Bela Ishakh

Bela Menahem Ishakh
Ruse
Bulgaria
Interviewer: Patricia Nikolova 
Date of interview: November 2004 

Bela Ishakh is a pleasant person with interesting viewpoints on life. Her wisdom that was gained through experience over the years is expressed in many valuable pieces of advice, sayings and observations that Bela is pleased to share with others. Her hospitable home, situated near the Danube, invokes the feeling of orderliness in life and in the family of Bela Ishakh. The sensation that she is the mistress of the house may easily evolve into the sensation that she is the mistress of the situation and also the family ruler. In this respect, it will not be incorrect to say that the position Bela Ishakh has in her family determines the atmosphere of matriarchate.

I am a descendant of a Sephardi 1 family, but unfortunately, I don’t know many specific facts, or any emblematic family stories connected with my ancestors. What I know for sure is that they lived in Silistra, a town near the Danube River, where I was born, too. 

My grandparents’ paternal and maternal parents are not known to me. I know only that the whole family was burned in the death camps in 1943 after the deportation of Macedonian Jews 2. I don’t know when the parents of my parents were born, and I can’t say anything about their life before their coming to live in Bulgaria. I have no idea of what their home might have looked like. I only know they were not rich.

My parents were called Menahem and Roza Alfandari. They were born in Istanbul and Silistra, respectively. My father was born in 1889 and died in 1969, and my mother was born in 1903 and died in 1968. They were buried in the Jewish cemetery in one and the same grave. Dad was in the trade with grain crops, wheat, rice, and Mom had always been a housewife. They had elementary education.

My parents were religious people and this was what my children inherited, too, since my father and mother actively helped me with the bringing-up of my own children. We attended services at the synagogue quite regularly, especially on the high Jewish holidays such as Yom Kippur, Pesach, Chanukkah, Lag ba-Omer, Purim, and Rosh Hashanah. My favorite holiday was Pesach. I liked the history of this holiday, especially the lesson of this holiday, which was for me that the Jewish people have been united because of their faith and the strength of this faith.
   
We spoke Ladino 3 at home, but of course we could communicate in Bulgarian when the situation required it. We used to read non-religious books mainly, secular novels by Mayne Reid [(1818-1883): Irish-American novelist] and others, and after that Marxist literature, dialectical materialism. We, the children read these books.

We lived a simple life in a tidy, humble house in the Jewish neighborhood of Ruse. The house had two rooms and a kitchen. We used wood for heating. There was no electricity then. We had oil lamps. Despite the poverty of my childhood, I cannot complain because I felt good.  

I was born in 1925 in the beautiful town of Silistra, near the Danube River. I am a hairdresser by profession. I have two sisters whom I love very much. The first one is Victoria Markus [nee Alfandari] and the second is Ester Alfandari. Both of them are now in Israel. I was the youngest of all the three, but I was the first to marry.

During the totalitarian period my sister Ester lived in Sofia and immigrated to Israel in 1999. Now she lives in Rishon Le Zion. She is married to David Alfandari, who worked as a textile designer when he lived in Bulgaria. They are not religious. Their son, Simon Alfandari, is a doctor. At present, Ester and David are pensioners.

Victoria lived in Ruse together with her husband Leon Markus and after his death in 2002 she moved to Israel – to stay with her son Avram Markus. They live in Kiryat Yam. They are not religious, either.

As a child, I attended the Jewish nursery and the Jewish school in Ruse. The Jewish school then started when the kids were first-graders and ended when they completed their seventh school year. After that, I graduated from the Jewish school in Ruse. Adon [‘Sir’ in Ivrit] Yosif Safra was our teacher in Ivrit. He was a favorite with us because he was very intelligent and nice. I didn’t hate any of the subjects at school, I didn’t need private lessons in any of them, and I didn’t play any musical instrument. 

We moved to live in Ruse when I was still very young. I remember that Ruse always had nice markets. Villagers from the nearby settlements came to sell their goods and the citizens crowded to buy things. We had a big and a small market there. We preferred the small one. Tuesdays and Fridays were the market days. All tradesmen there were favorites with us.

In the Jewish quarter on David, Vidin, Klementina, Gurko, Dondukov and Korsakov Streets, where the Jewish population lived, there were only small houses to see. The relationships between the poor and rich Jews were regulated by the Jewish community that collected funds from the rich Jews to give them to the poor.

I’d like to tell you in brief the history of Jews in the town of Ruse, known in the past as Ruscuk [in Turkish]. It was founded in 968 by Russians who one year before that crossed the Danube River fighting against the Bulgarian Kingdom 4. The name Ruscuk in Turkish means ‘many Russians.’ Turks captured the town in 1398. In 1519 the inhabitants were mowed down by plague. At the end of the 17th century, Ruse was a small town without significant commercial importance. Its population most probably was between 6,000 and 7,000 people, 600 families were Bulgarian.

No evidence of Jewish presence in the town was recorded until 1788, when the first Jewish tradesmen arrived. They did not settle there permanently, though. The first Jew who settled in Ruse was Mayer Ben Aron, called Bohor Karpus. He was the forefather of a family with the same name that lived in the town until 1948, when they immigrated to Israel.

At the end of the 18th century the town was governed by Mustafa Pasha. His wife was once ill and a Jewish nurse looked after her. But the Jewish holidays Rosh Hashanah and [Yom] Kippur were nearing and the Jewish woman said she had to go to Giurgiu [opposite side of the Danube, in Walachia, today Romania], because there lived her family and there was the nearest synagogue. Ruse had no synagogue back then. All Jews from Ruse traveled to the nearest towns where there were synagogues.

Mustafa Pasha was convinced that a synagogue would keep them within the town, so he donated one of his houses near the riverbank and it became the first prayer house for the Jews in Ruse. This happened in 1797. The first chazzan of the Ruse synagogue in 1800 was Avram Gratsiani. In 1824 a funeral commission [Chevra Kaddisha] started operating.

By the middle of the 19th century, Ruse had become one of the largest towns on Bulgarian territory. It was a settlement with boosting economy and was developing into a big center of enlightenment and culture, as well as an important river port. Crucial importance for the town development was the construction of the Ruse-Varna railway line in 1866.

In Ruse there were three synagogues: two were of the Sephardim, and one belonged to the Ashkenazim. In both of the Sephardi synagogues, ‘the small’ and ‘the big’ one, as they used to call them, there were religious rituals taking place. On weekdays, the rituals were performed in the small synagogue.

Usually, my family attended services at the big synagogue. The reading of the Torah on Erev Sabbath and for other Jewish holidays was taking place at the big synagogue. Every family that had paid a voluntary fee had special places reserved there. During the prayerful days at Pesach, Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah even women were gathering in the synagogue whose seats were separate from those of men; women’s places were on the balcony.

Yosif Alhalel was the chazzan of the Sephardi synagogues, and he was also a secretary of the Jewish community. Albert Yulzari was the shammash as well as the archivist. Naftali Rut was rabbi at the Ashkenazi synagogue, while Lupo Geldstein was the shammash. Chevra Kaddisha responsibilities were entrusted by the community to Simon Segal and Morits Kronberg. Both the Ashkenazi and Sephardi synagogues were religious centers where young and old Jews gathered for Erev Sabbath and the Jewish holidays. There the Jewish traditions were kept alive and passed from father to son. The religious activity of the synagogues was part of the activity of the whole community. 

There were no major differences between the large Sephardi and the significantly smaller Askenazi communities – neither from a religious nor a lifestyle point of view. Our Bet Am was a community. Periodically, concerts and social evenings were organized there, which attracted the Jewish youth. Events organized by the Askenazi or by the Sephardi community were intended for all the Jews. The only difference was that we had separate municipalities.

Later, when the time of the Law for the Protection of the Nation began 5, the Ashkenazi municipality was ruined, and so was their synagogue. Of course, Ashkenazim in Ruse spoke Yiddish to each other; they spoke usually in Bulgarian with us. Frankly speaking, I don’t recall any marriages between the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim. If something of the kind had happened, I would have remembered it, that’s for sure.

The [Sephardi] Jewish community had its own building that contained three office rooms, a big hall and a library. Not every Jewish organization these days could boast about such preciseness of governing the community as ours could. Our community, for example, kept registers of its members’ marital status. We had registers of the families in Ruse, registers of the marriages, a book for the newborns and another one for the funerals. Today one can still see them because they are well preserved, although nobody keeps such records here anymore.

We also had a kind of internal healthcare, within the community. The Bikur Cholim 6 committee provided nurses or ‘rohesas’ [Ladino for ‘doctors’] to those people who were old and lived alone. Chevra Kaddisha was the funeral committee and its heads were Mois Aron Hakim and Yosif Shlomo Kapon. They took care of the cemetery, so that it looked decent, and also made sure the funerals were carried out in line with the Jewish traditions. There was a small hut within the graveyard where a custodian lived permanently. These customs now may sound like a fiction.

I remember Ez-Chaim, the committee for poor and sick women in childbirth. Auntie Mari, Auntie Ernestina, Adon Aron and Auntie Sofie were in charge of this. Their full names were Mari Avram Asher, Ernestina Aron Djaldeti and Sofie David Maer, but I can’t remember any biographical facts about them. However, I remember them as selfless and dedicated people. Usually they visited in shifts the sick people and provided them with medicines and funds. Isak Eshkenazi and Baruh Magriso were in charge of the committee for voluntary donations. Their mission was particularly respected within the community, because it was they who secured funds for the community’s budget, but I learned about this later.

We also had an old people’s home. For example, nowadays, the only old people’s home operating in Sofia it is known under the metaphorical name ‘Parents’ home.’ Half a century before that there was an old people’s home in Ruse, owned by the municipality, as it is today the situation with the house in Sofia. Yako Kapon was the director of the one in Ruse. A total of 20 poor and lonely people were accommodated there and all their expenses were covered by the municipality. As a matter of fact, none of my relatives has ever been accommodated there.

In those days there were a lot of charity activities taking place within our community. The funds in the Jewish municipality’s budget were used for financing the implementation of special programs. These programs were socially intended and they helped poor people achieve a better living standard. The whole Jewish community co-operated for the implementation of these programs.

Jewish traditions were preserved to a great extent thanks to the Jewish school. We studied there from first to seventh grade. During our Hebrew classes we read the Tannakh and learned what the origin of the tradition was. The school’s headmaster Adon Josif Safra read the Tannakh for us and taught the kids to speak Hebrew. The school, which had 15 classrooms, a canteen and a gym, provided the opportunity for education of children from pre-school age up to the stage when they completed their elementary education. We didn’t have a yeshivah, but the school had a canteen, where dozens of children from poor families could have meals, including me and my brothers. On Pesach these children were given new shoes and clothes. 

As far as the school holidays of 1929 and 1930 are concerned, I was sent to Ruse’s Jewish school on the Varna campus. Several poor kids were selected and sent to holiday resorts with the financial support of the Jewish community. That was the first time I got on a train. Several rooms with beds were prepared for us in Varna. There was a chef, too, and we called her Auntie Hursi.

After school we usually went to the Maccabi 7 yard to play. The chairman of Maccabi was Baruh Ovadia, a prominent public figure of Ruse’s Jewish community. Wonderful celebrations of the high holidays Chanukkah, Purim and Pesach were organized under his auspices. On Lag ba-Omer for example we had an impressive manifestation with music in the streets of Ruse, we always had a drummer in the avant-garde. In the afternoon the whole Jewish community would gather at the Habermann site near Ruse, on a meadow, where we, the Maccabi members, would present complex physical exercises and gymnastic pyramids. It was a nice time.

Back then Maccabi was openly a Zionist organization whose aim was to prepare healthy and strong young men and women who would then immigrate to Palestine in order to build anew the Jewish State. We were prepared for that and most of my friends emigrated there during the great immigration process in 1948 [cf. Mass Aliyah] 8 and some of them even before that.

It is known that a group of 200 Jews set off on a boat from Varna in 1940, but they suffered shipwreck in the Marmara Sea and most of them died. These were mainly young Jews from Sofia and Plovdiv. At the same time, a recruitment campaign for young people who want to immigrate to Israel was taking place in Ruse. However, there was no mass emigration from our town after this campaign, but I am not informed about the reasons.

When I was young, I was an active member of the Union of Young Workers, or short UYW 9. That was in fact the reason why I met my future husband, Aron Gavriel Ishakh, who was also a member of the UYW. We met in our illegal club in 1945. [Editor’s note: It must have already been legal, as this happened after 9th September 1944 when the communists came to power in Bulgaria.] We had to prepare a wall-newspaper then, but I can’t remember any details except for that we gathered in the UYW club on Gurko Street. He saw me home and we became friends.

We married on 19th September 1945. We are proud that our wedding was one of the first civil marriages that took place in Ruse.

As a matter of fact, my husband Aron started working at the age of 14. As a boy he walked round the streets of Ruse together with his two brothers, Solomon and Samuel. The three of them used to sell balloons to earn their living, as they were very poor. Moreover, they were half-orphans because their mother had already died of cancer. So their sister Rebecca looked after them for a long time. She was already 13 years old when their mother Sofi Aron Ishakh died. This tragic event, which changed the life of my future husband, happened during the Law for the Protection of the Nation. We didn’t know each other back then, though.

What I know about my husband’s family is that unlike me he is a native Ruse citizen. His maternal grandfather, Aron Eshkenazi, was the son of the Silistra rabbi. When our compatriots moved to Israel and we remained here without a chazzan, it was he who read the prayers in the synagogue. His father on his mother’s side had been a well-known tailor in Ruse.

My husband’s mother was a dressmaker. They were very poor, especially after her death. Since his father, Gavriel Ishakh, had to earn the living for four children and himself, he was forced to sell what he produced for next to nothing.

During the Law for the Protection of the Nation my future husband was sent as a worker to a forced labor camp 10 for Jews. Barely 18 years old he was sent to the camp in the village of Mikre, Lovech region, and after that he was moved to ‘Sveti Vrach’ camp and then to another one in the village of Veselinovo, Shumen region. In fact, Jewish men were then used as working force at no cost. They used them to build the road between Shumen and Burgas.

I remained in the Jewish ghetto of Ruse, where I made social contacts with the young Jewish boys and girls who were interned from Sofia. All of us were then supporters of the Union of Young Workers. My friends’ names from this period were Violeta, Sami, Moni, Stela and others, but I can’t remember their family names any more.

There was also Galiko, who was interned from Sofia. He was handicapped. That was how he was born – with tangled legs and strangely twisted arms. Our Jewish community looked after him and regularly walked him in the town in a perambulator.

Our gatherings of the Union of Young Workers often took place at his house. We often discussed the idea of the foundation of [the state of] Israel, which meant we were Zionists to a certain extent. I remember that the house he was renting was right opposite to Maccabi. In spite of the terror, I think this period was romantic. 

I remember very well the period of the Law for the Protection of the Nation and the effect it had in Ruse. Here, especially, the Jewish community has always had good relationships with the Bulgarians. But I should underline that before the Law for the Protection of the Nation and at the beginning of World War II several particularly aggressive fascist organizations were set up in our town. They were called Brannik 11, Ratnik 12, Legionnaires [Bulgarian Legions] 13 and Otets Paisii 14. They were youth organizations after the model of the German ‘Hitlerjugend’ [Hitler Youth] 15, that is – the first youth organizations with anti-Semitic character here.

I remember that the members of Brannik, Ratnik, Legionnaires and Otets Paisii often used to march in the streets of Ruse as if in a threatening demonstration. They promised death to Jews, their slogans were: ‘Death to Jews’ or ‘Jews out of Bulgaria.’ They would also beat young Jewish people and write anti-Semitic slogans on the houses’ walls, such as ‘Long Live Hitler,’ ‘Death to All Jews’, and they would circulate provocative leaflets and so on and so on. Their goal was to raise anti-Semitic feelings in Bulgarian society. That proved eventually that anti-Semitism in Bulgaria was imported, it had no true origins in this society, since it was imitative.

Reactions of the Bulgarian society then were quite normal. Bulgarians did not pay attention to these fascistic young people. The official authorities behaved differently, though. I think that is why a total of 460 Jews was unfairly convicted and imprisoned between 1940 and 1941. Responsibility for these unfair sentences lies on  King Boris III 16, who was known to be an ally of Hitler during this period. Of course the Bulgarian government then is also to be held responsible.

Among those imprisoned  from Ruse were my acquaintances Moni Hakim, Sason Panizhel, Liza Hason, Jules Aroyo, Yako Melamed, Salvador Papo, Eli Ashoev, Hor Eliezer, Mois Natan, Izidor Ayzner, Yako Yulzari and others. They were imprisoned because they were detected as being members of the Union of Young Workers.

Meanwhile, 260 other Jews were fighting in the partisan groups. [Editor’s note: These are the actual figures, as the interviewee knows them from her husband, Aron Gavriel Ishakh, who had studied the archives and card-indexes of the Jewish community in Ruse as a chairman of the Israeli Religious Council in Ruse.] Among them from our town were Yako Izidor Yakov and Miko Yulzari. I remember Yako Yakov, who made a career as a political officer after 9th September 1944 and was the director of the theater in Ruse for many years.

The administration of the Jewish community also had its own position on the issue during the war. It counted much on the Jews who led Zionist organizations. The policy of the community put accents – of course we felt these bans as an instance of terror, but we couldn’t do anything against them – on Zionism and the Jewish religious traditions.

The war period unexpectedly sharpened the struggle between the individual Jewish organizations. Their ideological predilections sharpened. On the one hand, all Zionist organizations – Poalei Zion 17, General Zionists 18 and Revisionists 19 – were unified in their idea that the Jews should stay away from any fight against fascism. They thought that any kind of participations of Jews would strengthen the anti-Semitic feelings. They tried to persuade Jews in different ways and I think they were right.

The chairman of the community, Yosif Levi, several times at Erev Sabbath appealed to the attention of parents to do everything they can and exert influence on their children not to take part in the fight against fascism. The youth organization Hashomer Hatzair 20 was of the opposite opinion. The most influential among them were Izidor Ayzner, Yako Yakov and Tinka Dzhain, who organized a course for supporting the anti-fascist struggle.

Part of the young people from the sports organization Maccabi – Moni Hakim, Miko Yulzari, Fifi Mashiah and Liza Hason – attracted a great group of supporters of the same cause. These young Jewish men and women from Ruse, organized in groups of three, led the illegal conspiracy activities against fascism. Although my husband, Aron Gavriel Ishakh, and I did not join them, we were also engaged in the illegal activity connected with the Union of Young Workers.

I remember very well some of their bravest actions. For example, in 1941 during the German invasion of the Soviet Union 21, Leon Tadzher, who was a docker in Ruse and had escaped from a Jewish [forced] labor camp, decided to inflame the oil refinement utilities of the ‘Petrol’ plant. He killed with his knife the German security guard who tried to take hold of him, but was caught by the workers who started running after him. Later, Leon was sentenced to death and hanged.

Leon Tadzher’s full story was as follows. He was born in 1903 in Sofia and he found a way – I don’t know how exactly – to immigrate illegally to Palestine already in the 1920s. He was expelled and returned to Bulgaria in 1934 because of his revolutionary activity against the English colonialist administration.

When back in Sofia he earned his living as a workman in the construction sector. He actively took part in the strike of the sector’s trade union. In those days Leon Tadzher as a prominent Zionist with leftist [communist] views was often invited by the Jewish national library club to deliver lectures on Zionist topics, for example: why should the country Israel be constituted, why should people immigrate to Israel.

Leon Tadzher appeared on the police’s list of dangerous communist activists, that is a criminal for the then monarchist government. So, on 11th April 1941 he was officially asked to present himself before the police and was accused of something he hadn’t done. He was beaten and tormented, after which he was released because of lack of evidence.

After he was let free, Leon was interned to Isperih. Then, after the introduction of the Law for the Protection of the Nation he was sent to a Jewish forced labor camp near the village of Tserovo.

When the war between Germany and the USSR was declared, Tadzher escaped from the camp and was hiding in the huts and orchards near Ruse. He managed to get in touch with the local illegal communist workers who helped him to start working as a docker and after that as a blue-collar worker in the state-owned Ruse factory Petrol under the false name Dimitar Kirov and a Bulgarian identity card.

At the end of 1941, Leon Tadzher set fire to the crude oil refineries of the Petrol plant. The rest you already know. He was hanged on the central town square in Ruse on 17th November 1941.

After this event, the Gestapo, which had offices also in Ruse, demanded that the regional police chief of staff detain 300 of the most distinguished Jews in the town, and send them to the Germans for deportation to death camps.

This is one of my most dramatic memories. The compiling of the list was assigned to the chairman of the Jewish community, Yosif Levi. The list was ready but it contained the names of those next of kin to political prisoners and anti-fascists instead of rich and well-known Jews. In fact, the richer among us managed to buy themselves out of this list for a serious amount of money. The money was handed to the regional police chief of staff, Stefan Simeonov, who was also our delegate on Jewish matters. He had no objections on his turn.

After that, the Jews whose names had remained on the list were arrested and sent to the temporary camps Somovit 22 near the Danube River and Kailuka 23 near Pleven, after which they were to be deported to the death camps. But as it is known – the camp near Kailuka  was set on fire. Among the ten victims of the arson, only one man was from Ruse – Nissim Benvenisti.

The substitution of names in the list as well as the bribery of the Gestapo in Ruse became known after 1944. The chairman of the community, Yosif Levi, then hid in the English Embassy. From there he managed to escape to Palestine. He was not brought to justice, because he was forced to present such a list to the then Bulgarian authorities that were controlled by the Gestapo in Ruse.

From this difficult period, I remember well the victims of the Jewish community in Ruse: Izidor Ayzner, who was two years older than me, and Tinka Dzhain – she was one year younger.

Izidor became a member of the Union of Young Workers in Ruse when he was very young; he was only 17 years old. He was very clever and respected with his knowledge of Marxist ideas. That is why he was very soon appointed secretary of the Ruse Union of Young Workers’ town committee. He was also known for his talent for organizing the meetings of young people. I was among them, too. Thus Izidor could build a strong organization in a very short period of time, which consisted of 150 young men and women, most of them Jews.

What kind of activities were we involved in? Led by him, we were distributing leaflets and were writing anti-German slogans on the houses’ walls at nights, for example. But it didn’t last for long. Izidor was caught by the police during the Law for the Protection of the Nation in 1942 and was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. He was, however, tormented to death in the Varna prison, where he was sent to, as a result of which he died in May 1943.

Ana Ventura was the daughter of the well-known Ruse industrialist Avram Ventura, who owned ‘Zhiti’ factory. Influenced by Izidor Ayzner she became an active member of the local young workers’ organization – of course it was an illegal organization – yet before the Law for the Protection of the Nation was introduced. After Ayzner’s death she became a secretary of UYW regional committee. She organized and led many campaigns against the fascist regime of which my friends and I only heard because we didn’t take part in them. I admired her. Ana Ventura was killed in her illegal lodgings in Ruse in February 1944.  

Tinka Dzhain had a similar fate to that of Izidor Ayzner and Ana Ventura. Tinka and I were both members of Hashomer Hatzair with the only difference that she was influenced by Isi Ayzner and Yako Yakov and became a member of the illegal Union of Young Workers. She took part in many campaigns against the fascist authorities. I don’t remember what exactly they were. She got involved in illegal activities already in 1943,during the Law for the Protection of the Nation, becoming a political commissioner of an illegal fighting group.

In the end she was betrayed by the person in whose lodgings she lived illegally. The police executed her in the village of Bozhichen in the region of Ruse. After 10th November 1989 24, we, the Jews from the Ruse’s Jewish Organization spent own funds to build a memorial for her at her place of death – on the central square in Bozhichen. 

After 9th September 1944 25, my husband worked many years for the police, then called militia, and after the democratic changes in Bulgaria [in 1989] became a chairman of the Israeli Religious Council in Ruse. He has always been one of the most respected people in both Bulgarian and Jewish communities. He is also known for the fact that he introduced the ‘Personal Number’ [‘Edinen Grazhdanski Nomer’ (EGN), which stands for ‘Unified Civil Number’, used to certify the identity of Bulgarian citizens] in Bulgaria after the pattern of western European societies. His major passion – to collect facts and commentaries on the history of Ruse’s Jewry materialized recently in his book ‘Historic Notes on the Jews in Ruse’ [Ruse, 2002].

After the foundation of the state of Israel 26 we all felt it as our country and our sympathies for the Jewish nation increased even further. During the wars in Israel of 1967 27 and 1973 28 we were regularly reading all kinds of commentaries on them in the Bulgarian press, although we didn’t believe in them at all. From the letters we received from our friends there, we knew that the war was incited by the Arabs. I have been to Israel only once – in 1989 – and I loved the life there. When I came back to Bulgaria I felt the difference at once. In fact, from all our relatives it was my husband and I who remained in Bulgaria.

I have two daughters: Sonia, born in 1946, and Roza, born in 1953. My elder daughter graduated from the mechanical technical school ‘Yuriy Gagarin’ in Ruse and now works for ‘Shalom’ 29, being also the chairwoman of the economy commission at ‘Shalom.’ She is in charge of the collecting of rents from the organization’s estates that were let. These funds go for support to the local Jewish organization.

My younger daughter works as a statistician at the Statistical Office. Roza is divorced; her family name was Dalakmanska, but now she is Ishakh again.

My elder daughter’s family name is Grigorova. Her son, Aron, lives in Ramat Gan and in 2004 he became father of a son, whose name is Ben. I am very sad I am not around him in Israel now, so that I can at least get a glimpse of my great-grandson.

Aron graduated from a commercial and industrial management college and is a certified engineer. He works for a company and they are very satisfied with him. Before that his name was Roman, because there was a regulation once [in socialist times] that children from mixed marriages were Bulgarians and they could not have foreign names.

My children were brought up in line with the Jewish traditions by their grandfather and grandmother Menahem and Roza Alfandari. They were very religious people, observed all the traditions and thought very highly of the Jewry. That means they strictly observed Jewish rituals on holidays and on Sabbath.

My parents passed on to my children their knowledge, firstly, about the Jewish cuisine and, secondly, about our holidays Pesach, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot, Lag-ba-Omer. They celebrated these at home. Of course, we used to attend services at the synagogue, but rarely. I mean, we visited the synagogue only for the high Jewish holidays, such as Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Chanukkah, Pesach, Sukkot etc.

The date 10th November 1989 was warmly welcomed by the Jewry of Ruse. As a matter of fact, our regional organization ‘Shalom’ is apolitical. We don’t like focusing on politics, but it was very favorable for us that our estates were given back to us as we now have the chance to lead better lives; now we can also make use of the freedom to reconstruct our traditions. Before that we were deprived of our buildings and we had to pay rent to the municipal Housing Estate Fund.

We were not allowed to observe our rituals in public. They wanted from us to have our events together with the Fatherland Front 30. We didn’t have much choice then because of the policy of the Bulgarian Communist Party’s Central Committee. Their idea was to quickly and easily assimilate Jews through mixed marriages between Bulgarians and Jews. As a result there are almost no Jews in Ruse nowadays, and those who remain are of mixed origin. There are only five pure-blooded families left in Ruse now. I am proud that the Ishakh family is among them.

As a matter of fact, during the totalitarian period, when we were deprived of our estates, we were also deprived of our synagogues. I am speaking of the two synagogues: the big Sephardi one and that of the Ashkenazim. The small Sephardi synagogue was demolished in 1935 because it was then almost in ruins and the Jewish community took a decision to demolish it. An apartment block was built on the site. The big synagogue was given as an atelier to a town council sculptor and he made his sculptures in there. So our synagogue started looking like a bungalow.

The Ashkenazi synagogue was given to the state lottery and they built twelve small rooms in it. When we were given back our estates in 1989, we were also given the two synagogues. We had a double problem to solve. We had to pull down the inner walls in the Ashkenazi synagogue in order to transform it into a synagogue and a club again.

We needed money, but we didn’t have it. That is why we sold an estate. I am speaking of an old house that was in the possession of a Jew who immigrated to Palestine before 1948. The house remained as a property of the Jewish community in Ruse. It was located on Alexandrovska Street, and we started the reconstruction. That happened in 1992.

Meanwhile, the big Sephardi synagogue started falling into ruins. It was crumbling away in front of our eyes, but we didn’t have the money to reconstruct it. We asked for 100,000 BGN [which equals some EUR 50,000] from the central governing body of Shalom in Sofia – but the sum was very high and there was nobody to give it to us.

That was the reason why the governing committee of Ruse’s Shalom decided to sell it to an Evangelist sect. [Editor’s note: It is most probably a smaller neo-Protestant Church.] All the Jews in Ruse are convinced that it is a sect, not a widely accepted branch of the Christian religion. And we sold it. They spent USD 120,000 to reconstruct the building.

It is sad, but it looks now exactly the way it did 50 years ago. But it is no longer functioning as a synagogue. And it will never be a synagogue again, because we don’t have funds to buy it back from the Evangelists. 

If I have to express my personal opinion of the historical date of 10th November 1989, I would rather say I am satisfied with the changes. I feel freer than before, my family also enjoys the new social conditions. After the changes, I, as all other Jews of my age, received the three installments of the aid from the Swiss Fund. It is no secret that both my daughters have their jobs, and both my sisters immigrated to Israel where they feel comfortable.

This is the one side of the coin, though. On the other hand, I don’t’ like the economic changes that took place after democracy was established in Bulgaria. Unemployment, poverty and discontent – that were the seeds of democracy here. Before 1989, everybody had a job, the society was calm, everybody could build his own home. My family was even in the possession of a plot of land where we grew okra and grapes for making wine.

This unemployment has affected the other part of my family: my grandson [Sonia’s son] is jobless, so is my daughter-in-law. It is paradoxical how we reached to a situation when my husband and I have to help them out with money from our pensions; to help them with our advice and to take care of them.

Glossary