What's in a name???

In Ashkenazi Jewish tradition, children are named after the deceased. In September 1991, while I was pregnant with Shira, my grandfather passed away. Though he was ill and his death was not unexpected, the timing was very unfortunate--just three months before the birth of his first great-grandchild. We had no doubt that we would name this child after him. My grandfather's Hebrew name was Shimon. This is a somewhat old-fashioned name and, we felt, unsuitable for a child. We therefore decided to use the first letter, "shin", as the first letter of our child's name. We didn't know at the time if we would be having a girl or a boy (we did find out a few days later, however), so we chose two names: Shai for a boy and Shira for a girl. "Shai" means "gift" whereas "Shira" means "poetry". We later realized that the name Shira, poetry, was especially fitting since my grandfather had so loved to read.

In early September 1992, I discovered that I was pregnant again. At the same time, Avi's father was terminally ill and quickly approaching death. Avi's sister was also pregnant and it made his father happy to know that he would soon have two new grandchildren, even if he might not live to see them. Unfortunately, my pregnancy ended in a miscarriage about three weeks later. I remember my father-in-law being very sad. On December 4, 1992, my father-in-law passed away. Less than a month later, I discovered that I was pregnant again. Though we are not "superstitious", we couldn't help but believe that the child I was carrying had the soul of Avi's deceased father. We didn't really think much about a name until late March, when we learned that I was carrying a boy. Even then, we had difficulty finding a suitable name. My father-in-law's name was Haim Yoel. We couldn't find a single boy's name that we liked that began with the letter "het". Then one day it came to us. The word "haim" means "life". "Yo" and "el" are both names for God. We decided to combine Haim's first and middle names and came up with the name "Yohai", "God lives". Though perhaps slightly old-fashioned, this is a fairly uncommon and very beautiful name (or at least we think so).

Deciding on a name for our third child was the most difficult. Fortunately, there had been no recent deaths in our family and we didn't have anyone to name him after. The baby was due in May 1997, just around the time of Israel's 49th Independence Day. We learned that the Bible says that at the close of each 49 years, a ram's horn is blown to announce the beginning of the jubilee year. This is how we finally came up with a name. Yovel was born on May 2, 1997 and received his name at his brit mila (circumcision ceremony) on the eve of Israeli Independence Day, the close of 49 years. "Yovel" is the Hebrew word for "jubilee" (and, in fact, the English word is a derivative of the Hebrew). It is also a word for "ram", the animal from which we get the horn ("keren hayovel") blown to announce the jubilee year.

A name is something that stays with a person from the moment of his birth until his death. In some ways, a name defines the person who owns it. We hope that the person or event which inspired the names of each of our children will become a part of who they are. In this way, they will carry with them the history of our family and of our people.

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