My name may be Bogus, but the story is super Jewish

My name may be Bogus, but the story of how my family acquired this name is super Jewish. With all the Passover posts hitting the feed, I thought I'd tell a cool Jew story too lol

So we always knew our name was originally Boguslavski. My dad's grandparents arrived in NY in 1900-05, and the lavski was cut off because it was too hard to spell or understand. Thus, Bogus.

For most of my life that was the end of the story.

We took a trip to Israel in 2012, and in Jerusalem, visited the Holocaust museum. At the end of the museum is the Hall of Names, a compendium of all collected data on Jewish lineage. Vast amounts of resources went in to collecting and making this data available for Jews who have no idea where their families came from.

Looking through the data, I found thousands of Boguslavkis, spelled in every manner, and many Sam Boguslavskis (my great grandfather's name). No luck.

We exit the main building and enter this outdoor exhibit, a cemetery of sorts. Giant headstones 15-20 ft high form a bit of a pathway, almost maze-like. Each stone represents a country in Europe, and on each are 20-50 words, names of villages in the country whose Jewish population was completely wiped out in the holocaust.

As we're about to exit, the last stone represents Ukraine. I stop dead in my tracks, as if hit by a brick, or as if I saw a ghost. My breath was stolen.

On the Ukraine stone, the word Boguslav.

At once, it all clicked. Our last name is not unique, it's actually a story of where we came from. We are of the village Boguslav in Ukraine, as are many others, hence the thousands of Boguslavskis spelled all sorts of ways in the Hall of Names.

We still don't know anything about our family before they immigrated to the US, but we know where to go to find it.

Fast forward to 2020, and I'm volunteering and protesting state-sponsored police violence across the Bay Area with Tha Hood Squad. One day, JT, the leader of the squad, asked me what tribe I come from, and what our symbol is.

"I'm Ashkenazi Jew, and our symbol is just the Star of David, which isn't very specific"

"Nah man, I mean like what actual tribe do your people come from? Not like the whole group of European Jews, but like the village."

So I started researching the history of Boguslav and my people there. What I found really changed my understanding of my place in my ancestry.

It turns out, the people of Boguslav were subjected to state-sponsored violence in the form of Pogroms for over a century at the hands of the Russian and Ukrainian governments.

My family fled this violence to the US.

However, the Jewish people of this region, including specifically in Boguslav, formed a defense group called the Jewish Defense League, to protect their people against the progroms.

When a pogrom was imminent, the JDL would pour into the street blowing the shofar (a ram's horn for you gentiles) to alert the village and bring the troops into the streets to clash with the State.

THIS WAS WHAT I WAS DOING IN THE BAY WITH THA HOOD SQUAD.

I was floored. Without knowing it, I was walking in the path of my ancestors. I was protecting Black and Brown communities from the same state sponsored violence visited upon my people in Boguslav.

I came back to JT with the image of the Shofar.

"This is the symbol of MY tribe. It represents a call to arms, to stand up for the oppressed, and to fill the streets with opposition to state-sponsored violence."

All my life my name was a punchline. A joke people made and I played along with at my expense. It was always harmless of course. But it didn't fill me with pride.

Now, as an adult with a deep knowledge of my ancestry and my place within it, I'm prouder than hell to be a Bogus. I'll never stop filling the streets in opposition to the violence of the State and fascism.

I may still crack jokes about my name being Bogus, but it's with a sly smile that I know something really profound that others don't. They aren't actually in on the joke.