Is Rivkah Chaya a common Jewish name?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Someone asked me this on the thread about grieving parents, and I really don’t want to hijack that thread, so I’m answering the question here, which is the same forum. If mods want it somewhere else, that’s fine.

Rivkah and Chaya are both fairly common Jewish names. Rivkah is the name that gets Anglicized Rebecca, or Rebekah, and Chaya means “life.” It’s the feminine version of Chaim.

My family usually just calls me “Rivkah,” as “Chaya” is actually my middle name. Sometimes I get the diminutive “Rivkeleh.”

“Chaya” is pronounced with a glottal fricative like the “Ch” in Chanukah. Most Americans just pronounce it “Haya,” and I wish my parents had spelled it that way.

When I was little, our rabbi had a daughter named Rivkah, who was about five years older than me, and she was already sort of the Rivkah of the synagogue, so I was called Rivkah Chaya by everyone at shul, and I know a lot of people who still call me that, including some extended family.

I know lots of other Rivkahs, and several Chayas. I know a Rivkah Chana, and a Rivkah Chava, as well as a Chaya Rivkah, and tons of women with Chaya as a middle name with some other first name, but I don’t think I actually know another Rivkah Chaya, although I’m sure there are plenty. There’s probably even another couple with my very Jewish last name.

ETA: Great, there’s a typo in my title. It should be “I**s **Rivkah Chaya, etc.” Mods, fix, please?

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Typo reported.

Very pretty name, thanks for the explanation.

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I think my cousin is a Rivkah Chaya (her hebrew name). We had a lot of family to name for, after the shoah so many of us received a first and middle hebrew name. Many of the girls have some form of an R name (Rochelle, Rachel) and some form of Haya/Chava. I am almost positive my cousin Rochelle is either Rivkah Haya or Chava.

My daughter is Esther Chava.

4

It’s a name I see on the board a lot. But I suppose there’s just one of you here.

5

I’ve known one Rivka Chaya, but several Channa Leahs.

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I have a cousin named Hava Leah, and for some reason, she’s always been called the whole thing. Her mother’s name is Chana, which is the same name as Hannah, and she wishes when she’d immigrated (she was four), her parents had changed her spelling, since she’s really tired of getting called “China.” So she did the sensible thing with her daughter’s name, and did not stick her with a phoneme that does not exist in English.

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FWIW, my son’s Hebrew name is Yochanan, and it says that on his certificate for his bris. He will be called that when he is called to Torah. If he ever decides to move to Israel, he can be called any variation of that. But his American birth certificate says John.

8

It’s a little schleppy, but changing one’s name to a preferred spelling for reasons of personal preference is always an option.

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To my Israeli ears, it sounds like a very common *Orthodox *Jewish name. I don’t think I had any Rivkas or Chayas of Rivka Chayas in my secular high school class, although I’m pretty sure they were very popular names in the all-girl schools. The whole double-biblical name thing is considered rather old-fashioned by the nonreligious.

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I grew up with fluently yiddish grandparents and read Sholom Aleichem. So to my ears, familiar, if not necessarily common.

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Have never met anyone with either of those names before.

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I grew up in a largely Jewish community and was always a little jealous of friends getting to have Hebrew names in addition to their regular names.

Then again, I didn’t complain about Santa bringing me xmas presents, and got a kick out of my mom lighting her Hanukkah candles.

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My sister’s name is Chaya. One of her daughters has Rivkah as a second name.

Zev Steinhardt (who, personally, is named neither “Chaya” nor “Rivkah.”)

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I would expect that. My generation has lots of Rivkahs, Sarahs, Davids, and other biblical names. To us, they sound more modern than the Yiddish names of the previous generation. I grew up among observant, but not Orthodox Jews. We had mixed seating in the synagogues, and lots of young women who wore talliots and even kippot, girls who had bat mitzvah celebrations where they were called to Torah, but plenty of older women in the synagogues who would never criticize the choices of younger people, but always wore dresses, and were never called to Torah themselves. They went out in their own hair, and that was change enough from what their mothers did.

Plenty of Yiddish was spoken, but no one was very concerned with teaching it to children. Children were supposed to prepare for the future. I had to ask my aunt to teach me Yiddish, even though she had spoken it to me a bit when I was little.

My Yiddish is thoroughly American. I have no discernible dialect, and I don’t speak it very well (although I understand it). I’m what linguists would call “conversant,” a step below fluent.

Israel is very different from the US, although in the last generation, you see maybe 20% of American Jewish parents copying Israeli naming trends. So you get kids in Hebrew school named Ori or Shachar, next to a Braeden (Hebrew name Baruch).

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Without knowing your last name, I don’t know if this observation is relevant, but there are many names that sound Jewish – Goldberg, for example – that are Jewish by virtue of being rooted in Germanic naming and then attached to European Jewry.

In contrast, names like Cantor or Spivak derive from chazzan, Levy, Levi, Weill, Segal . . . these derive from Jacob and Leah’s son and indicate families of leviyim just as the kohanim are today named Cohen or Kohen… or even Katz, thought to be an abbreviation of kohen tzedik.

In other words, I guess, there are Jewish names derived from Germanized or Yiddishized surnames, and then there are JEWISH names which come from Judaism.

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My last name is Maccaby.

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Um…

…game, set, and match to Rivkah Chaya.

Yahsher Koach :slight_smile:

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I was the one that asked (and had meaning to for a while). Based on this thread (and even your OP), if it’s not really common, it seems like it’s at least common, or, at the very least the two names are common on their own and it’s a coincidence that they were put together similarly.

A lot of her facebook friends have very Jewish sounding names as well and I see Hebrew posts from time to time as well, so it’s not that she named her kids Kim, Samantha, Tom and Chaya Rivkah…there was a precedent going into this. I thought her other kids had Jewish/Hebrew sounding names as well, but looking at them, they really don’t. Biblical, yes, but it’s not like you don’t hear them on a regular basis. I believe since the last time I saw her, 20 some years ago, she has delved deep into the world of Judiasm, if that makes a difference.

Anyways, I was just wondering if it was common or a coincidence.

I mean, if you knew an Italian family that named their kid Joey (or, any of the other three or four names the 75 people in my family seem to pick from), I could tell you it’s not a coincidence. See:* Joey *Tribiani (and notice that two of his sisters have the same name). IIRC the same joke was used in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

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While I can’t think off-hand of anyone I know with the specific combination (other than you), each of the names taken singularly are certainly plenty common. One of my daughters has the middle name Chaya, and if my (still-living) mother-in-law wasn’t a Rivkah, it’s likely another of my daughters would have that as a name as well.

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Again chiming in with expositional dialog:

Some readers may not be aware of the tradition among Jews (or more specifically among Ashkenazi Jews) of not naming a child after a living ancestor.