Rachela

The name Rachela reaches back to Hebrew, where rachel meant a ewe, a female sheep. That pastoral image sits at the root of the name, and it has never quite left it.

In the Book of Genesis, Rachel is the wife of Jacob and the mother of Joseph and Benjamin. Her story kept the name alive across centuries of Jewish life, so that Rachela became one of the names most closely tied to Jewish families in Poland. A child called Rachela carried a name read at once as scriptural and familiar.

The meaning is plain and old. Owieczka, a little ewe. There is tenderness in that, the sense of a small animal watched over and counted. On a Polish school register the name would stand slightly apart, and everyone reading it would know where it came from.

Rachela has taken on no Polish diminutives. It stays as it is, close to the Hebrew, close to the ewe it names.