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rue Salasky spent six months of a 10-month teaching assignment in Bulgaria through the U.S. Fulbright program. Her Balkan adventure, including plans to
visit Istanbul, Kiev, Odessa, and Israel, was cut short when Fulbright canceled all its programs worldwide due to the novel coronavirus pandemic and sent everyone home—effective immediately. Salasky was in Baltimore, Md, at the time, attending
with no time to return for goodbyes or even to collect her belongings. She returned home to Norfolk and started the readjustment to U.S. life in the COVID-19 era. The first installment of her experience in Bulgaria was published in the December 14, 2020 edition of Jewish News. This is the second and final piece.
her daughter’s wedding when her foray into Eastern Europe was abruptly over,
Reflections on a sojourn in Bulgaria Prue Salasky
Jewish life In Sofia Seventy years later, the remnants of Bulgarian Jewish life are largely confined to Sofia, where there’s a community center helped by American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee funds and the Ronald S. Lauder Jewish School, which opened in 2019. Together, they complement the Sofia Central Synagogue, a glorious Moorish Revival style building designed by Austrian Friedrich Grunanger to accommodate 1,300 worshipers, and whose 1909 dedication was attended by Tsar Ferdinand 1 and his wife. However, despite the community’s post-Soviet revival—at its rededication in 1996, the mayor of Sofia and other dignitaries attended—and the attendance of hundreds for Hanukkah celebrations, according to volunteer guide Leon Benatov, the Orthodox shul cannot always raise a minyan for Friday night services. When cousins Marilyn and Ken Siegel from Virginia Beach met me in Sofia in mid-February, we called the synagogue in advance to identify ourselves. On arrival, we were admitted and entered a small side chapel; there, Marilyn and I were ushered to the back to follow the Kabbalat Shabbat service from behind view-blocking lace curtains. Meanwhile, Ken sat with a handful of men of varying ages as we all listened anxiously for the arrival of enough men to form a minyan; it was close to 30 minutes after the designated time for services until a sufficient number of men had gathered. The Israeli rabbi, on staff since 2016, proceeded to race through the prayers at breakneck speed using a siddur with Hebrew on one side of the page with Bulgarian facing. We returned on Sunday morning for a
tour of the main sanctuary, a truly spectacular and elaborate interior from the turn of the 20th century when many of the extant synagogues in the Balkans were built, a testament to the general prosperity of Bulgaria’s most recent ‘golden age’ and the comfortable place held by Jews in that society. The guide, Leon Benatov, pointed out a corner of the sanctuary’s floor damaged by an aerial Allied bomb. He was one of those saved during WW II, when in June 1943 his family, like all 25,000 Jewish residents of Sofia, were dispersed to 20 towns in the countryside for their protection. His family stayed in one room in another Jewish family’s home in Provadia, a small town near Varna, the country’s largest port on the Black Sea. Then five years old, Leon recalled the hunger and difficulties of the family’s 15-month exile, but also noted that he, his parents and sister stayed together (his father being over 45 was exempt from the labor camps), and it providentially saved them from the Allied bombing of Sofia. They were also fortunate to return to their home—and eventually were even able to reclaim most of their belongings. After the war, he remembers receiving packages of clothes and food from the JDC. Now 82, Leon, many of whose family were among those making Aliyah after the war, is working to preserve the history and legacy of Jews in Bulgaria. He recently translated a history by Avram Takhzher from Ladino to Bulgarian, a book I purchased (at some expense!), but which was a casualty of my unexpected departure from the country. He has almost completed a book of 3,200 Jewish proverbs in Ladino with a Bulgarian translation; and he’s preparing a reprint of a four-volume Israeli series featuring the biographies of 137 prominent Jews in Bulgaria.
14 | JEWISH NEWS | January 25, 2021 | jewishnewsva.org
Leah Davcheva, in her mid-60s, is also involved in preserving the heritage of the country’s Ladino speakers. She has interviewed more than a dozen in Sofia (some of whom have passed Shofar statue of gratitude to the Bulgarian people in Varna. since she began the project) in Bulgarian for an ethnographic study slated for pubToscani, an Italian architect; in the heart lication in December 2020. She grew up of downtown, the city has repurposed nonobservant in a Jewish community it as an art gallery like those in nearby of about 200 in Ruse (Roo-say) on the Yambol and Haskovo. On its second story, Danube with parents who were both stars of David are just visible on the Communist Party members. They were painted arches forming an unlikely juxtaLadino speakers, but Leah never learned position with the exhibition of Christian the language. She and her husband settled iconography. Its courtyard has the obligain Sofia in the ’70s, but she still considtory thank-you to the people of the town, ers herself an outsider in its religious a freedom statue, and an adjacent building community. that’s a community center—though seemingly closed—for the “approximately 100” Synagogues but no services Jewish residents of the city. Beyond Sofia, there’s a telling absence A couple of weeks later, I planned of active synagogues or any semblance to attend High Holiday services in the of Jewish life in communities that once larger, more prosperous resort/port city of hummed with activity. Yet, emblematic of Varna, 2½ hours north by bus. However, the lack of violence accompanying their the renovated synagogue in a residential abandonment, many of the buildings are neighborhood, home to Chabad since well preserved. 2010, was deserted on Friday evening. Before school started, I had a few With only a 30-minute break from manunencumbered days to explore Burgas, datory training on Saturday morning, I the Black Sea resort city of my teachtook myself instead to the Archeological ing assignment and the country’s fourth Museum, past the prominently situated largest behind Sofia, Plovdiv and Varna. shofar statue of gratitude to the Bulgarian With 2-hour direct flights to Tel Aviv, its people, and whisked around a gallery that beaches and casinos make it a popular has the oldest known gold jewelry in the summer tourist destination for Israelis, world—crafted by Thracians in 4,600 even after a 2012 terrorist bus bombing B.C.E. and discovered this century in a that killed six. I quickly found a former local burial site. Spectacular! synagogue, the same early 20th cenThe next day, not far from some tury vintage as Sofia’s, but designed by Roman ruins, I stumbled across the Naval
