You're writing research and fact-free speculation. The real story about immigrant name changes is in Dara Horn's People Love Dead Jews. Read Chapter 6: Legends of Dead Jews about how immigrant parents fabricated the Ellis Island name change stories to hide from their children the real reason: to shelter their children from "no Jews and dogs allowed" anti-semitism. Comparing the name changes in the USA driven by anti-semitism avoidance to mandatory Palestine's Jews restoring ancient Hebrew names in preparation for state sovereignty is utter nonsense. They were opposites, not analogues.
From that chapter:
"So I didn’t think it was a big deal a few years ago when I gave a public
lecture at a Jewish institution and casually mentioned that the family story
so many American Jews have heard, that their surnames were changed at
Ellis Island, is a myth. At Ellis Island, which has been up and running as a
National Park Service museum for over thirty years, this is routinely
announced on public tours. More recently, we have entered an era of trendy
genealogy, bolstered by cheap DNA testing that has led tens of thousands of
Americans down the rabbit hole of ancestry research, with ample guidance
from online forums, TV documentaries, family tree construction software,
and accessible archival databases. With this public glut of information, I
hardly thought my mention was news.
Wow, was I wrong.
After that talk, I was mobbed by people—angry people, in a scrum.
These were well-read, highly educated American Jews, each of whom
furiously explained to me that while maybe most people’s names weren’t
changed at Ellis Island, their great-grandfather was the exception. None of
these people offered any evidence, other than to assure me, “My greatgrandfather
wouldn’t lie!”
I didn’t lose any sleep over my Ellis Island mob. But then it happened
again. I wrote an article for a Jewish publication in which I compared the
“My name was changed at Ellis Island” story to similar historical material,
such as Washington chopping down the cherry tree, the CIA killing
Kennedy, and the lunar landing being faked to impress the Soviets. In the
comments section, hundreds of people explained to me how I was totally
wrong, because . . . well, instead of evidence, they then inserted a fivehundred-
word anecdote about their great-grandmother, so there.
My angry hecklers have taught me a great deal about the power of
founding legends, about mythmaking and its purpose. But now I know I
have to get the facts out of the way first. So, for the record: No, your
family’s name was not changed at Ellis Island, and your ancestors were not
the exception. Here is how we know.
First of all, there was no language problem at Ellis Island. Immigration
inspectors there were not rent-a-cops. These were highly trained people
who were required to be fluent in at least three languages, and additional
translators circulated to ensure competency—and in this context, the
languages spoken by Jewish immigrants were far from obscure. Second,
immigration processing at Ellis Island wasn’t like checking ID at today’s
airports. These were long interviews, twenty minutes or more, because the
purpose of this process was to weed out anyone who was likely to become,
in the jargon of the time, “a public charge.” So this was not a situation
where some idiot behind a desk was just moving a line along.
Even if it were: nobody at Ellis Island ever wrote down immigrants’
names. Immigrants’ names were provided by ship’s manifests, compiled at
the port of origin. Ships’ manifests in Europe were based on passports and
other state-issued documents. Those compiling ships’ manifests were very
careful to get them right, because errors cost them money and potentially
their jobs. Any immigrant who was improperly documented on board these
vessels had to be sent back to Europe at the shipping company’s expense.
Yet there is ample evidence of name changing: thousands of court
records from the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s of Jewish immigrants and their
children filing petitions in New York City Civil Court in order to change
their own family names."
In her book A Rosenberg by Any Other Name, the historian Kirsten
Fermaglich tracks these court filings. For legal name changes, petitioners
had to provide the court with their reasons for changing their names. And
that’s where we see the heartbreaking reality behind the funny stories about
Ellis Island. In these legal petitions, as Fermaglich unemotionally reports,
we meet thousands of American Jews, most of them born in the United
States, explaining under oath that they are changing their names because
they cannot find a job, or because their children are being humiliated or
discriminated against at school, or because with their real names, no one
will hire them for any white-collar position—because, essentially,
American antisemitism has prevented their families’ success.
In her analysis of thousands of name-change petitions, Fermaglich notes
many clear patterns. One is that those with Jewish-sounding names
overwhelmingly predominated such court filings. In 1932, for instance
(nearly a decade after the closure of Ellis Island), over 65 percent of namechange
petitions in New York were filed by people with Jewish-sounding
names. The next-largest group, those with Italian-sounding names, made up
a mere 11 percent of filings. Granted, the Jewish population of New York
that year was twice the size of the city’s Italian American population—but
not six times the size. Another pattern Fermaglich uncovered is that
petitioners with Jewish-sounding names often filed name-change petitions
as families; frequently the motivation cited for the name change involved
the educational and professional prospects of the petitioners’ children. In
these petitions that Fermaglich rather dispassionately describes, we witness
ordinary American Jews in the debasing act of succumbing to
discrimination instead of fighting it.
American antisemitism during the decades that followed the mass
migration was, as Fermaglich puts it, “private” and therefore “insidious.” In
the earlier part of the twentieth century, such discrimination was not subtle,
appearing in job advertisements with the warning “Christians Only” or at
hotels and restaurants posting signs declaring “No Dogs or Jews Allowed.”
