In my experience, which is limited to NE Poland, Jews rarely named
children after deceased siblings. I know that in the immigrant
generations of my own family, this would never occur, because it would be
considered bad luck. Being very superstitious, they preferred to name
children after relatives who lived a long time.

In the 1800s, I have seen it occasionally, but rarely.

Sometimes it appears that a child is being named after a deceased cousin.
Usually, the child is actually named after a deceased common ancestor,
or both cousins have different deceased ancestors with the same given
names.

Gary Maher
NJ / USA


On Sun, 14 Mar 2004 00:01:26 -0600 "JRI-Poland digest"
<jri-pl@...> writes:

If a child dies at a very young age, by some customs you are supposed

to

name a next child for that now dead child. Some customs absolutely

forbid

it. The three part question is:

For Polish Jews about mid-1850, were they supposed to name the next

child

for a recently dead, older sibling or not?

The age at death of that sibling, would that have any bearing on this

naming

practice? (Say, 2 months or 12 years?)

Would it make any difference if it was a sibling or cousin that is
dead?

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