My Jewish Name

My Grandparents Nathan (Sarkolik)
Block and Mary Dora nee' Kharnas

When I was seven years old, I began Hebrew school. On the first day our teacher, Mrs. Friedman, gave us an assignment: ask our parents what our Hebrew name was. When I asked my mom, she told me that I had been named after her mother, Mary Dora, and that my name was Mortka Dov. When I returned with that information, my teacher informed me that she would not use that name. That was a Yiddish name. My Hebrew name, the name I would be called in synagogue, was “Mordechai”.

Now Mordechai, I learned, was a famous name in Jewish history. He was one of the heroes of the Purim story, and I carried that name proudly. But later in life I became a bit troubled by it. If my parents had named me “Mortka Dov” at my bris, was that not my proper name? True, it was a Yiddish name, not a Hebrew name. But is it not my true “Jewish name”?

Once my father asked Mr. Wolf, the principal of our Hebrew school, why we were not being taught Yiddish. Mr. Wolf replied that it was Hebrew, not Yiddish, that was the language of the Jewish people. This was probably news to my father. After all, his parents spoke Yiddish, my mother’s parents spoke Yiddish, most Jews in America, immigrants and children of immigrants, spoke Yiddish.

An article in this week’s “Forward” — “How Yiddish became a ‘Foreign Language’ in Israel” shed some light on the matter. Hebrew became the language of Jews in Israel partly due to through “violence, intimidation and propaganda”. In the 1930s it became illegal to speak Yiddish in a public meeting — one had to speak Hebrew. A year after the establishment of the State of Israel, the government of David ben Gurion legally banned Yiddish theater and publications in Yiddish. Yaakov Zerubavel, a Yiddish speaker, wrote of the status of Yiddish in pre-state Israel in the thirties:

“Worse than the persecution was the methodical, psychological and ideological pogrom practiced by the authorities against the right to use the Yiddish language.”

It was against this background that my Jewish name was changed from the one my parents gave me to its Hebrew equivalent — as were many Yiddish names when the bearers of those names arrived in Israel. How could they keep those names in such an anti-Yiddish environment? They may have felt a bit like Romeo:

By a name
I know not how to tell thee who I am:
My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself,
Because it is an enemy to thee.
Had I it written, I would tear the word.

See also: “Each of Us Has A Name” by Zelda