The Jewish Problem for Romania and for me

It's difficult looking for information about former Jewish residents of a country which kicked nearly the entire Jewish population in the gut, killed them, or made sure that they left.  There is little willingness by the government municipalities to help.  There is yet a very small Jewish population in modern Romania, and they do aide those seeking information.  I am thankful for these men and women.

I do not know Hebrew or Yiddish, having not been brought up in the Jewish tradition or faith.  I cannot read cemetery headstones.  I cannot read temple records.  I must rely on others to search for and locate information. This is, I think, my last name in Hebrew: הלר.  That's the extent of my current knowledge.

Our Family Name

Every time I am able to spend time searching for information about my paternal line, I learn more. For example, I was viewing a video about Jewish surnames recently (thank you Melissa). While the quality of the video was not excellent, it was good enough to learn something about the immigration of Jewish peoples throughout Europe, over time, from the middle east. Long ago, I learned from the video, Jews did not use last names.  For boys, they used the patronymic naming scheme where a a part of the name is based upon one's father or grandfather, or earlier male ancestor.  For girls, they used the the mother's name or female ancestor (matronymic).

Stepping back, I have often wondered how our last name, Heller, came about. It was interesting to learn about the pressures in Eastern Europe to adopt a last name came from the prevailing government of a given state. Generally, the names that people chose were those that would fit in with the region and the language. At some point a government would make a law that everyone must have a last name, and that families would have the same last name. A reason given for the law was for the purpose of getting population census.  Jews often picked names that fit with their occupation, or sometimes a permutation of a Hebrew word for the occupation. Some may have chosen a name because it was related to an admired man.

So where did Heller come from? There was a German or Austrian coin known as a häller pfennic - or a coin made in the Swabian town of (Schwäbisch) Hall, and it was shortened to häller. Perhaps a moneychanger, or someone who was a dealer in coins, might be known as Häller.  Alternatively, Ancestry had another explanation:

Jewish (Ashkenazic): nickname for a person with fair hair or a light complexion, from an inflected form, used before a male personal name, of German hell ‘light’, ‘bright’, Yiddish hel

Heller is also the name for a very revered man, Rabbi Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller.  We will never know for sure how our Heller last name came about, but this is my story, and I'm sticking to it - until I have a better story.