Berta Pando with her father Ezra Dzhaldeti, her mother Fortunae and her sister Rika Dzhaldeti

Berta Pando with her father Ezra Dzhaldeti, her mother Fortunae and her sister Rika Dzhaldeti

I and my family – next to me is my father Ezra Dzhaldeti, my mother Fortunae Levi Dzhaldeti is beside him ad she is holding my sister Rika by the hand.

The photo was taken in 1950. We were on a walk in the park in Yambol. It was the summer and it was my summer recess from ORT. I used to return to Yambol and the tradition to take walks in the park regularly was revived every summer. There is neither a stamp of a photo studio, nor any other inscription on the back of the photo.

In 1949 I went to Sofia to study there. They had just opened a boarding house and a vocational school sponsored by Joint. They called it ORT. It was situated near Rouski Monument whereas the boarding house was on 20 ‘Pozitano’ Street, next to the Jewish school. In the first year there was only me and three other girls. In the second – there were eight girls form all over Bulgaria, in the third – fifteen. In the first year there were 52 boys and 4 girls.

My sister Rika Ezra Dzhaldeti (1943 – 1994) was eight years younger than me and we were in close contact until 1949 when I had to go to Sofia to study. She was very young but I remember she was crying all the time – ‘I want with Betty, I want with Betty.’ So mum would always make me take Rika on my walks in Yambol. And when we turned around the corner and mum couldn’t see us, I would always slap her and send her back. I was a pretty grown-up girl at the time and she always wanted to come with me. Then I went to study in Sofia and then got married. When we had already moved to Plovdiv she came there to study at the college of medicine, to become a laboratory technician. Later on, she returned to Yambol and there she was working as a laboratory technician at the hospital. She didn’t succeed in getting married after all. I was communicating with her more actively in the last few years and she even died while living here with us, in Plovdiv, she got ill and lived here with us for four months, we were taking care of her and she died on her way from Plovdiv to Yambol, where she had to be hospitalized for blood transfusion. She was buried in Yambol.

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