Hebrew Family Names on Epitaphs in the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery

The Jewish cemetery in Warsaw has been found in 1806 and used by the community ever since. The number of legible inscriptions is currently just over 82 thousand and a vast majority includes surnames of the deceased. Most of them come from Prussian and Austrian clerks who provided Jewish families in Central, Western and Southern Poland with proper German-sounding surnames, or alternatively from Russian and Polish clerks who assigned Slavic-sounding ones to the Jews of the East and Northeast. However, some of the recorded surnames seem to have found their way around the naming commissions and preserved their French, Italian, Latin, Persian, Turkish, Mongolian or otherwise nonstandard roots.

The focus of this presentation is on Hebrew or partly Hebrew surnames found at the Warsaw cemetery. Some of them are quite common, like Melamed or Levy. Some were created anew in the second half of the 19^th century. Others are known rabbinical names with long history and thoroughly studied genealogies. There are also those that do not belong to any of these groups and yet have somehow preserved a Hebrew root or compound throughout the ages, carried by a single bloodline that in some cases seems to have ceased to exist in the 20^th century Warsaw.

The presentation will include photographs of authentic inscriptions and basic information on the history of Jewish surnames in Central Poland, as well as the author’s own research on surnames he had indexed during four years he had spent at the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery.