Orgeyev, Moldova (Pages i - ii) (original) (raw)

[Page i]

Notes From the Project Coordinator

One of the more important aspects of a Yizkor book translation is to allow the readers to find information about their relatives. This requires that the names in the book are transliterated in such a way as to yield the names that readers are expecting. This is a fairly difficult task because of the way that the Hebrew names are specified and other anomalies within this book.

1. Vowels are not specified within the Hebrew portions of this book;
2. Many Hebrew consonants (e.g. feh/peh beit/veit, etc.) are not distinguishable from one another because the distinguishing characteristics are not specified;
3. The same person listed in the Table of Contents, in a chapter, in the List of Figures and in a Figure Caption will often have their surname spelled several different ways;
4. If five different people were to transliterate the same surname there would probably be at least four different spellings.

This project coordinator felt that it was important to establish some guidelines and transliteration methods that were, at least, consistent and explainable. The first decision was to determine what the “end product” of the transliteration should be. Should the names reflect the period and location, should they be “modernized”, or should they be “westernized”. The following thoughts yielded a final answer:

1. These people all lived under the Russian/Romanian influence and most of them died there;
2. Modernization of names would, at best, be very risky since there is nothing to indicate how names were modernized;
3. Westernization would be unfair to all of the people reading this book that are from Israel, South America and other countries besides North America;
4. It is important in genealogy to understand family names as they changed over time.

It was, therefore, decided that the names should reflect the period and location in which these people lived. The consequence of this is that you will find Yosef not Joseph, Yitzchak not Isaac, Goldshteyn not Goldstein, Veitzman not Weitzman and other such differences. The methods used for transliteration were slightly different for Given names and Surnames, and are described below.

Given Names: In order to establish a consistent method it was decided that a published source (that had both the Hebrew and transliterated equivalent) should be used as a basis. Several sources were investigated and it was decided that “The Complete Dictionary of English and Hebrew First Names” by Alfred J. Kolatch (1984) best met the criteria previously discussed. It proved to be a good source since over 80% of the Hebrew spellings in this Yizkor book were found in Kolatch's book. The other 20% were generated by using the techniques that are discussed in the Surname discussion that follows.

Surnames: Surnames were much more difficult because there was no single source that would satisfy the needs. A transliteration table was generated after examining many sources and transliterated names. The table reflected differences if a Hebrew letter was at the beginning of a name, in the middle or at the end because it's location often had a major effect. There were always exceptions to every rule and there were in this situation. As indicated above, the same surname was often spelled several different ways and in these cases the most “complete” Hebrew spelling (e.g. that which specified the most complete set of letters) was used and the others were made to agree.

The following is the transliteration table that was used. The Hebrew letter is specified followed by the Latin characters used if it was at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a name.

Some of the primary exceptions were the following letter combinations:

Finally, it was decided to standardize on -ovitz as an ending instead of -ovich, no matter which was specified.

When the table and exceptions were applied against all of the given names in the book over 95% of them agreed with the transliteration found in Kolatch's book. For the surnames the hard part was deciding where to place vowels, what ayin should be, whether vav was a v or an o/u and determining whether the feh/peh should be an F or an P. In order to aid in this dilemma three sources were used to determine the possible spellings, the pronunciation and the possible placement of vowels.

1. Jewishgen Family Finder (using the Daitch-Mokotoff soundex)
2. “Jewish Names in the Russian Empire”, by Alexander Beider
3. The transliterated 1906-07 Bessarabia Duma Lists

The transliterated Bessarabia Duma lists were specifically from the town of Orgeyev and were also part of the basis of Beider's book. These two sources were from Russian transliteration, so it was important to use their concepts and not their actual spellings.

The result of all of this is really twofold. First, when searching for a surname the following should be taken into consideration (if you were using the Daitch-Mokotoff system it would be done for you):

1. Also check Z and CH if your surname begins with TZ, TS, KH or CH;
2. Also check SH and Z if your surname begins with S;
3. If it begins with P or F then check both;
4. Remember that a vav can be a V or an O/U (within a name only), so check for alternate spellings within a name;
5. Vowels are very questionable since they are “arbitrary” so expect possible differences in the vowels and their placement.

Secondly, there are many names (especially in the figure captions) that have only initials instead of given names. This only causes a problem if the initial is a feh/peh or an alef (ayin was never found as an initial or it would have also been a problem). In those cases the value was put in brackets (unless the same person was found with a given name elsewhere in the book). You will, therefore, sometimes find “[alef].” or “[feh].” to indicate that the actual initial is not known.

Even after all of this was done sometimes the same surname ended up being spelled different ways. The project coordinator tried to keep this from happening but with 6 or 7 different translators some slipped through during the validation and formatting step.

Terry Lasky Project Coordinator

[Page ii]

Index of Surnames

Prepared by Terry Lasky

This index is not part of the Yizkor book, it was constructed by the project coordinator to help in locating information about specific surnames. If you haven't read the “Notes from the Project Coordinator” you should read it first - it gives an explanation of the transliteration of the names in this book and some hints for locating family names.

The following codes are used to indicate where the names may be found:

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