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IN MEMORIAM

Judy Davidson, ERETZ Editor

Judy was born one day before me and she never let me forget this. “I am older than you,” she always would say when we had an argument. We worked together for 25 years, functioning like a husband-and-wife team, as my wife Dita said. We complemented each other as we built a magazine that somehow spoke to tens of thousands of readers around the world. The result of our collaboration is 105 issues of ERETZ Magazine and over 1,000 articles.

 

Judy Davidson and her mother Sarah. (Meir Zarovsky)

 

We were famous for our arguments. “Difficult terms should be explained,” Judy always insisted; “People have dictionaries to look up terms,” was my constant retort. Punctuation was another point of discord, especially that comma before “and” in a list – Judy wanted it in, I claimed that it was redundant. Confirming that we had every detail exactly right was another sore point. Judy wanted precision. The most famous argument that we had was over the rank of the assistant who had helped Captain Warren, of the British Army, in discovering the famous underground shaft in the City of David in Jerusalem. The sources from the 19th century referred to the assistant, a Mr. Brittles, once as a corporal and another time as a sergeant. “So what was he?” Judy demanded. “Leave him as a sergeant,” I fumed, “we have to close the magazine.” But Judy did not give up. A week of research unearthed the fact that Brittles had been promoted from corporal to sergeant because he had accompanied Warren on the famous and dangerous climb.

 

Judy worked in spurts. She preferred to work during the night. She found all the activity in the office during the day disturbed her concentration. And so, after everyone had gone home, she used to sit in front of a computer until the late hours of the night, going over the magazine, refining the texts, rewriting, checking facts, and making sure that everything was in place. She was known for her brilliant titles and her sense of humor, which never left her, even during her last hours.

 

Last December, she was hospitalized and a malignant tumor was found in her brain. “I hope they won’t take out my sense of humor,” she quipped before the operation to remove it. Though the operation succeeded, and left her sense of humor intact, other problems surfaced. She continued to work through it all, setting up a computer and internet connection near her hospital bed. Everything will be fine soon, she believed, and I will be back on the job like usual. We believed it too. We were expecting Judy to return any day, to walk into the office and find her sitting at the computer in the late hours of the night.

 

She died suddenly. She slipped silently away into the night, on a Thursday night, as if she had just finished editing another issue of ERETZ Magazine. Judy had no surviving family. There is no one to sit shiva over her, no one to recite the Kaddish, no relative through whom her memory will be preserved. But her memory will live on with me and in the pages of ERETZ. She was my companion in English writing for over a quarter of a century.

 

May her memory be blessed and remembered in the pages of life.

Yadin Roman

 

 

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