hey people, help me out, to anderstand from where is coming my last name ,,harabagiu,,im finding this name in jewish sites .is my last name jewish or what ?

The simple answer to "or what ?" is yes!!!... ;-)))

On the other hand, the simple answer to "is my last name Jewish...?" is yes... and no!

The original discusion started from another Jew whose name is Harabagiu and whose roots are in Herta, which today is in Ukraine, although the region is contested even by the middle of the road Rumanian nationalists! In the Herta district, the Romanian population may be as high as 95% of the total. Of course, we all know that the border settling problems of Bukowina, Bessarabia and Transnistria are... unsettled.

I was not sure if this is the right avenue for the linguistic analysis of 'haraba' and its cognates, plus its Ottoman and Jewish connection, so I got into more details at two newsgroups, Balkan-Jews http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Balkan-Jews and Rumanian_minorities http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Rumanian_minorities .

Alin