We are very sad to announce that Mikhal Oren ז”ל, one of the members of the Accordance staff, passed away on Saturday, April 8, 2017. She had been battling acute leukemia since November 2016, a sequela to the Hodgkins lymphoma for which she was treated in 2014. She underwent a bone marrow transplant three weeks ago, but did not recover from it.
We were very privileged to have Mikhal as part of the Accordance development team, especially for scholarly texts that required both an excellent knowledge of Hebrew and advanced computer skills. Not only did she start out by completely proofreading and correcting the entire electronic BDB Complete, but she particularly excelled in developing the Accordance modules of the Masora Thesaurus and the recently released ETCBC (formerly WIVU) Hebrew syntactical database. She also assisted in the development of the ongoing tagged Ugaritic texts. Her particular skills made her by far the most qualified person on our team to develop these and other specialized Accordance modules.
Mikhal graduated with a Ph.D in Hebrew language from the University of Haifa, and rather than choosing an academic career, came to us as an Accordance customer, asking if she could help in developing Accordance texts. We gladly accepted her as a developer and have benefitted from her services even more than we could have anticipated. According to those who knew her well, she saw her work with Accordance as an extremely fulfilling job and even as her life’s work.
Not only did Mikhal have excellent professional skills, but she was a very modest person, who never sought public recognition, even when she clearly deserved it. Those she worked with found her a very pleasant colleague who often went beyond what was expected of her.
During her last days, Mikhal expressed appreciation several times for all of the encouragement, thoughts, and prayers of many among the Accordance staff who knew her and knew her condition. Her passing, even with the knowledge of the seriousness of her condition, was a shock and severe loss to all of us. We will miss her very much, both professionally and personally.
זיכרונה לברכה
zikhronah livrakha
May her memory be blessed!