By Daniel Mann
The passing of Phyllis Sutker, of Skokie, IL, in November generated not only a feeling of profound grief but also a flood of personal and communal memories. Ken and Jamie have invited me to share some of them with Ameinu, and I’m grateful for that privilege and mitzvah.
At the wonderful Chicago Labor Zionist Alliance tribute to Phyllis ten years ago, I recounted some facets of our association, and it continued until her recent illness. As I said at the 1997 event, I first met Phyllis, together with several other younger leaders of what was then Pioneer Women (now Na’amat USA) who also proceeded to high position in the organization, at a summer seminar in Israel in the early 1960s. I happened to be there as the young executive of LZOA-Poale Zion (later part of LZA) for world movement meetings but used the opportunity to catch up on Israel in general. Somehow, wherever I went there was the Pioneer Women seminar group. Some of them decided that I was a spy for their national office. Phyllis and I bonded then, and our close working relationship developed through our work in establishing the American Zionist Federation (now Movement) in 1970 and in many other settings. We shared a platform at the LZA national convention in New York in 1985 and again at the Midwest Seminar in 1992, and continued to cooperate when I became national president of LZA and Phyllis assumed high office in the new AZM in the 1990s.
Most recently she agreed to serve on a blue ribbon committee I chaired in 2004 that recommended the renewal of the Jewish Frontier as a printed quarterly. That was one of the many occasion son which she and I agreed that neither of us could say no to a request from the other. There had been a push to turn the journal into an on-line publication, but Phyllis —although an inveterate user of email—called me to say that she did not want to have to download 32 pages of our magazine.
Of particular significance was Phyllis’s representation of our entire movement for a decade on the WZO Executive and the Jewish Agency Board of Governors, which she assumed while still national president of Na’amat USA. In 1987 she headed up the successful movement campaign in the World Zionist Congress elections. Ten years later, when we did not do so well in the next round of elections, she brought a perhaps too-analytical postmortem to a practical conclusion by pronouncing her judgment: “We lost he elections because we didn’t get enough votes.” By then I had the pleasure at a meeting of the world movement of nominating her as an honorary fellow of the WZO, and when I was given the same title a few years ago, what was most gratifying to me was that I would be part of a small, very select group of honorary fellows from the American movement, including Phyllis. Sadly, that cadre has now been diminished by her passing as well as that of our mutual mentor, Esther Zackler.
This recital is primarily a listing of shared events and positions, but what was most important was the personal dimension. I called Phyllis my political and organizational buddy. Time after time, at meeting after meeting and in dealing with issue after issue—whether in Chicago, New York, or Jerusalem—she and I found a common language and a common strategy almost without extensive dialogue. We both knew what needed to be done and did our best to do it. At a meeting I attended in Chicago to discuss the 1994 strategic plan, a precursor of the more ambitious one a decade later, she took the trouble to attend and offer her sage counsel. As Ken has already reported, she maintained her interest in our work through the last year of her life and was upbeat about what Ameinu was doing to advance the Labor Zionist position in the American Jewish community.
Finally, it should be noted that Phyllis enhanced her own personal qualities through her relationship with her husband, Calvin, a distinguished leader in political and communal life in hi s own right, and with their children and grandchildren, all of them living nearby and many of them attached to Na’amat and Habonim Dror Camp Tavor.
In the passing of Phyllis Sutker I have lost as good a friend, colleague, and ally as I could ever hope to have in the movement, and all of us have lost an outstanding leader. May we honor her memory by continuing the endeavor in which she played so central a role.
