Oma was born in Germany on November 26, 1903. She died in Haifa, Israel on April 29, 2003.
Family History
The family tree traces its roots back to Moses aus Kups in the old German kingdom of Bavaria. It was not until the Napoleonic Wars that German states required their Jewish citizens to adopt surnames. Before surnames were adopted, a German-Jewish male was often identified by a given name to which was added the name of the village in which he was born. Therefore, when the patriarch of the Mack clan was born early in the eighteenth century, he was called Moses aus Kups (Moses from [the town of] Kups). As Moses grew into adulthood, though the state had yet to require it, he desired a surname. To his chagrin, he learned that in order to obtain a surname, one had to pay a fee to the government at a cost proportional to the length of the name chosen. Because Moses, like all rural Bavarian Jews, was poor, he was obliged to pick a short name. Family tradition relates that he created his surname from the acronym Moses aus Kups. The name Mack acquired its modern spelling when a c was later slipped in. Over the generations, the Macks dispersed throughout northern Bavaria.