What's in an Israeli name?

Published on November 14, 2012

Tower of BabelCultureSocietyPoliticsLifestyle

The or­gan­is­ers of the face­book event ‘Melt­ing down the melt­ing pot: Re­cov­er­ing the lost names!’ have a pretty mis­sion: ‘Change your re­done He­brew fam­ily name on face­book to the pre­vi­ous last names of your fa­ther's and mother's fam­ily: whether it was a clerk at the jew­ish agency or a school teacher who changed your name; whether it was changed out of shame or fear of racism; whether it was due to a fam­ily feud, vol­un­tar­ily, fol­low­ing kab­balah stud­ies; whether it's your pen name – for a week [now ex­tended] we re­trieve the lost name and tell its story.’

Over 1, 000 peo­ple have joined the ini­tia­tive, which res­onates with de­scen­dants of holo­caust sur­vivors, Ara­bic jews and sec­ond-gen­er­a­tion im­mi­grants alike. The re­quire­ment for ‘He­brew’ names, which many en­coun­tered upon ar­rival, is a sub­ject es­pe­cially painful for im­mi­grants from Ara­bic and east­ern Eu­ro­pean coun­tries, whose names were - and, in the case of Russ­ian-speak­ers, still are - often forcibly changed upon ar­rival. One fel­low, Amos Bar, be­came ‘Amos Shlomo Bili­bil-Stock’ on face­book. ‘Bil­bil is the Turk­ish name of the Bul­bul bird, which is also why my grand­fa­ther didn't he­brai­cize his name,’ he says; bul­bul is He­brew slang for male gen­i­talia. ‘The sec­ond part of the in­vented sur­name, Stock, means stick. Grandpa ac­tu­ally he­brai­cized that, to Sharvit, and then every­one thought he was of ori­en­tal de­scent. Bar is a name my par­ents made up after my mother re­fused to be Mrs. Bil­bil. I hereby use this stage to kick its be­hind. Shlomo is my sec­ond name, after my grand­fa­ther's fa­ther, who died six months be­fore I was born. And he was ac­tu­ally named Zeide.’

Image: (cc) Anger­Boy/ Flickr