Tamar Joy Kahn

Tamar Joy Kahn (Joy) passed away peacefully on November 29, 2025 in Rockville, Maryland. Joy was born in Port Arthur, Texas to Theodore and Shirley Langer on January 14, 1936. She grew up in Brinkerhoff and Buffalo, New York. Joy was the first of many family members to attend Cornell University where she received her bachelor’s degree in French Literature and Linguistics. During this time, she also made some of her closest life-long friends. Upon graduating, Joy moved to Washington, DC where she worked for the NSA and learned Japanese. Joy met her husband and devoted partner of 37 years, Arnold Kahn, at a mixer for Jewish singles at Adas Israel in DC. They married on February 17, 1959 in Buffalo, New York where everyone who attended the wedding was snowed in. After their first child was born, Joy and Arnold moved from their apartment in DC to their home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, where Joy lived for more than 55 years. Joy built a career based on her love of languages and written information. When her children were little, she worked at home translating articles from French and Japanese into English. When their youngest child began school, Joy continued her education and received a master’s degree in Library Science at the University of Maryland. Joy worked part-time with the National Library of Medicine, learning COBOL programming and literature abstracting for PubMed (called MEDLINE at the time). She then spent over 30 years at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute for Bioethics as a bibliographer, publishing annual bibliographies of bioethics literature, and developing keywords for indexing the literature in a bioethics database as part of the National Library of Medicine. Joy was active in the community and volunteered her time with The League of Women Voters as well as running the libraries at Ohr Kodesh Congregation and the Jewish Community Center. Joy particularly loved family gatherings and hosted many holiday get-togethers. She and her sister remained close and their families visited each other several times a year for holidays and summer vacations. Joy loved travel and took special trips with her grandchildren to Europe, China, and Orlando. She also went to Qatar to help establish their bioethics database at the Georgetown Campus in Doha. Some of her favorite destinations were France, Spain, and Iceland. Joy will be remembered as a devoted friend, a gracious host, a voracious reader, a theatre-goer, a world traveler, and a dedicated wife, mother, and grandmother. She was the glue that kept her extended family and friends together. She was predeceased by her parents and husband and survived by her sister, Barbara Osofsky, her children Ted (Mao Wang), Janet (Jeff Urbach), and Esther (Jonathan Bar-on) and her grandchildren Leah, Ethan, Elana, Yael, Avi, Simon, and Jonas. Memorial donations may be made to the Association of Jewish Libraries jewishlibraries.org/donation/, the League of Women Voters www.lwv.org/, or the Arena Stage tickets.arenastage.org/donate/contribute1.

Tamar Joy Kahn

January 14, 1936 - November 29, 2025