Aron and Bela Ishakh


This is my favorite family picture. Here you can see my beloved husband Aron Ishakh and me. The photo was taken in Ruse in 1973.

When I was young, I was an active member of the Union of Young Workers, or short UYW. 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 club in 1945. 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.

After the foundation of the state of Israel we all felt it as our country and our sympathies for the Jewish nation increased even further. During the wars in Israel of 1967 and 1973 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.