Ichthyological

Possibility for Pesha

QUESTION: Hi! In a not-so-recent column (“Name Mailbag,” Nov. 2025) you stated that the name Pesha is probably a Yiddish derivative of a Hebrew name such as Batya. My wife's middle name is Pesha and she had been under the impression that Pesha was the feminine of Fishel, meaning "fish.” Is there ANY possibility of this? Thanks.

-Dr. M. Jacobson

ANSWER: Your question put a smile on my face because my wife's grandmother is named Pesha Fischer (may she live until 120). From what I understand, the name Fishel (meaning "little fish") first developed as a kinnui for the Hebrew name Ephraim because the Biblical Ephraim was blessed by his grandfather Jacob that he should multiply like fish (Gen. 48:16). To say what you are proposing, the derivation scheme would be something like Fishel → Fish → Pish → Pesh → Pesha, which isn't so likely. From an onomastic and etymological perspective, this trajectory is problematic for several reasons. First, diminutives and feminines in Yiddish naming practice generally preserve a recognizable core of the original name. We often see suffixes added (-ke, -le, -el, -a), but wholesale replacement of initial consonants like a shift from f to p is highly unusual. Second, while Fishel does generate related forms (such as surnames Fish, Fischman, or Fisher), there is no known pattern whereby an animal-based male kinnui names produces an independent female given name through semantic translation alone. In other words, Ashkenazic women were not typically named by creating a feminine counterpart to a symbolic male nickname (“fish” → “female fish-name”), especially when the result bears no obvious phonological resemblance to the original.

By contrast, the phonetic evolution from Batya → Basya → Pesha is far more plausible within Eastern European Jewish speech patterns, where consonant softening and dialectal shifts are amply documented. I can't get more detailed because I'm already boring myself, but you can read about those types of onomastic morphologies in Alexander Beider's book A Dictionary of Ashkenazic Given Names: Their Origins, Structure, Pronunciation, and Migrations.

So I can't say there is NO possibility of Pesha deriving from Fishel, but it doesn't seem likely given what we know of historical Jewish naming conventions.

-RCK

Chofetz Chaim’s Surname

QUESTION: What was the Chofetz Chaim's last name — Cohen, Kagan, or Poupko?

-Shlomo Greenwald (Fair Lawn, NJ)

ANSWER: Good question. I can see why it’s so confusing. In all his seforim, the Chofetz Chaim signed his name Yisroel Meir HaKohen, which might suggest that his surname was Cohen. But the truth is that in the area of Poland where he lived, the h-sound often morphed into a g-sound in names. For example, the town Horodna is also called Gorodna, the surname Horowitz becomes Gurwitz, the surname Heller becomes Geller, Helfand becomes Gelfand, Kohut becomes Kogut, Harry becomes Gary, and so forth. In the same way, for the Chofetz Chaim, the h-sound in the middle of Kohen becomes Kagan. Consequently, sources not written in Hebrew often refer to the Chofetz Chaim as Rabbi Yisroel Meir Kagan. But I’m not sure if it’s accurate to really say that Kagan was his surname.

Additionally, while the Chofetz Chaim’s father might have been a Kohen/Kagan, his father died when he was young and his mother remarried. People say that her husband’s surname was Poupko and since the Chofetz Chaim grew up in the Poupko residence, he is also associated with that family name, which he may have adopted in certain contexts. But the truth is that his mother married Rabbi Shimon HaLevi Epstein. Instead, it seems that the Chofetz Chaim himself used the surname Poupko from childhood, and even his father and father's father used that surname. After corresponding with members of the greater Poupko family and descendants of the Chofetz Chaim, I wasn't able to get down to the bottom of the matter as to when/why he seemingly later switched out Poupko for Kagan.

So basically, in some ways, all three options that you mentioned are correct. What makes things more complicated is that in the next generation, the Chofetz Chaim's two sons took on two different surnames: His oldest son Rabbi Aryeh Leib took on the Poupko last name, while his younger son Rabbi Aharon went by Kohen/Kagan.

-RCK

Avir/Abir

QUESTION: Shalom, Reuven. We are searching for a boy's name to give, be’ezras Hashem, in few weeks and you are the only one I know who probably knows the answer to my question. Is it appropriate nowadays to give the name Abir, more precisely Abir Yaakov? I don't mean Adir nor Avir, but specifically Abir (based on the Biblical Hebrew word for "mighty/strong one"). Can you please have a look at the attached dictionary entry and give your opinion? Thank you in advance! By the way, we are planning on moving to Israel in a few years to join the Belz community in Jerusalem.

-Eva Elias

ANSWER: First let me reveal my bias in that I have a conservative view of naming conventions. I especially feel strongly that you should not give a name that your kid will be embarrassed about, for example, if they're the only kid in their class or in their school with that name. I also think that especially because you are a giyoret and you are an outsider trying to join a new Chassidic community, you don’t want to stick out even more by giving your son a weird name. So, I strongly advise against giving the name Abir.

According to data from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), the name Abir is quite rare in Israel. It only start being giving in the 1980s. And its all-time peak popularity was in 2021, when 35 boys born in Israel that year were given this name. In that year, it was ranked the #375^th most popular name given to Jewish boys in the Holy Land; not very popular.

Also, the way the name Abir is written in unvowelized Hebrew, it is likely to end up being pronounced Avir (like the word is pronounced six times in Tanach, even though elsewhere it is read as Abir). That would make this name a homonym with the Hebrew word for “air.” You don't want your kid's name to sound like "air." Think of all the schoolyard bullying that the name is just asking for. Adir is a bit more conventional in Israeli circles, but I’ve never met anybody named Abir or Avir. Although, there is an Arabic feminine name Abir (also spelled Abeer), which literally means "perfume/fragrant/aroma/beautiful smell." Again, I advise sticking to traditional names; what’s wrong with just Yaakov? The Baba Sali's grandfather Rabbi Yaakov Abuchatzeira (1806-1880) wrote a book called Abir Yaakov (although technically, it should probably be called Avir Yaakov based on how the phrase is vocalized in Tanach).

-RCK

POSTSCRIPT: A month after I sent this answer, I heard back from Mrs. Elias and she informed me that she had a healthy baby boy, and they gave him the name Shraga Yaakov at his bris.

Jeremy

QUESTION: Is Jeremy a Jewish name?

-Jeremy G.

ANSWER: Depends what you mean by a "Jewish name." Is it a name that some Jewish people have? Definitely. It's actually quite popular in American Jewish circles. There's even a famous American rosh yeshiva who recently made aliyah who goes by Jeremy (I wonder if he still does or has since Hebraicized his name). Is it a kodesh name that has a Hebrew origin? Well, sort of: It seems that Jeremy is an alternate form of the name Jeremiah, which as you probably know is an Anglicization of the Hebrew name Yirmiyahu found in Tanach. Jeremy is also the English name that my parents gave to my little brother Yerucham Klein, the world-famous Instagram food and travel influencer.

-RCK

The Prime Ministers

QUESTION: I just found out that the last name of David Ben-Gurion (the first prime minister of Israel) was originally Green, not Ben-Gurion. What were the original last names of the other prime ministers?

-Benny Blue.

ANSWER: Yes! David Ben-Gurion is a particularly good example of the phenomenon. He was born David Grün (or Green), a perfectly ordinary German/Yiddish surname meaning “green.” He eventually adopted the Hebrew surname Ben-Gurion. This wasn't a Hebrew translation of Grün, however, rather it reflected an ideological Zionism, with the man who would become the first prime minister of Israel getting inspiration from the historical Jewish leader Yosef ben Gurion (one of the Jewish leaders associated with the revolt against Rome in the end of the Second Temple period, and also the penname of the author of Yossiphon).

The ideological Hebraization of names produced names that were sometimes phonetic adaptations, sometimes semantic translations, and sometimes completely new Hebrew names with an ancient-Israelite or biblical flavor. I even found a sefer on Otzar HaChochmah devoted to giving people guidelines for how to Hebraicize their old European names when they come to Israel.

Among Israel's prime ministers, there are quite a few examples of this onomastic phenomenon. Moshe Sharett was born Moshe Chertok (Shertok); Levi Eshkol was Levi Shkolnik; Golda Meir was Golda Mabovitch; Yitzhak Shamir was born Yitzhak Yezernitsky (Jaziernicki); Shimon Peres was Szymon Perski; Ehud Barak was Ehud Brog; Ariel Sharon was Ariel Scheinerman; and Yair Lapid inherited the Hebrew surname Lapid after his father changed the family's earlier name Lampel.

Some of these name-changes are themselves rather interesting. Shkolnik (Skolnik) is connected with the Slavic word for “school,” but bears a phonetic similarity to the Hebrew word eshkol ("grape cluster"). Similarly, Brog sounds a bit like Barak, so that connection is also phonetic. Peres's original last name Perski is a Polish-form surname, and Slavic names ending in -ski/-sky very often indicated an association with a place or locality. But it became Peres, after the Hebrew word peres in Chumash for a non-kosher bird of prey (possibly a "vulture"). Scheinerman is German/Yiddish in form, with schein meaning something like “beautiful,” “bright,” or “fair-looking.” If you take some of the consonants from Scheinerman and re-arrange them, you get Shamir (the name of the mythical worm that King Solomon used to cut the stones for the Temple).

A particularly neat example is Lapid: The Jewish surname Lampel is etymologically related to the English word lamp. I even have the name in my family tree, as one of my great-great-grandfathers was named Ezriel Lampl. The name Lapid comes from the Biblical Hebrew word lapid, which means “torch,” so the example of former prime minister Yair Lapid's surname actually preserves the basic meaning and imagery of the old name, while giving it a Hebrew form. And Benjamin Netanyahu's story is interesting in a different way: his father was born Benzion Mileikowsky (1910-2012), but he adopted the name Netanyahu as a nod to his own father, Rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky (1879-1935).

-RCK

The Name Disha

QUESTION: Hi. I very much enjoyed your articles in The Jewish Press on names. I was wondering if you know the origin of the name Disha, which was my mother's name. She was from Poland. Across the years, we have come across a few people with that name. Thank you and Gmar chasima tova.

-Leah Preiserowicz (Brooklyn, NY)

ANSWER: I actually dealt with this name in an earlier column that asked about the name Tisha. Basically, it's related to word for "soul" in various Slavic languages. See "Name Mailbag" (Nov. 2025). I'll send you a link.

-RCK