R’ Chaim Kanievsky to switch her name to Sarah, as Shira is not really a Jewish name – it’s just a Hebrew word that people decided to use as a name. Many names we use now have no basis in Judaism. “
I wonder what he would say about Gila, Rina, Ditzah, and Chedvah!
Still, it’s better to take a word from the Torah and call someone’s name by that word, than to use the German word for that same word. “Gittel” is Tova, and Tova is LOSHON HAKODESH, not Gittel, in spite of what some of us may think. The fact that a lot of Torah was learned and disseminated in Yiddish, as well as Yiddish being a unifying language for European Jewry, is not as compelling as it once was, IMO, as a great great deal of Torah is now learned in ENGLISH, the new Yiddish, and most Jews in the USA today speak English. Just ask anyone who learns with an Artscroll Sefer, if English has not become their “heilige” language. Perhaps people should start naming their children Brian, instead of Boruch, by the same logic that compelled their grandparents to opt for a German/Yiddish name versus Loshon Kodesh. Just a thought…