Jewish genealogists in favor of representatives from the National Genealogical Association and Federation of Genealogical Societies, Malcolm explained the need for a Jewish genealogy umbrella association. Gary became the first president of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies ( first AJGS, then IAJGS)—and the first to receive its prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. Wanting to be sure that AJGS had a fixed task, Gary assigned it to organize and run the annual seminars—soon called “conferences.”
Early in the 1990s, a young man from Paris named Alexander Beider wrote to ask if we might publish his as-yet unfinished dictionary of Russian-Jewish names. We talked it over, decided to publish whatever commercial publishing companies did not (no one published Jewish genealogy works in those days), and took a chance on Beider. Gary asked me to think of a title and I took the manuscript to edit on a three-week summer vacation. With exception of a book on Yiddish, Avotaynu published all of Sasha’s subsequent books, and Gary tried to convince Sasha to move to the U.S.
Back and forth we went with one dreaming up an idea, the other endorsing it enthusiastically—and then vice versa.
Gary was always game for whatever I suggested. “Are you up for another adventure,? I would ask. He always was. Thus, we took a group of 40 Jewish genealogists to Bad Arolsen, Germany, to do research in the records of the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross—the first to be allowed into the collection.
We also went to Salt Lake City (along with Carol Skydel) to confront the Mormon leadership about baptizing dead Jews, a particular sore point with Gary and one about which he never relented.
Gary was a terrific person with which to work. He was bright, energetic and creative. More than that, he was a lovely person, kind, thoughtful and loyal to a fault. Rabbi Stern once told us that “I don’t need to be recognized for everything I do, but it really annoys me when others take credit for what I do.” The same was true of Gary; more than that, he looked out to make sure that others were recognized for their accomplishments as well. Without that Jerusalem conference in 1984, Gary and I would never have met. It was my great good fortune that we did. Our partnership enriched my life immeasurably and for that I will always be grateful.
Rest in peace my dear friend.
###