According to the school’s website, 470 is the numeric equivalent of the rebbetzin’s name. One month after she died, Beth Rivkah broke ground on a new 125,000-square-foot campus at 470 Lefferts Avenue, in Brooklyn.
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The secretary in the office is Chaya Mushka.”Įven the school building has links to Rebbetzin Schneerson. “Next door to her is a Chayale and a Mushkie. “My daughter’s teacher is Mushkie,” Margolis said. But the name is the most popular among the school’s 20 or so teaching and administrative staff, almost half of whom are named Chaya Mushka. Sheina Margolis, a preschool teacher at Beth Rivkah, said of the 15 girls in her class, only two are called Chaya Mushka. So it’s possible many of the Chayas listed on the health department’s statistics have different names, such as Chaya Rivka or Chaya Sara. And Crown Heights residents say neighborhood schools have only a fraction of the Chaya Mushkas today that they experienced during the 1990s.
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It peaked in 20, with almost 200 girls named “Chaya” in each year.Īccording to Jewish tradition, two girls in the same immediate family cannot share the same name. Statistics from New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which does not record middle names, show that the popularity of the name “Chaya” surged shortly after the rebbetzin died, from about 100 girls annually during the mid-1980s to 150 girls annually during the early 1990s. But the name appears to have been similarly popular overseas, at least according to Mushka Afrah, from Milan, Italy, and Mookie Cohen, of Sydney, Australia, both of whom now live in Crown Heights. There are no figures for the number of Chaya Mushkas worldwide. “In my son’s class, I would say about 90% are called Mendy,” Gansberg said. That name became increasingly popular after the rebbe died in 1994. “The joke is, if I don’t remember the name I say, ‘Oh, it’s probably Chaya Mushka’ - and I am usually right,” said Gansberg, who has an 18-year-old daughter and three nieces called Chaya Mushka.Įven so, Gansberg added, Chaya Mushka is not as popular for girls as the name Menachem Mendel is for boys. Leah Gansberg, a Crown Heights matchmaker, said almost one-third of the 200 women on her list of eligible brides are Chaya Mushkas. Today, like Efune, many of those little girls are starting families of their own. “I ignored every ‘Mushkee!’ unless it was specifically for me.” “The older I got, the less I turned around,” said Efune, 22.
#Chaya mushka butel windows
Mushkee Efune said that when she was at Beth Rivkah school, in Brooklyn, older girls would call down “Mushkie” from the school’s fourth-floor windows and watch as scores of little faces in the playground turned upward. Then each could sign off on her test paper in a different way, one with a star and one with a heart.Įvery Mushkie has a story about her name being called out and a group of Mushkies turning around. Mushka Katzman, 21, a classmate of the two Avtzon cousins, recalled how a teacher at the Lubavitch high school they attended avoided confusion by asking both girls to choose their favorite shape. “We always requested to be in the same class and everyone got us mixed up,” said one of the 22-year-old Avtzons who recently married and officially became Mushky Edelman.Įven today, now that one of the Avtzons has given up her maiden name, the two women still receive each other’s phone calls and text messages, or those meant for their 21-year-old cousin, Chaya Mushka Avtzon, who also lives in Crown Heights. That was no solution for teachers and classmates of Chaya Mushka Avtzon and Chaya Mushka Avtzon, first cousins who lived three doors away from each other on Crown Street, in Brooklyn. “Then you start going by the street ,” Deitsch said, “like Chaya Mushka Crown or Chaya Mushka President.” Rishe Deitsch, senior editor of a Chabad women’s newsletter, said distinguishing between Chaya Mushkas at school only became a problem when cousins shared the same surname. To differentiate themselves, these Chaya Mushkas adopted various nicknames and alternative spellings: Chaya, Chayale, Moussia, Mushkee, Mushkie, Mushky or Mookie. Duchman said that at her Beth Rivkah school in Brooklyn, about 75 of the 120 girls in her grade were called Chaya Mushka.
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“The rebbe was our leader and when the rebbetzin passed away, it was the greatest thing to give back to the rebbe,” Duchman told the Forward.ĭuring the 1990s in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where the Lubavitch movement has its world headquarters, schools were flooded with Chaya Mushkas. Mushky Duchman, born in August, 1988, in Brooklyn was among them. On the first anniversary of Rebbetzin Schneerson’s death, the rebbe was presented with an album of namesakes born during the previous year - 324 Chaya Mushkas from across the world. In the months that followed, hundreds of Lubavitch parents named their daughters Chaya Mushka.