Celebration of "Name Days" among Jews in pre-Second World War Poland

[Tessa]

Hello. I would be so grateful if someone could help me. I'm trying to discover if Jews in pre-war Poland celebrated Name Days, and how assimilated these Jews were. ("Name Day" is the tradition of celebrating the day of the year associated with one's given name. In Poland traditionally, celebrating Name Days was more important than celebrating birthdays).

I should think without a doubt that those Jews that fell under the umbrella of "Orthodox" would never celebrate Name Days, as the practice comes from the Christian calendar of saints. However, I have read certain things that seem to suggest more assimilated Jews did indeed celebrate Name Days.

I would love to find out if Jews did celebrate Name Days, and how assimilated they were. It was my assumption that only extremely assimilated Jews (those Jews that thought of themselves entirely as Poles and hardly as Jews at all), would celebrate Name Days; and yet what little I have managed to find on the subject (which is admittedly extremely negligible and unreliable) does seem to suggest that less assimilated Jews did celebrate Name Days.

If anyone can help me, I would be incredibly grateful.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this.

[mirjam]

On Monday, November 4, 2013 9:27:55 AM UTC+2, Tessa wrote:
I never heard nor read about such an event????
but i advise you to send your question to

http://www.bh.org.il/default.aspx

Beth HaTfutsot
they might be able to answer you or refer you further .
mirjam

[amethyst...@gmail.com]

Mirjam -- thank you very much for the link! Very helpful!!

[mm]

On Mon, 4 Nov 2013 07:27:55 +0000 (UTC), Tessa
<amethyst...@gmail.com> wrote:

>Hello. I would be so grateful if someone could help me. I'm trying to discover if Jews in pre-war Poland celebrated Name Days, and how assimilated these Jews were. ("Name Day" is the tradition of celebrating the day of the year associated with one's given name. In Poland traditionally, celebrating Name Days was more important than celebrating birthdays).
>
>I should think without a doubt that those Jews that fell under the umbrella of "Orthodox" would never celebrate Name Days,

Of course in the 19th century no one called themselves Orthodox. They
were just Jews. It wasn't until Jews came up with heterodox ideas
that they started to call the traditional Jews orthodox. The
orthodox themselves still didn't use the term until later, but I have
no idea how much later.

That doesn't mean everyone was fully observant. The range, esp. in
the city, might have been as great as it is now. (I find it hard to
believe there were any Jews for Jss claiming to practice Judaism, but,
off topic for your post, in the US as early as about 1915 iirc, there
is a church in the middle of the east side, a poor n'hood where
eastern Europesan Jews first lived and continued to do so until the
1950's or maybe the 60's, that pretends it's a synagogue. It has a
corner stone with a line in Hebrew and a line from the Xian bible in
English^^^. After all the Jews left the east side and a JCC
was built in the 60's 2 or 3 neighborhoods later, and a Jewish
community services building**** was built to the right of it, and
Baltimore Hebrew College just to the right of that, the same church or
some organization that bought the church, built a big building right
next door to the right of the colllege building. I don't see anyone
going in or out, and I don't know what they do, but it's not good.

****I may have reversed the college and the community building. The
latter had the Board of Jewish Education, Jewish Family Services, a
Free Loan society, and a few other agencies that are too small to have
their own building.

^^^I was going to include a link so readers could see the building,
but today, Google's street view is almost entirely black. Nothing can
be seen, at least for several blocks on Caroline St. in Baltimore.
The church that pretended to be a shul (It's closed now, I think) can
be seen in the satellite view on S. Caroline St. just south of E.
Baltimore St. The southeast corner of that intersection contains a
building also owned by pretend Jews, and it connects with everything
north of the empty lot. The building just north of the empty lot is
the pretend shul. If they fix street view, you can almost read the
insciription on the corner stone with a 14" monitor. Maybe with a
bigger monitor it can be read, or maybe it will just fade away.

(Across Caroline, on the east side of it, is a row of brand new
townhouses. Well, not so new that some of the trees aren't pretty big
already, but my point is that one can see how much new development is
going on in this area, which hadn't been much improved since 1920 or
so. )

> as the practice comes from the Christian calendar of saints. However, I have read certain things that seem to suggest more assimilated Jews did indeed celebrate Name Days.
>
>I would love to find out if Jews did celebrate Name Days, and how assimilated they were. It was my assumption that only extremely assimilated Jews (those Jews that thought of themselves entirely as Poles and hardly as Jews at all), would celebrate Name Days; and yet what little I have managed to find on the subject (which is admittedly extremely negligible and unreliable) does seem to suggest that less assimilated Jews did celebrate Name Days.
>
>If anyone can help me, I would be incredibly grateful.
>
>Thank you so much for taking the time to read this.

I can't give you the information you want. My mother's parents were
from Eysheshuk, Lithuania, and part of Lithuania, maybe that part, was
ruled by Poland for a while. And my grandmother had a Tanach written
in Polish, so she might have known Polish at one time, but none of
that helps you.

However, there are plenty of Xian saints with Jewish names. Michael
is the only one I can think of but I'll bet most male Jewish names
were used for Xian saints. (Didn't/don't they assign them names along
with sainthood, and not rely on what their parents named them. Maybe
to prevent duplication? Or is it only popes who get a new name?)

If your kid is already named, say, Michael, and Michael's day comes up
once a year, I don't think a family would have to be extremely
assimilated to note it**, only somewhat assimillated***. . Maybe
they didn't even know the names were names of Xian saints. As a little
boy, at least, I didn't know that Halloween had any relationship to
Xianity. I'm not sure my mother did either. She might have thought
it was the difference between living in Indiana and living in
Pennsylvania. When you said name-day, it didn't occur to me that
this had anything to do with Xianity.

IIUC, Poland was a pleasant place for Jews to live for maybe hundreds
of years. That's why so many Jews moved to Poland and stayed there.
At some point the mood changed, but when they were getting along fine
with their goyish neighbors, why not do some of their small practices
that don't contradict Judaism. Is everything covered by "Do not do
the practices of the Egyptians?" I don't know but maybe not. If
goyim are the first to play the violin, does that mean that Jews can't
play the violin?

I think I've heard that before the shoa 1/3 of the population of
Warsaw was Jewish. Any truth to that? ***Ironically, with that
many Jews, it might be harder to tell what is a Jewish practice than
with fewer. If there are only 100 Jews, you can know what each
extended family's customs are, but with thousands, when you see a
somewhat assimilated Jew doing something, you won't know if it's only
because of his assimilation and his gentile neighbor or because he has
this other custom.



**Especially if what I once read is true, that Jews didn't pay much
attention to birth days, but paid much more attention to the day of
death. Hmmm. This sounds like smething people outside the family
would pay attention to, and maybe not relevant here. . I don't know
if this is related, but my mother didn't find out until she applied
for a passport that she had been celebrating the wrong birthday all
her life, by 2 or 3 days. That's what she said. I didn't think to
ask if maybe her mother or father's recollection was more accurate
than the county clerk's, who depended on the hospital, which might
have been disorganized. At any rate, is it true that birthdays were
pretty much ignored by Jews, and does this refer to by their family in
their lifetime?
--

Meir

[Yisroel Markov]

On Mon, 4 Nov 2013 19:11:23 +0000 (UTC), mm <mm2...@bigfoot.com> said:

>On Mon, 4 Nov 2013 07:27:55 +0000 (UTC), Tessa
><amethyst...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Hello. I would be so grateful if someone could help me. I'm trying to discover if Jews in pre-war Poland celebrated Name Days, and how assimilated these Jews were. ("Name Day" is the tradition of celebrating the day of the year associated with one's given name. In Poland traditionally, celebrating Name Days was more important than celebrating birthdays).
>>
>>I should think without a doubt that those Jews that fell under the umbrella of "Orthodox" would never celebrate Name Days,
>
>Of course in the 19th century no one called themselves Orthodox. They
>were just Jews. It wasn't until Jews came up with heterodox ideas
>that they started to call the traditional Jews orthodox. The
>orthodox themselves still didn't use the term until later, but I have
>no idea how much later.
>
>That doesn't mean everyone was fully observant. The range, esp. in
>the city, might have been as great as it is now.

It was. The far end of the range was conversion to Christianity, of
course. But there was, e.g., a Jewish prostitution smuggling ring
operating in Poland and some surrounding countries, and it wasn't run
by observant Jews, I'd say. (There was even a so-called "alfons
pogrom" in Warsaw - "alfons" being the term for "pimp" - where a bunch
of observant and moderately observant male Jews united to beat up the
recruiting representatives of that ring.)

About a third of Polish brothels were owned by Jews, BTW. Can't say
that their owners were otherwise observant, but likely they employed
observant accountants and such :-)

[snip]
--
Yisroel "Godwrestler Warriorson" Markov - Boston, MA Member
www.reason.com -- for a sober analysis of the world DNRC
--------------------------------------------------------------------
"Judge, and be prepared to be judged" -- Ayn Rand

[mirjam]

On Monday, November 4, 2013 7:03:23 PM UTC+2, amethyst...@gmail.com wrote:
> Mirjam -- thank you very much for the link! Very helpful!!

You are welcome
mirjam

[amethyst...@gmail.com]

You're both completely correct – the traditional Jews of Poland didn't think of themselves as "Orthodox" (in fact, the observant ones distinguished themselves from unobservant Jews by calling themselves "Jewish Jews"); and, indeed, the range was as great as it is now – with the assimilationists (which, as Yisroel Markov rightly says, even included Christian conversion from time to time) at one end and the fully observant at the other. Though as far as my research goes, I've never heard of ANY Jews for Jss in pre-war Poland either.

Meir, your insight is hugely helpful. You're so right – "If goyim are the first to play the violin, does that mean that Jews can't play the violin?" sums it up perfectly, and I thank you so much for your perspective.

And yes, there were about 400,000 Jews in Warsaw in 1939 (though I've heard as many as 500,000 from some sources), which, in a total population of about 1,300,000, is indeed about a third.

Thank you both for your help – I'm so grateful!