Israeli Name Generator

Israeli names sound different from the biblical Hebrew names most people know. Since the founding of the state, parents have favored short, nature-flavored, often unisex given names: Noa, Tamar, Yael, Shira and Maya for girls; Itai, Yonatan, Omer, Noam and Eitan for boys; and names like Tal, Gal, Adi, Roni, Shaked and Yuval that are given to both. Older generations carry the classic biblical and Yiddish-era names (Moshe, Yitzhak, Shoshana, Rivka), so the first name alone usually tells you roughly when someone was born.

Surnames reveal where a family came from. Mizrahi names like Peretz, Biton, Azulay, Dahan and Ohana (Morocco), Sasson and Shamash (Iraq), Tzadok and Damari (Yemen) and Kashani (Iran) sit alongside Ashkenazi names like Friedman, Shapira, Goldberg and Rosenberg. Many families Hebraized their surnames in the 1950s, producing place and nature names such as Golan, Harel, Lavi, Almog, Barkai and Ben-Ari. Ethiopian-Israeli families often keep Amharic surnames (Tesfaye, Desta), Bukharan families carry -ov endings (Yusupov, Davidov), and Arab citizens of Israel, about a fifth of the population, have names like Masarwa, Khoury and Zoabi.

The list mixes all of these groups in roughly the proportions you would meet in a Tel Aviv office, an army unit or a university class.