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Auerhan, Auerhahn, Orhan, Or-Chen: one family name

The same surname has been written at least six ways: in German-language registers in Galicia, on American passenger lists, in a memorial book, in the United States and in Israel. This page explains where each spelling came from.

What the name means

Auerhahn is German for the male capercaillie, the great wood grouse of the mountain forests of central Europe.^[1] It is a bird name, like Adler (eagle) or Fink (finch): one of many surnames that Jewish families in Galicia took or were given after the Austrian emperor Joseph II made hereditary surnames compulsory in 1787.^[2] It is not the same name as Auerbach, which comes from a German place name and belongs to unrelated families. The two are often confused.

Why one family could carry two surnames

The Austrian state recognized only marriages registered with the civil authorities. Many Jewish couples in Galicia married only in a religious ceremony, and the state counted their children as born outside marriage: they were registered under the mother's surname. Galician records mark the result. Recte ("correctly") introduces the legal surname; f. (falsch, "false") introduces the surname a person actually used. Brothers and sisters in one household could be written under different surnames, depending on whether their parents' marriage had been registered when each was born.^[2][3]

An example from another Galician town: the surname list of the 1910 Jewish census of Tarnopol, published by Gesher Galicia, has three neighbouring entries, AUERHAHN, AUERHAHN f. FELD and AUERHAN. That is the name in two spellings, and someone legally named Auerhahn who used the surname Feld.^[4]

The spellings

Or-Chen: a name remade

In the first decades of the State of Israel many thousands of families exchanged their European surnames for Hebrew ones, and in the mid-1950s David Ben-Gurion required diplomats and army officers to take Hebrew surnames.^[5] אור-חן, Or-Chen, means "light and grace". It keeps the sound of Auerhan and gives it a meaning in Hebrew: the name did not survive by accident, it was remade.

One name on three continents

From 1 July 1924 the United States admitted only 5,982 immigrants a year from Poland.^[6] Galician Jews who still wanted to leave went where the doors were open: to Argentina, to Brazil, and to Palestine, where the Fourth Aliyah of 1924–1929 brought about 82,000 Jews.^[7] That is one reason the same Galician surnames are found today, in different spellings, in the United States, in Argentina and in Israel. For records of Jewish arrivals in Buenos Aires, see the Encyclopedia of Strzyżów.