- Source: Ellis Island Special
- Amerika Serikat
- Hasan di Tiro
- Joe Biden
- Brooke Shields
- Logam alkali
- Daftar museum dan institusi budaya di Kota New York
- George H. W. Bush
- Nauru
- Martin Luther
- Kate Winslet
- Ellis Island Special
- Ellis Island
- Statue of Liberty National Monument
- Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital
- Mary Elizabeth Ellis
- Ellis Island Casino & Brewery
- Liberty Island
- Name change
- Anglicisation of names
- Ellis Island (miniseries)
An Ellis Island Special is a family name that is perceived or labeled, incorrectly, as having been altered or anglicized by immigration officials at the Ellis Island immigration station when a family reached the United States, typically from Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In popular thought, some family lore, and literary fiction, some family names have been perceived as having been shortened by immigration officials for ease of pronunciation or record-keeping, or lack of understanding of the true name—even though name changes were made by the immigrants themselves at other times. Among the family names that are perceived as being Ellis Island Specials are some that were supposedly more identifiably Jewish, resulting in last names that were not identifiably so. Also, Germanic- and Yiddish-derived names originally spelled with an Eszett (spoken with an s sound but written ß) have been ascribed to family names like Straub (given the similarity with the letter B), which might have been said originally as Strauss in the Old World.
The phrase "Ellis Island Special" has also been adopted by some food vendors and applied to sandwiches, among other foods.
History
According to the history professor Kirsten Fermaglich, the idea that Ellis Island officials changed immigrants' names "did not become an important image in published literature until around 1970", decades after Ellis Island had ceased to serve as an immigration arrival station. The influential 1974 film The Godfather Part II imagined that the fictional Sicilian boy Vito Andolini was assigned the name Vito Corleone by an Ellis Island official. Professional genealogist Megan Smolenyak blamed the perpetuation of the myth on that film as well as on "immigrant grandfathers who enjoyed spinning yarns to confuse their offspring". As the earlier tendency toward cultural assimilation among American Jews transitioned into ethnic pride, a false narrative of victimization arose that contended that name-changing was something done to Jewish immigrants against their will to de-Judaize them rather than having been the choice of the immigrants themselves.
See also
Jewish assimilation