On Tue, 26 Aug 2003 02:31:15 UTC, bsmannlein@... (Barbara
Mannlein) opined:

Carol asked for private responses, but I too am interested in this
line.
My late MIL, a member of Temple Emanuel (R) of Yonkers, NY also insisted
that she and her sister had no Hebrew names because it was not the
custom at that time.

But that is not the question asked by the original post. For women not
to have a Hebrew name has not been unusual in recent centuries. For
men, it has been a rarity. Alas, our ancestors, for better or worse,
knew nothing of Political Correctness.

To address the original question: The only time anybody in the
gentleman's synagogue would have known his Hebrew name (which he
almost certainly had) would have been upon ascending to the Torah;

from the question, it does not seem that this happened very often, if

at all.

Historically, the graves of virtually all Jews buried under Jewish
auspices would have been marked by a monument inscribed in Hebrew with
the Hebrew name and patronymic of the deceased. One of the least happy
developments in American Jewry has been the abandonment of this
custom, for no visible reason, so that the Jewish identity (name,
father's name, etc.) is lost with the memory of his survivors. That,
precisely, is what makes this moment a historical one for
Jewish-American genealogy: in the absence of the missing data,
genealogy will become difficult or impossible in the community in only
a few years. Witness the question that started this thread.

--
Stan Goodman, Qiryat Tiv'on, Israel

Searching:
NEACHOWICZ/NOACHOWICZ, NEJMAN/NAJMAN, SURALSKI: >from Lomza Gubernia
ISMACH: >from Lomza Gubernia, Galicia, and Ukraina
HERTANU, ABRAMOVICI, LAUER: >from Dorohoi District, Romania
GRISARU, VATARU: >from Iasi, Dorohoi, and Mileanca, Romania

See my interactive family tree (requires Java 1.1.6 or better):
http://www.hashkedim.com

Please remove the CAPITAL LETTERS >from my address in order to send me
email, and include "JEWISHGEN" in the subject line, else your message
will be deleted automatically, unread.