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Heritage
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© Moshe Hemain
Jewish family
    Struggle of ordinary Jewish family was vividly described by esteemed artist Samuel Bak in his memoirs “Painted in Words” :
“When I was a boy of eight or nine haunting the library on Straszun street in the Vilna ghetto,  the old shtetl of Sholom Aleichem was my favorite place of escape. Populated by colorful characters, it gave me access to a universe from which I knew my family must have come. My urban Jewish middle-class environment and my secular parents had made the shtetl life into something alien and exotic.
It was in Sholom Aleichem's nineteen-century world that I rediscovered the landscapes of my own origins. The book spoke to me of the lives of eastern Jewish families, families that were identical to the thousands that had lived in the villages around the ancient town of Vilna. The Yochels, my forebears on
Mother's side, were one of those families, and Mother was full of stories about them. They would have occupied some small house on a muddy terrain. Adjoining it would have been a shack for a cow.
Further on would have been a well, a horse, perhaps a couple of goats, a small vegetable garden. All at the edge of a typical Jewish village with its modest synagogue, a rabbi who was the ritual slaughterer and the instructor of the children, and a few shops to provide the villagers with the necessities they
couldn't produce by themselves.
Like most of the Jewish population, Mother's people toiled for a meager livelihood. They raised many children and tried to distinguish themselves from the Gentiles by doing all the could to give their off springs a minimal education and some qualifications for employment. It was meant to assure their
livelihood and, perhaps, a bettering of their lot. They labored in a world of strong racial, religious, and social bias and were consumed by constant apprehensions about the hardships of days to come.”
Among the main purposes and functions of the family is the transmission of culture and heritage, the basis of group identity. It was ferocious loyalty of the Jews to the idea of the family as they know it, the family both as focus of experience and as fulfillment of their obligation to perpetuate their line, that enable them to survive. Historically, the Jewish family successfully transformed itself in response to the conditions of its environment.
Surnames
HISTORY OF JEWISH SURNAMES
 The History of Jewish Surnames (Truth & Myths)  from  TKF partner Jewish Genealogy Surname Project:
Video stories about how the Jewish names were developed throughout the History, from the Shem Hakodesh (Hebrew sacred names) up to the kinnuim (secular names in every country). It's a worthwhile cultural information, and also a help to genealogists who want to research in their roots. Also, detailed explanations about truth and myths are included.
The Jewish Surname Process in the Russian Empire and its Effect on Jewish Genealogy
An index of Bukharian surnames on geni.com
Excerpts from Benzion C Kaganov article “Jewish Surname Through Ages”, September 1, 1956
Throughout the Middle Ages the Jews relied greatly on patronymics for family names. Since women were often the breadwinners, many famous Ashkenazim bore as surnames the names of their mothers or other female members of their family: Samuel Eidels, Joel Sirkes (Sirke being a diminutive of Sarah).
However, most Jewish surnames in the Middle Ages derive from places of origin, with every part of Europe being represented, often in corrupted form.
But the various surnames attached to one and the same Jew can also be attributed to the habit of using both a religious and a secular first name. The same was true of surnames: a Jew sometimes had one name in the Jewish community and another for civic and business purposes. Simon Heine, the great grandfather of Heinrich Heine, was also called Simon Bueckeburg, having come from that place. The philosopher Moses Mendelssohn was sometimes called Moses Dessauer because he came from Dessauer.
This disorganized state of affairs as regards Jewish family names created great difficulties for government authorities, and so, when the German states undertook to “emancipate” the Jews at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, they made an effort to regularize Jewish family names by requiring them to adopt fixed and permanent ones. (At the same time use of the Hebrew language in their business transactions was prohibited.)
In 1797 Emperor Joseph II promulgated an edict ordering the Jews of Galicia and Bucovina to assume permanent family names. Similar edicts were passed in Frankfort in 1807 and in Baden in 1809. And Napoleon’s proclamations of Jewish emancipation in France, Hesse, and Westphalia in 1808 were accompanied by laws requiring the adoption of permanent family names. Prussia followed suit in 1812, Bavaria in 1813, and Saxony in 1834
These new regulations were intended, above all, to serve several practical ends for the governments concerned. The levying of taxes would be expedited by fixed surnames, and so would the conscription of Jewish soldiers. But here was also an opportunity to Westernize, “civilize,” and assimilate the Jew. To many an “enlightened” Jew himself, the adoption of a family name looked to be one more asset in the struggle to secure equal rights and integrate oneself in the Gentile world.
Most Jews, however, resisted the adoption of fixed family names—again, out of an ingrained conservatism. In many places, the edicts had to be enforced over and over again.
Excerpts from Alexander Beider article. “Names and Naming”
Jews of the Habsburg Empire were free to choose their names subject to approval of Austrian officials. If a Jew had not chosen a name, one was assigned. The choice depended only on an Austrian official’s imagination.
Almost all names were based on German words. Many referred to occupations, and others designated personal qualities. The most populous category, however, consisted of artificial names drawn directly from various lexical layers of the German language and unrelated to characteristics of their first bearers. Among these were names of flora and fauna, metals and stones, natural phenomena, food, and household utensils. In many names of that group one can distinguish unmistakable ornamental elements: they are drawn from words that have positive associations. This is particularly true of names derived from adjectives: Ehrlich, Rechtschaffen, and Redlich (honest); Freundlich (friendly); Frisch (fresh); Fröhlich (happy); Geduldig (patient); Glücklich (lucky); Herzlich (warmhearted); Lieblich (charming); Superfein (top-quality); and Tugendhaft (virtuous). For other names, the semantics is neutral. Derogatory names exist as well, though their proportion is small. Among the examples are Deligtisch (criminal), Geschwür (ulcer), Kaker (crapper), Harn (urine), Niemand (nobody), Affengesicht (monkey’s face), Bleichfrosch (pale frog), Schmutzbank (dirty bench), and Wanzreich (rich in bugs, or realm of bugs).

A very large number of artificial names are compound, made up of two roots. The first of these roots generally comes from the following series:
  1. Metals: Gold (gold), Silber (silver), Eisen (iron), and Kupfer (copper).
  2. Adjectives designating beauty: Fein (fine) and Schön (beautiful).
  3. Colors: Braun (brown), Grün (green), Roth (red), Schwarz (black), and Weiss (white).
  4. Flora and food: Apfel (apple), Birn (pear), Blum (flower), Korn (seed), Mandel (almond), Rose (rose), and Wein (wine, vine).
  5. Words related to the heavens: Himmel (heaven, sky), Licht (light), and Stern (star).
  6. Size: Klein (small) and Gross (big).

Principal second parts in compound surnames include the following:
  1. Topographical terms: Berg (mountain, hill), Feld (field), and Stein (stone).
  2. Habitations: Dorf (village), Haus (house), and Heim (home).
  3. Words related to plants: Baum (tree), Blatt (leaf), Blum (flower), Holz (wood), Wald (forest), and Zweig (branch).
 
The resulting names often are associated with nature and beauty. It is very plausible that the choices were influenced by the general romantic tendencies of German culture at that time. Moreover, the acquisition of these surnames by Jews served the interests of the state, which hoped to achieve acculturation of its Jewish population: the new names thus sounded typically German. In many cases, they were already used by Christians. For example, those ending in topographical and habitational terms often coincided with place-names in Central Europe and surnames of nobility who owned these localities (Grünberg, Rosenberg, Rosenthal, etc.).

The pattern of compound surnames allowed officials to construct numerous names from only a few roots, with various combinations. The method, invented in Galicia, was applied on a larger scale in the area annexed by Austria after the third partition of Poland; there, surnames were added after a law of 1805. These new territories included the cities of Kraków, Lublin, and Radom.
 
In the Russian Empire a law forcing all Jews to acquire family names was passed in 1804. The authorities in Jewish kahals (communities) were responsible for implementing the process. No regulations restricted the selection of surnames. However, in many examples Jewish authorities used special patterns to create names quickly. In several districts of eastern Belorussia, approximately one-third of surnames were created by adding the suffix -in to female given names (Dvorkin, Malkin, Shifrin, Zeitlin). In northern Ukraine, nearly half of the Jews had surnames ending in -man. A great number of appellations were created in Yiddish and Hebrew; others came from Ukrainian and Belorussian words. Often these names were immediately Russified, as Russian was the official language of the empire. German was mainly used only to construct artificial compound names such as Blumenthal, Goldberg, Rosenbaum, and Rosenblatt, names that were particularly common in Volhynia and Podolia. 
 
Most often, surnames were created from place-names in the Pale of Settlement. These were particularly common in the Kiev and Grodno areas, where they mainly ended in -ski (Belotserkovski, Fastovski, Kanevski, Shpolianski, Smelianski, Umanski; Albertinski, Chepelevski, Diatlovski, Ivashkovski, Molchadski, Pliuskalovski). In the Mogilev area, Volhynia, and Podolia, many names ended in the Yiddish suffix -er (Klebaner, Moshnyager, Prigoniker, Stepaner, Studenitser, Zastenker). In western Lithuania, many names were created without suffixes (Dorbian, Dusheik, Kekst, Kibort, Kretingen, Novoran, Shapkaits, Upin).
 
In the Russian Pale of Settlement, numerous surnames are drawn from Yiddish.
The regions in which the Yiddish names were particularly common were Bessarabia, Podolia and Volhynia.
 
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Percentage of Jewish Surnames by Type in Russian Empire *)
   Type                    % of Jewish Surnames
Toponymic                   33
Artificial                       18
Patronymic                13
Metronymic                7
Occupational            15
Drawn from personal characteristics 12
Kohen or Levite origin  1
Rabbinical lineage           1

*) Alexander Beider. “Jewish Surnames Adopted in Various Regions of the Russian Empire”, October 1, 2008
Genealogy
TKF collection of surname from
   -  scanned documents
   -  cemeteries
   -  books
Jarrett Ross videos about Jewish Genealogy
Maria's Tips and Tricks to the JewishGen Research
Finding professional genealogist
Levite DNA
Geni project "Families from Volhynia"

Stories
Migration
Documents from archives
Search into Galveston's immigration database
Documentaries
​Residents of Holy Land, arrived from Russian Empire before year 1875
Many Jewish families  came from the small shtetls  of Russian Empire. Hundred years later their descendants are all over the globe, uncles and cousins, brothers and sisters. Ukraine, Russia, Seattle, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Rome, Tel Aviv,  Yafa, Jerusalem and many more.
From one small shtetl of Pale to hundreds of cities. Do you want to see how it happened?

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