September 8, 2020

Monica Tanur

Monica Tanur's roots span Europe and Latin America. Her maternal grandparents came from Germany and Austria, and her paternal grandparents from Russia and Poland. Both sets of grandparents fled during the era of the war, some family members perishing in the Holocaust. Her maternal grandfather survived a labor camp in France and made his way through Portugal, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, where he met her grandmother, before settling in Mexico City. Her paternal grandmother came from Bialystok, and her paternal grandfather was born in Russia and traveled through Germany, Palestine, and Brazil before reaching Mexico. Both of Monica's parents were born in Mexico City, her father in 1937 and her mother in 1947. Monica grew up as one of three girls in a close, observant family centered on Shabbat dinners with her grandparents.

Raised in the Ashkenazi community, Monica attended Jewish schools from preschool through high school, learning Yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish, and English, and speaking Yiddish with her grandparents. She followed her father into dentistry. She met her husband Eddie on a youth trip to Israel when she was fourteen and he was fifteen, and they reconnected during dental school, marrying in 1990. The couple first came to Dallas from 1990 to 1992 for graduate dental programs, he in periodontics and she in pediatric dentistry, then returned to Mexico. In 1996, amid financial turmoil and safety concerns in Mexico, they accepted a full-time faculty offer for Eddie at Baylor and moved permanently to Dallas.

In Dallas the family settled in Plano and enrolled their daughters in Solomon Schechter, later Levine Academy, and then Yavneh, keeping Jewish education a priority despite the financial sacrifice. Monica began as an assistant teacher at Levine before joining Baylor, now the Texas A and M College of Dentistry, where she has taught for nearly twenty-one years. She and her husband kept a traditional home, keeping kosher, cooking Mexican food, and raising three trilingual daughters. They have been active in the Hispanic Dental Society, Southwest Dental Society, and the Alpha Omega Jewish dental fraternity, and belong to Congregation Tiferet Israel in Plano. Monica credits her paternal grandmother, who lived to ninety-six, as a role model, and takes pride in the loving example she and Eddie set for their daughters.

She and her husband raised three daughters in Plano, remaining active in Jewish and professional communities.

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