Search Results - "Jewish Family Names"

Gefilte fish is probably Eastern-European Jewry’s most famous dish. Other well-known Jewish delicacies include borsht, bagels and shmalz. Today, however, not many are aware that the names of these familiar foods are also Jewish surnames, as are babke, kishke, tzimes and more. There are at least a hundred Israelis with the family name Herring, and over one hundred people in the U.S. bearing the last name Schmalz. Some family names originated from Yiddish terms such as Gitflaish (“good meat”), Vaisbroyt (“white bread”) and Feferkichen (a spice cake, sometimes translated as “gingerbread”). Others, such as Weisskraut (“white cabbage”) or Sauerapfel (“sour[…]

Mirra (Maria) Sakhnovsky (Sakhnovskaya) was a fascinating, but controversial, figure, who was willing to go to great lengths to spread her ideology. Her short life was replete with secrets and mystery. Born in the Pale of Settlement, she fell in love with the communist revolution, had an impressive military career, and become the first woman to reach a rank equivalent to general in the Red Army. Her story ended, like many others, when she was thrown under the brutal and blind machine of Stalin’s purges. Her birth name was Mirra Goetz. On official forms, she always wrote that she was[…]

Rabbi Henry Sobel was a young rabbi in Sao Paulo, only 31 years old, when he was forced to make a decision that would define his life, and to a great degree would also impact the entire Brazilian nation. The year was 1975 and Sobel, the son of Jewish refugees who was born in Lisbon while his parents were fleeing the Second World War and were en route to New York, was in his fifth year as rabbi of a large Jewish congregation in Sao Paulo. And, then, the body of Vladimir Herzog was delivered to him for burial. Herzog,[…]

A few months before his tragic death, the circus artist, Zishe Breitbart, put on a nighttime performance in the city of Lublin, Poland. That afternoon, while getting full on soup with kreplach (dumplings) and kishka (stuffed derma) at one of the local eateries, a large crowd of Jews started gathering outside the restaurant, eager to see their greatly admired hero in person. A group of Poles who happened to be in the area approached the Jewish fans and began taunting them: “Could it be that you’re so merry because Mendel Beilis has come here?” When Breitbart saw what was going[…]

While riding in a taxi for many long hours, en route from Russia to his city of birth, Benjamin Zar dropped the bombshell: “When we get to Mashhad,” he told Sarah, the woman he recently got engaged to, “my mother will give you a pendant that you have to wear. Otherwise, our lives will be in danger.” That episode took place in the 1920’s. A few months earlier, Benjamin’s father, a fur trader from Mashhad, Iran whose name was Yaakov Zar, was hosted by the Jewish community in the Russian city of Mur (which can no longer be found on[…]

The Jewish community of Egypt flourished from the mid-19th century through the 1950s. Egypt’s increasing integration into international trade, particularly after the opening of the Suez Canal, attracted Jews from other parts of the world who settled in Egypt, manly in Cairo and Alexandria, alongside members of the veteran local Jewish community. Their arrival in Egypt coincides with the period when the use of surnames became widespread. An investigation into the meaning of the family names documented among the Jews of Egypt during modern times allows for a glimpse into the ancestry of their families and their country of origin[…]

It happened in November 1919, almost one whole century ago. World War I was over, the Versailles treaty was signed in Europe, and the Russian civil war was raging, between the reds and the whites – supporters of the old Czarist regime. Jewish refugees from all across Europe, including those deported from Palestine by the Turks, gathered in Odessa, on the shores of the Black Sea. The leadership of the Odessa Committee, formerly Chibat Zion, applied for refugee status papers on behalf of the Eretz Israeli refugees, in which the applicants were required to prove their knowledge about their homeland.[…]

Israel is awash in a wave of nostalgia. Hipsters model 60s styles in Tel Aviv. Khaki pants star in Fashion Week. And retro raves attract hundreds of victims of the Static and Ben-El era, who gather to trade stories about the First Gulf War to the strains of Queen songs. Foreign media notes that nostalgia also pervades this year’s Purim celebrations, with 50s and 60s costumes making a comeback. Two classics are the cowboy costume and that of his eternal rival in the Pan-American war, the Native American. Alongside the Palmahnikim, IDF soldiers, and cops and robbers that were ubiquitous[…]

He was paranoid, provocative, racist and chauvinist. But most people forgave him all of it, because he was a singular genius with an IQ over 200 and the memory of a Google server farm. Bobby Fischer, World Chess Champion from 1972-1975, harbored neuroses that spilled over into his personal and public lives. As a teen, he joined a Christian cult called the Worldwide Church of God, which believed that the apocalypse was imminent. He also developed a hobby then that would become central in his life after retirement: intense anti-Semitic activity. The brilliant chess master began at some point to[…]