Transliterator's notes:
- General
The original list in the Memorial Book is written in unpunctuated Hebrew characters; therefore there are no vowels. However in Yiddish the vowel "e", pronounced like the "e" in "yes", is written with the consonant ayin; the vowel "a", pronounced like the "a" in "bar", with aleph. Both Hebrew and Yiddish write the vowel "y", pronounced like the "u" in "busy" with a yod. However both the vowel "o", pronounced like the "o" in "both" and the vowel "u", pronounced like the "u" in "sure" are written with a vav, and you cannot distinguish between them.
- All yud's, pronounced like the "y" in "yes", were transliterated to "y".
- The Hebrew letter zadeh was transliterated into "tz". The same letter with diacritics, a newcomer to Hebrew, which is pronounced like the "ch" in "chat", was transliterated to "tch".
- The Hebrew letter chet, pronounced like the "ch" in "Channah" or "Yitzchak", which has no equivalent in English, was transliterated to "ch". I did the same with the undotted chaf.
- Family Names.
Wherever possible, I tried to transliterate according the following rules:
- If I knew a name, I kept it in the form I remembered it was written with Latin characters.
- As described in "1." above
- My best guess
- Corrections I received from various people.
- Given Names
There are many variations of the same name in the list, and many diminutives to them. I tried to keep the transliteration as close to the original as I could, even in those cases when I suspected that two different names were actually the same. I also tried to be consistent and transliterate identical Hebrew names into the same English form.
- If I recognized a name, I tried to transliterate it so that if an English-speaking person should pronounce it, it would sound the way it is pronounced now in Israel.
- Many names have two consecutive vowels. These were separated by an apostrophe (') to avoid mispronunciation such as "Lyh" for "Le'ah".
- Many names end with a vowel. An "h" was appended to these names to avoid dropping the pronunciation of the last vowel, which could convert "Mosheh" to "Mosh". The only exception is the ending of "hu", like in "Yeshayahu", because of aesthetics.
- Alphabet
The original Hebrew list is arranged according to the Hebrew alphabet, using only the first letter of the family name; because additional letters are not used the names within the category aleph, for example, are randomly ordered. The list presented here is arranged according to the English alphabet; the ordering uses as many letters of the family name as required to establish the name's unique position in the list. The numbers in the last column show the relative position of the entry in the Hebrew original.
We know that not all those who died are listed here. If the names of your loved ones are missing, please let me know, and we will be honored to add the name(s) to this list. Also we will gladly make any corrections needed. Just e-mail them to me.
Moshe M. Shavit
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