Next Cantor

When I get back to the States, I’m going to look into the process of changing my last name from Chodosh to Hadash.

This is the sort of culmination of a process that I begun a few years ago when I started looking into the origin of my name “Chodosh” which my Dad’s family and my family always pronounced with a very American pronounciation. We don’t have a whole ton of genealogical data going back to the “old country” but we know that we have cousins “Rodes” and “Hodes” who probably originally all had the same name as me. Sort of a best-guess is that we were originally חדש, “Hadash,” which means “New.” There are twelve entries in the Jerusalem phonebook under that name. I like the idea of being “new,” and it has a good sound and appearance with “Hazzan” (cantor) in both Hebrew and English. I’ve been telling everyone for the last couple years that my name is spelled “Chodosh” and pronounced “Hadash,” and now I think I’m ready to take the final step: changing my transliterated name to match the Hebrew one. It’s like when Beijing became Peking, or Bombay became Mumbai. Nothing’s changing but the transliteration.

My decision to do this is also influenced by the fact that I’m the “last” Chodosh — I have no brothers or cousins with that name and I’m pretty sure my dad’s done having kids. So it’s not like I’ll be alienating my huge family of Chodoshes by becoming Hadash.

So, keep a look out for that change to come around this summer, when I’ll try to put the paperwork through and start changing the way I identify myself online and elsewhere.

Comments? Post ‘em.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 3rd, 2007 at 11:44 pm and is filed under Diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.