No problem! I love this stuff, I don't need to convince you of that...
(Incidentally, unless I'm very much mistaken Yukel is diminutive for Yukeb/Yokeb which is the Yiddish descendant of the *German* name Jakob - similar processes created quite a few kinnuyim/traditional nicknames)
I’m reading all of this to my husband who is finding this fascinating. He had no idea that Zalman and Shlomo were related.
His family is—best as we can tell—from the Uman region. But we’ve heard different things from family members: For ages we were told that the family shtetl was Brest-Litovsk,
but then we began to suspect that it might have been Breslov. No one ever seemed curious enough to write anything down, pull out a map, or ask searching questions. There is a strange amnesia/unwillingness to discuss these things in my husbands family and questions are waved away and heavily
discouraged. As a result, almost no information or family lore has survived. Everyone came over before the war to escape pogroms, and no one wanted to talk about *anything* from Ukraine or Russia. There are zero photos from that time. And those who stayed didn’t survive, nor are they spoke of.
What family trees we’ve managed to reconstruct all come from JewishGen, and no one seems to have died in the camps. From the dates it’s anyone’s guess: They were almost certainly killed by shooting squads, either German, Russian or local/partisan. But the family won’t speak of it. They claim to be
It’s not even “technically” my family (I mean, of course it IS, we’ve been married for 27 years), but I still can’t get enough of this stuff.
Just wonderful.
My favorite name in the family tree thus far: Fishel Yukelson. (Not much variation among the women: Mostly Chana and Leah)
I had assumed that it was “Son of Jacob” but it was a rabbi who suggested that it might have been meant in the patriarchal sense (a very young rabbi, who probably does not have your specific cultural knowledge.)
It helps that I have a Yukel somewhere very far up my family tree.
And I have a cousin whose paternal line includes a "Simcha Yaakov, called Zimel Yukel" (in contemporary Hasidic Yiddish these are both inherently funny names)
Comments
(Incidentally, unless I'm very much mistaken Yukel is diminutive for Yukeb/Yokeb which is the Yiddish descendant of the *German* name Jakob - similar processes created quite a few kinnuyim/traditional nicknames)
His family is—best as we can tell—from the Uman region. But we’ve heard different things from family members: For ages we were told that the family shtetl was Brest-Litovsk,
Just wonderful.
My favorite name in the family tree thus far: Fishel Yukelson. (Not much variation among the women: Mostly Chana and Leah)
And I have a cousin whose paternal line includes a "Simcha Yaakov, called Zimel Yukel" (in contemporary Hasidic Yiddish these are both inherently funny names)