The slow decline of the Aleppo Jewish community began during the 19th century following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and was accelerated following the turmoil of World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in […]
Index of Jewish Surnames in Alexandria in the 20th Century (updated December 2022)
Like the Jewish community in Cairo, the community in Alexandria increased from few thousand members at the end of the 19th century to a vibrant body of around 40,000 members at its peak in 1948.Many factors contributed to this fast […]
Index of Jewish Surnames Found in 20th Century Cairo – Updated December 2022
The last two decades have witnessed a remarkable surge of publications, both academic and literary, about Jewish life in Egypt during the 20th century. The latest is the Ph.D. thesis by Dr.Liat Maggid Alon from the Ben Gurion University, a summary […]
Consolidated Baghdadi Jewish Surnames Index (1874-2001)
[updated June 25, 2023] Like most of the Jewish communities in the Levant, Baghdad’s Jewish population too was not properly indexed so far. The community which counted in 1947 about 77,000 members downsized by more than 90% in 1951 due […]
A Consolidated Index of Jewish Surnames in 20th Century Damascus
Like many other Jewish communities in the Levant, the Jewish community of Damascus dwindled from a thriving community with 12,000 members in 1943 until only a handful remained by 2010. Its members largely left for Mandatory Palestine and later to […]
Elbaum as an Example of the Adoption of Jewish Surnames in the Shadow of 18th c. Austrian regulations
On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the death of Yaakov Kopel Lukover* Abstract Keywords Yaakov Kopel Likover (ca.1695-1769) a well-known kabbalist, scholar, tavern owner and progenitor of at least three Chassidic dynastic legacies is the progenitor of the Elbaum […]
Given Names of the Jewish Women of Damascus – 1583-1909
Among the many challenges one faces in Jewish genealogical research is the paucity of sources relating to female given names and surnames. This was clearly illustrated at the lecture of Dr. Lea Haber–Gedalia in the 2015 IAJGS Annual Conference in Jerusalem [1]. There are […]
The Jewish Surname Process in the Russian Empire and its Effect on Jewish Genealogy
Did you ever wonder why your autosomal DNA and Y-DNA genetic match lists contain so many unfamiliar surnames? Did you ever question where the myriad number of bewildering and unexpected surnames, even among your close genetic matches, comes from? If […]
The Jews of the Crimea and their Names
The ancient history of Jewish settlement in the Crimea (in Russian, “Krym”) dates back over 2,000 years to the time of the Bosporan Kingdom, a Roman client state (438 BC-370 AD). From the eighth to the tenth centuries, the Crimea fell […]
Shealtiel Family World Reunion in Mexico City, July 1st – 5th, 2015
The Shealtiel Family World Association is delighted to announce its exciting 8th World Family Reunion from July 1 – 5, 2015 in Mexico City. The reunion, packed with interesting activities from beginning to end, is an opportunity for cousins from […]
In Search of the Family Name Tarica
This article first appeared in Sephardic Horizons, Vol. I, Issue 1, Fall 2010. It is reprinted with permission—Ed. For many years, undoubtedly like many other Sephardim, I often wondered where my patronymic name came from, what it meant, and who […]
Book Review: Pleasant Are Their Names: Jewish Names in the Sephardic Diaspora, by Aaron Demsky, editor
Pleasant Are Their Names: Jewish Names in the Sephardic Diaspora. Bethesda, Md.: University Press of Maryland, 2010, $35.00 Professor Aaron Demsky, editor of this new book focusing on Jewish names in the Sephardic diaspora, serves as director of Bar-Ilan University’s […]
A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames in Bulgaria: A Window on Its History
The result of six years of work, my Dictionary of Jewish Bulgarian Surnames, with 803 individual names, has been uploaded on the web at <www.sephardicgen. com/databases/BulgarianSurnamesSrchFrm.htmldatabases. html>. Details given for each surname are: Surname All known variants Language from which […]
Book Review: A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire: Revised Edition. 2 vols, by Alexander Beider.
Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire: Revised Edition. 2 vols, by Alexander Beider. Avotaynu, 2008. $118.00. To order: http://www.avotaynu.com/books/DJSRE2.htm When the first edition of Alexander Beider’s massive Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire came out in […]
Jewish Surnames Adopted in Various Regions of the Russian Empire
This article is adapted from a lecture delivered at the IAJG Conference in Chicago, August 18, 2008—Ed. Generally speaking, it is relatively easy to distinguish Sephardic surnames from Ashkenazic surnames. For example, if one sees two lists, the […]
A Method for Deducing Unknown Surnames And First Names of Female Ancestors
Most 19th-century Eastern European archival documents rarely tell us all we would like to know about the people and families we are researching. Very often, for example, the maiden names of mothers are missing on birth records. We, therefore, cannot […]
IAJGS 2006: Strategies for Assigning Surnames to Early JRI-Poland Records
Jewish genealogists who trace family to the early 19th century frequently encounter difficulty trying to follow the trail back to the time when their ancestors did not use hereditary family names. Researchers who find records without surnames often cannot determine […]
Some Issues in Ashkenazic Name Searches
During the symposium that inaugurated the International Institute of Jewish Genealogy in September 2006 in Jerusalem, one lecture particularly attracted my attention, that given by Professor H. Daniel Wagner of the Weizmann Institute of Science. During his presentation, Wagner enumerated […]
Jewish Surnames Adopted in Various Regions of the Russian Empire
Generally speaking, it is relatively easy to distinguish Sephardic surnames from Ashkenazic surnames. For example, if one sees two lists, the first with the names Abitbol, Cordovero, Haddad, Modigliani, Oliveira and Toledano, and another list with the names Bergelson, Goldman, […]