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A GUIDE TO

Jewish Bulg ri

"A must for everyone interested in Jewish heritage in Eastern Europe"

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A Guide to Jewish Bulgaria fills an important

and all-too-frequently neglected niche in Bulgarian
history.
Elizabeth Kostova, North Carolina, USA
In a country that has been populated by
Jews for many centuries and that prides itself on
having saved its Jews from the Holocaust, there is
surprisingly little Jewish heritage beyond the very
obvious. What remains a disused synagogue here,
an old, neglected cemetery or the ruin of a building
there is sometimes extremely difficult to find.
Unless you know exactly where to look.
This superbly researched, written and
photographed book is a must for everyone
interested in Jewish heritage in Eastern Europe
in general and Bulgaria in particular.
Samuel Finzi, Berlin
Bulgaria did not turn over its Jews in World War
II but afterwards, when they left for Israel, it did
nothing to preserve their heritage, synagogues and
cemeteries. This informative, well-documented,
and above all very impressive book does much to
rectify this. It is not a requiem for the Bulgarian Jews,
but rather a historical and artistic testimonial to the
remnants of the Bulgarian Jews comprehensive
contribution to the country that once was their
motherland.
Dr Baruch Hazan, Tel Aviv
Elegant and eloquent, this book is a fascinating
journey through one of the least known lands in
Europe. Wonderful throughout!
Dr Milena Borden, London

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This book is dedicated to those who come to find their roots,

and then return in order to understand them

Gilad
Gilad

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
Dimana Trankova
Anthony Georgieff

JEWISH
BULGARIA
A GUIDE TO

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Front cover: Centennial anniversary of the Sofia Central Synagogue, 9 September 2009;
Back cover: Menorah, Jewish Museum of History, Sofia
Yadad and Torah scroll from the 19th Century, Jewish Museum of History, Sofia (page 5);
Jews carrying Torah scrolls in the Sofia Central Synagogue (page 166)

, 2011
, 2011
, 2011
. ,
, ,
, (, , ,
), .
.
.

.

Dimana Trankova, 2011

Anthony Georgieff, 2011
Vagabond Media Ltd, 2011
All Rights Reserved. Without limiting the rights under the copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying or otherwise), without the prior written consent of the publisher.
The publisher assumes no responsibility, direct or implied, for any advertising content. Products and services mentioned
are subject to change without prior notice.You are strongly advised to make proper research and seek professional
advice before making any financial commitment in response to advertising material.

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CONTENTS

Preface
Early History
From the Middle Ages to 1878
Jews in Independent Bulgaria
Second World War
Emigration to Eretz Israel
Rescue of Bulgaria's Jews
Exodus
Time of the Commissars
New Beginnings
Sofia
Vidin
Ruse
Shumen
Silistra
Varna
Burgas

Karnobat
Plovdiv
Pazardzhik
Gotse Delchev
Kyustendil
Samokov
Dupnitsa
Off the Beaten Track
Stara Zagora,Yambol, Sliven,
Kazanlak, Nikopol, Lom, Svishtov,
Pleven, Haskovo, Kardzhali, Dobrich,
Sboryanovo
Antisemitism in Bulgaria

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Preface

When asked about the sources

of their national pride, most educated
Bulgarians don't have to think too long:
"The salvation of the Bulgarian Jews from
the Holocaust" is usually one of the top
three answers. Bulgaria, they will assert,
stands unique in Europe and the world in
that it did not allow its Jewish citizens to be
transported to extermination in the Nazi
death camps. Christians, Jews, Muslims and
Gypsies lived in peace and harmony, they will
add, reinstating the Bulgarians' "proverbial"
hospitality and tolerance.Your Bulgarian in
the street will probably omit to mention
the Bulgarian State Railways cattle cars
that brought over 11,000 Jews to Treblinka
and Auschwitz from the then Bulgariaadministered territories of Aegean Thrace
and Vardar Macedonia. Any question likely to
arise will not be about the fact of the rescue,
but about who should be credited for it.
As leaders and political systems changed
in Eastern Europe's post-Communist years,
so did the answers to this question. Initially,
the Communist school textbooks claimed
that it had been the Communist Party and
its leading functionaries who were personally
to be lauded for the heroic deed. With the
fall of Communism in 1989, perceptions

8 JewishBulgaria

and attitudes changed. The regal figure of

Bulgaria's King Boris III, a war-time ally
of Hitler, emerged. It was because of his
cunning policy of procrastination and his
manoeuvring that not one Jew was sent to
certain death, the story went. But it would
soon transpire that things in Bulgaria's
recent history were not so black-and-white.
The name of Dimitar Peshev, the 1940s
deputy speaker of parliament, came to the
fore. Ignored and largely forgotten under
Communism, Peshev now shone as a valiant
citizen who not only stood against the
government's intention to make Bulgaria
Judenfrei, but was the organiser of a popular
movement to prevent what had seemed like
an accomplished deed.
These theories, of course, conflicted with
each other, and Bulgaria's post-Communist
leaders settled for the least controversial
option. It was the Bulgarian people as a
whole, they claimed, it was the Bulgarian
nation as such that rose up and saved
its Jews. It was a nation of selfless Raoul
Wallenbergs and not a single Maurice Papon.
But can virtue, the other side of crime,
be collectivised? Is it not individuals who are
to be held responsible for whatever good or
evil happens?

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Details from a parochet curtain, Sofia Central Synagogue

Any reflection on these questions will

evoke other questions. If the Kingdom of
Bulgaria of The Axis is to be credited with
saving about 48,000 Jews from the gas
chambers, why were there so few Jews left
in the People's Republic of Bulgaria of the
Warsaw Pact? If so many Jews had lived
in these lands over the centuries, why are
there so few reminders of them? What
happened to their synagogues, cemeteries,
neighbourhoods and communal properties?
What happened to the individual people who
once had a life here?
This guide aims to help anyone with
an interest in Jewish history in Eastern
Europe and the Balkans arrive at their own
conclusions. It is designed to be a journey
through both territory and time: illuminating
the historical backgrounds while directing
the reader along the paths of topography.
Many of the monuments described in this
book are hard to find and in various stages
of disrepair. Unless a traveller knows where
exactly he is going and what he is seeking,
they can easily be overlooked; but once
discovered, they will open up gateways to a
rich and fascinating, if largely forgotten, part
of Europe's Jewish heritage.
Welcome to Bulgaria and Shalom!

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Early History

The first evidence that Jews lived in

what is now Bulgaria dates from at least 500
years before the first Bulgarian state was
actually founded.
Interestingly, the inscription in question,
found on a tombstone, was in Latin: "Ioses,
archsynagogus, son of Maximin, erected this
stone while he was still alive in memory
of himself and his wife Kyria..." The actual
tombstone, dating back to the 2nd Century
CE, was discovered during the excavation
of the Roman town of Ulpia Oescus, in the
vicinity of the present-day village of Gigen,
near the Danube River.
Ioses had apparently been influenced by
the Roman fashion of preparing tombstones
for posterity during ones lifetime. His
tombstone bore no images of ivy leaves or
other pagan symbols of eternity, for the man
was not only a Jew but an archsynagogus, a
rabbi who had charge of several synagogues.
His presence on the Danubian shores
indicates the existence of a Jewish diaspora,
which had probably arrived a century earlier
along with the Roman legions stationed
there to guard the empires northern
borders. Further testimony to the Jewish
diaspora is another Gigen find, a marble slab
bearing an image of a menorah.

10 JewishBulgaria

Yet the question of when exactly the first

Jews came to Bulgaria is open to speculation.
Some hypotheses contend that the earliest
Jews in the Balkans moved here after the
destruction of the First Temple. Other
theories suggest that Jews arrived as a result
of Alexander the Greats conquests, which
turned the Mediterranean and the Middle
East into a common area where migration
was relatively easy and unimpeded.
The Roman conquest of the Balkans
played a crucial role in settling Jews
throughout the area. Many were exiled
there by Emperor Vespasian after the Siege
of Jerusalem in 70 CE and also after the Bar
Kokhba Revolt of 132-136 CE, while others
accompanied the legions as traders and
artisans, a standard Roman practice.
One of these might have been Annanias,
whose tombstone, carved in Roman letters,
was discovered in the modern Bulgarian city
of Vidin, once the Roman fortress Bononia.
The Jews who came to the Balkans
in Antiquity were Romaniots, the oldest
Jewish settlers in these lands. Some of their
descendants, arguably, are still living here
today.
The Jews did not inhabit only the
Danubian shores. A find in the village of

Vrana Stena, near Kyustendil, indicates the

presence of Jews in the hinterland as well.
Excavations of a Late Antiquity fort dating
back to the 3th-5th centuries CE unearthed
an amulet clearly showing a six-pointed star
and the inscription: "Solomon Stamp, Keep
Me." What this find indicates is that in those
times there was a significant demand for
such amulets and so there would have been
Jewish smiths to manufacture them.
Perhaps the most spectacular remains
of this early Jewish presence in Bulgaria is
the Antiquity synagogue in Philippopolis,
modern-day Plovdiv. Philippopolis was
a major city on the road connecting
Constantinople with Central Europe. It had
emerged as a large cosmopolitan centre, a
patchwork of nationalities and religions that
outshone other large cities of the colourful
Roman Empire.
The synagogue of the Philippopolis Jews
had a fantastic mosaic floor, with intricate
geometrical motifs as well as lions, birds,
panthers and menorahs. It was constructed in
the 3rd Century CE, but would be destroyed
and rebuilt several times over the next few
centuries.
The trials and tribulations of the
Philippopolis synagogue illustrate how

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The Roman town Ulpia Oescus, near the modern village of
Gigen, is where the earliest Jewish artefact in the Bulgarian
lands was unearthed

easily the fate of the Jews changed under

the Romans. Unlike Christianity, Judaism
had the status of Religio licita, a "tolerated
religion." In the 4th Century, however,
when Christianity was gaining momentum
as an official religion, the pressures being
put on Jews intensified, yet official attitudes
could change like the breeze. Emperor
Theodosius I (379-395), who actually made
Christianity the state religion of the Roman
Empire, officially ordered the governor of
Moesia, in present-day northern Bulgaria,
not to persecute Jews and demolish their
synagogues.
The Philippopolis synagogue is proof of
these changing attitudes. When Theodosius
died, his sons Arcadius (395-408) and
Honorius (393-423) ruled the eastern
and the western parts of the empire
respectively. Anti-Jewish sentiment was on
the rise. During their reign, the Philippopolis
synagogue was destroyed for the first time,
either as a result of antisemitism, or when
the Huns conquered and ravaged the city
in 447.
The synagogue would be rebuilt and then
destroyed yet again a century later. At that
time, however, the whole political picture
of Europe and the Balkans was beginning to

change. The Middle Ages dawned, and new

peoples had arrived in the Balkans. After 681
the Jews found themselves living in a new
state set up by Slavs and Proto-Bulgarians.

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Exodus

"Not a single person will be able

to say that 40,000 Jews will leave Bulgaria
for good," stated a member of the Jewish
Fatherland Front, a by-blow of the ruling
leftist Fatherland Front, in 1946; and he
added: "We Communists do not want to
help set up a Jewish state in Palestine. The
Fatherland Front wants to create a life for
the Jews in Bulgaria."
Real life turned out to be quite different
just two years later. Bulgaria-proper emerged
from the Second World War with as many
Jews as it had had at its outset. In 1948-1951,
32,099 Jews left for Palestine. They had been
preceded by about 7,000 who had left during
or immediately after the war. In this way
Bulgaria parted with over three quarters of
its Jewry.
The mass emigration of Bulgarian Jews
was the result of many and complex reasons.
The war-time antisemitic legislation was
repealed in full shortly after the 9 September
1944 Communist coup, and the Fatherland
Front, which took over, adopted various
measures designed to bring about the
restitution of Jewish properties confiscated
by the pro-Nazi government. But the
Fatherland Front was actually in no hurry to
implement the measures, creating a situation

34 JewishBulgaria

that would characterise life in Bulgaria for the

next 45 years: the introduction of laws whose
lawmakers had no intention of enforcing.
Over 70 percent of the countrys Jews had
little or no means of subsistence. Communist
apparatchiks sometimes refused food
coupons to Jews and the Jewish community
was plagued by fears that there might be a
return to the antisemitic policies of the past.
These fears were not assuaged by the new
rulers attitude towards other Bulgarian
ethnic minorities, especially the Muslims.
Bulgaria was rapidly becoming a model
Soviet state. Whilst the Communists had
vowed to return all Jewish properties to
their erstwhile owners, a law nationalising
"large" town properties was adopted in 1947.
Rich Jews again found themselves turned out
of their factories, banks and residences.

In the meantime, the fight to set up

the State of Israel intensified. While the
Communists supported the Jewish efforts
in the British Mandate, they continued to
oppose all manifestations of Zionism at
home. Zionist feelings, however, turned
out to be a lot stronger than anyone
expected: in 1946 the United Zionist
Organisation had as many as 14,000 active
members. In the following years this
number would rise.
Georgi Dimitrov, Bulgarias Stalinist leader,
had returned to Bulgaria from Moscow in
1946. Echoing Soviet attitudes, he told Jewish
leaders that emigration to Palestine would
"in principle" be allowed. The real change
came after the Soviet Union consolidated its
stance towards emigration to Palestine, and
especially after Andrei Gromyko supported

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A group passport for Jews leaving for British Palestine in 1946

Bulgarian State Archive Library

Pioneer Railway Station in Sofia whence many Jews left on

their great aliyah trip (previous page)

the establishment of the State of Israel at

the United Nations.
On 28 July 1948, with the blessing of
the government which officially endorsed
Jewish emigration to Palestine "in order
to join the fight against imperialism," the
Consistory in Bulgaria issued a directive
encouraging emigration. Those who
wanted to leave were issued with aliyah
certificates, and given exit visas often
the result of per capita payments provided
by the American Joint Distribution
Committee.
Emigration continued throughout
the Communist period, even though the
administrative obstacles put in its way
increased.
The 1989-1990 collapse of the
Communist system and the ensuing
economic chaos prompted a new wave of
emigration to Israel. About 5,000 Bulgarian
Jews, many of whom were the offspring
of mixed marriages or were themselves
in such unions, took advantage of the
Law of Return. At the same time, some
Israelis of Bulgarian origin, who had left in
1949-1951, had their Bulgarian citizenship
restored, and began spending an increasing
amount of time in Bulgaria.

El Al Shot Down Over Bulgaria

Well known for its excellent security, the
Israeli national airline, El Al, has had only one
incident in its history when one of its aircraft
was shot down. This happened over Bulgaria
at the height of the Cold War.
In the early morning of 27 July 1955 El Al
Flight 402, a Lockheed L-409 Constellation,
took off from London bound for Tel Aviv. It
carried 58 people onboard. It was supposed
to fly over Yugoslavia and Greece, because
Communist Bulgaria did not allow nonWarsaw Pact aircraft in its skies.
West of the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border,
however, the aircraft changed course and
entered Bulgarian airspace near Tran.
Two Soviet-manufactured MiG-15s were
immediately sent from Sofia to tail the El Al
aircraft through western Bulgaria.
The MiG pilots would later contend that
the Israeli aircraft was not clearly marked as
a passenger plane and that they had used all
means of warning it, including firing tracer
bullets. But the Israeli plane continued on
southwards towards Greece. Shortly before
it was due to leave Bulgarian territory, radio
orders to shoot it down were transmitted.
Flight 402 ended in a fireball near the
Bulgarian town of Petrich. All onboard died.
The Bulgarian Communist Government
did not concede what had happened until
a day later. It did appoint a commission of

investigation, which concluded that the Israeli

aircraft had violated Bulgarian airspace,
but also that the Bulgarian response was
disproportionate.
Bulgaria refused to allow a six-member
Israeli team of investigators to look into the
case. It did not allow even its own prosecutors
to interrogate the pilots. Three Israeli experts
would later be permitted near the site of the
crash, but almost all the debris had already
been cleared away. The Israelis concluded that
the plane had deviated from its course owing
to high winds.
In 1957 Israel sued Bulgaria at the
International Court in The Hague. The
court ordered Israel and Bulgaria to settle
the dispute themselves. Bulgaria paid
out $500,000 to the families of the dead
passengers, a fraction of the $6,850,000
originally demanded.
The reasons for the shooting-down
continue to be unclear. Some suggest that the
El Al pilots made a navigational error through
fatigue, others surmise that the aircraft was
downed because it was carrying a contraband
shipment of silver. Yet others claim the plane
was shot down because a Mossad agent being
sought by the Soviets had boarded the plane
in Vienna, and Bulgaria merely acted on Soviet
orders.

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36 JewishBulgaria

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Time of the
Commissars

The Communist-engineered and

Soviet-backed coup on 9 September 1944
marked the beginning of a 45-year system
in which, theoretically, there was no private
property, everyone enjoyed equal rights,
and you got whatever you needed. In fact, it
was a system where the currency was not
convertible, travel was not allowed, people
might end up in a labour camp for telling
jokes or listening to Western music, and any
indication of religiousness was suppressed.
On 9 September 1944, however, few
suspected what was in store for them.
Formally, a leftist coalition called the
Fatherland Front had assumed power,
and the Allied Control Commission was
supposed to ensure the the first postwar election was democratic. But the
Communists were already paving the way
for the sovietisation of Bulgaria. In 1946,
while the Red Army was still in the country,
a rigged referendum abolished the monarchy
and instituted a "peoples republic." In 19471948 private property was nationalised.
Purges of "enemies with a party ticket"
ensued. Concentration camps for opponents
of the new regime were set up and Stalins
cronies in Sofia were busy turning Bulgaria
into a model "New Order" state.

Impoverished and humiliated by the

Defence of the Nation Act and fearful
of new repressions, the Jews were beset
by infighting. On the one hand were the
Zionists who wanted to resettle in Palestine.
On the other were the Communists who
wanted to create a "new life" for the Jews
inside Bulgaria.
As early as October 1944 the Zionists,
who by far outnumbered the Communists,
started to prepare for their departure to
what would become the State of Israel. They
were opposed, verbally and otherwise, by the
Communists who said they considered the
urge to leave to be the product of "enemy
propaganda." The Zionists were billed
"traitors" and even "fascists." The Jewish
Communists had their own branch of the
Fatherland Front, a status no other minority
in Bulgaria enjoyed.
In 1946 the Communists and the Zionists
formed a joint council to run the Consistory.
The Zionists were supposed to have a
larger representation because of their sheer
number, but in reality the whole enterprise
was controlled by the Fatherland Front.
The official line of the Bulgarian
Communist Party was promulgated in
1948 and was endorsed by the leader

Communist Bulgaria was friends with most of the Arab world

(top); A mural depicting "labour and artistic freedom" in 1950s
Bulgaria, at the former Jewish school in Kyustendil (above)
United in death? A Jewish Communist gravestone in Kyustendil
(previous page)

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on one of its walls. Friedrich Grnanger, a

reputable Viennese architect of the time, was
contracted to go ahead with the project.
Grnanger was instructed to erect a building
similar to the great Sephardic synagogue in
Vienna (now demolished).
The project did not go very smoothly.
The Consistory sent the initial project back

52 JewishBulgaria

to the drawing board. Then it decided it

wanted a synagogue for 1,100 rather than
the originally planned 700 people. Work on
the building began as late as 1905.
The synagogue was shut down in 19431944, in keeping with the wartime Defence
of the Nation Act, as most Sofia Jews were
deported to the provinces. During the Allied

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bombings of Sofia a bomb fell on the roof.

It failed to explode, but the walls of the
synagogue collapsed under its weight. The
library as well as the communitys archives
were destroyed for good.
The most serious changes to the
synagogue were yet to come. The new
regime of the Soviet-backed Communists
declared itself officially atheist and started
to actively discourage religious practices. In
1950s then Chief Rabbi Asher Hananel was
tried for "malfeasance in office" and sent to
prison. The synagogue was thus rendered
rabbi-less, a situation that would continue up
until 1994.
The regime had no intention of leaving
the synagogue empty, however. The building
had excellent acoustics, and the government
decided, in the 1960s, to convert it into a

concert hall. Construction work on the

buildings interior started in the 1980s,
but was never completed. For much of
that period the synagogues interior was
enmeshed in scaffolding and ladders.
The synagogue was given back to
the Jewish community after the fall of
Communism. In 2008, major renovations
began. They were paid for by the Bulgarian
Culture Ministry, as well as by private donors
in Israel and the United States. The works
ended in time for the 9 September 2009
Centennial Anniversary of the Sofia Central
Synagogue.
Nowadays Sabbath and other prayers
are usually held in the small hall of the
synagogue. The great hall is used for major
holidays, state visits and occasionally
concerts.

Robert Djerassi (left), Maxim Benvenisti, chairman of Shalom

(second left), and Israeli ambassador to Bulgaria Noah Gal
Gendler (fourth left) welcome Israeli President Shimon Peres,
2010 (above, left)
Rabbi Bechor Kachlon (left) and Bulgarian President Georgi
Parvanov light Hanukah candles, 2010 (top); Hundreds of old
Jewish book are stored at the synagogue's depository (above)
Great Hall of Sofia Central Synagogue (previous page)

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Sofia synagogues Vienna-manufactured chandelier weighs
2,200 kilograms

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Sofia Cemetery

Anyone approaching Sofia from the

West during the 16-19th centuries would get
a very interesting initial view of what would
become Bulgarias vibrant capital: a huge
Jewish cemetery melancholically lined with
semi-recumbent Sephardic tombstones.
The landscape started to change in 1888,
when the new capital of the new country
started to experience an influx of migrants
from the provinces. The outlying areas to
the south-west of the city, where the Jewish
cemetery was, were gradually converted into
residential quarters. Some of the tombstones
could be seen scattered around as late as
the first decades of the 20th Century, when
a poor Jewish neighbourhood existed in this
part of Sofia. Curiously, the living and the
dead coexisted happily: next to the remnants
of the cemetery there was a stadium where
the Jewish football team Akoakh (1919-1940)
used to train.
Today nothing indicates where that Jewish
cemetery used to be. Since the 1930s the
former Jewish Geren neighbourhood has
been a part of the Vazrazhdane area. The

modern Vazrazhdane Square, in fact, stands

on a part of the erstwhile graveyard. Roughly
speaking, the whole area between Aleksandar
Stamboliyski Boulevard, Hristo Botev
Boulevard and Positano Street once used to
be a Jewish necropolis.
In 1898, the Sofia Central Cemetery was
opened in the village of Orlandovsti, now
a part of metropolitan Sofia. The Jewish
cemetery was moved there, into a special
Jewish Sector in the northern reaches of
the cemetery. The Orlandovtsi cemetery
(on Zavodska Street, served by trams Nos.
2 and 3, and bus No. 2) is still in use to this
day. Many of the tombstones, especially
those of the richer Jews, are pure works
of art, amongst the best in Bulgaria. They
bear inscriptions in Hebrew and Bulgarian,
but many also have lines in German, French,
Italian and Ladino.
The Jewish Sector is adjacent to the
Muslim and Catholic sectors, and is easy to
find. Make sure you enter the gates of the
cemetery from the entrance next to the last
stop of trams Nos. 2 and 3.

Sofias cemeterys Jewish chapel is the only functioning

cemetery ritual house in Bulgaria

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Bulgarias largest Jewish cemetery has
hundreds of exquisite headstones

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Population: 55,000
Long distance phone code: 094
Regional Shalom Organisation:
2/3 Bdin Street; shalom.vidin@shalom.bg
Things to see: Stamboul Kap Gate;
Baba Vida Fortress; Osman Pazvantoglu
Mosque and Library; St Dimitar Cathedral
Things to do: Walk along the Danube
waterfront; Mingle with the locals in the
central square; Explore the charm of the
streets and alleys in the old town; Pass
through the Stamboul Gate at night
Museums: Baba Vida Fortress; History
Museum (13 Tsar Simeon Veliki Street);
National Museum of Natural History
(1 Tsar Osvoboditel Boulevard)
Galleries: Nikola Petrov Art Gallery
(2 Bdintsi Square)

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VIDIN
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A Jewish monument of gratitude adorns Vidins central square
(below)
Vidins synagogue, once the largest in Bulgaria, has been in a
state of complete dilapidation in the course of decades (right
and opposite page)

Situated in the northwestern

corner of Bulgaria on a picturesque bend
of the Danube,Vidin is now an economically
depressed town in the poorest area of
Europe. Few young people want to stay. The
locals hope that a new bridge across the
river connecting it to Romania will improve
the overall situation. Less than a century ago,
however,Vidin was a bustling port city where
a sizeable Jewish community prospered.
The first Jews are thought to have arrived
in Antiquity, when the Roman fort of Bononia
was what Vidin was known for. The Invasion
of the Barbarians put an end to Bononia.
Jews would return several hundred years
later, when Vidin again emerged as an aureate
Mediaeval city. At the forefront were Jews
from Italy and Byzantium, who arrived as early
as the 13th Century.They would be followed

76 JewishBulgaria

by Ashkenazis fleeing persecution in Hungary.

Rabbi Salomon Ashkenazi, who was born in
Neustadt, founded one of the first rabbinical
schools in the Bulgarian lands in Vidin.
Sephardic Jews came in the 15th Century.
By the end of the 17th Century there were
at least five synagogues, one of which was
Romaniot.
The Jewish merchants in Vidin did
business throughout the Ottoman Empire
and beyond. In 1658, for example, the main
Vidin synagogue received a gift of a silver
tablet from the Jews inhabiting one of
the Danubian islands upriver. When the
Dubrovnik merchants lost their privileges in
1688 because of their support for the antiOttoman Chiprovtsi Uprising, their Jewish
peers were quick to seize the new business
opportunity.

Vidins Jews were faced with a major

threat in 1807. Maverick Osman Pazvantoglu,
the local Ottoman governor who had
quarrelled with the High Porte and
subsequently rejected the sultans supremacy
in the Vidin area, fell sick. His death seemed
inevitable, and rumours that he had been
poisoned by his Jewish physician started
circulating amongst the local Ottomans.
The Turks decided to murder all the Jews
in retaliation for what they saw as an act
of high treason. But Pazvantoglu was not
quite dead yet. He learned of the plan, and
personally sent orders to do nothing against
the Jews. A massive celebratory party was
held, and from that time on the local Jews
would celebrate a kind of Vidin Purim called
Purim de los borrachones, or Purim of the
Drunken.

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The Russo-Ottoman war of 18771878 severely affected the local Jewry. The
synagogues were damaged or destroyed
in the fighting, and the Jews lost their main
trading partner, the Vidin Ottoman garrison.
After Bulgaria became independent in 1878,
the population of Vidin amounted to about
15,000 people, of whom 1,400 were Jews.
The Jews of Vidin, however, did not want
to leave. In the first years of independent
Bulgaria the Jewish neighbourhood, in the
Kale area, saw the erection of a spacious
community house. The grand Vidin
synagogue was constructed in 1894. Located
at the intersection of todays Baba Vida and
Jules Pascin streets, the Vidin Synagogue
outshone all other synagogues in Bulgaria.
Its architecture was inspired by the Great
Synagogue of Budapest. Its ornaments were
crafted out of wood from Transylvania and
Hungary, and its chandeliers were imported
from Vienna.

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There are plans to refurbish the former Vidin synagogue
into a Jules Pascin museum

Jules Pascin, a portrait by Albert Weisgerber, 1906

The Prince of Montparnasse

From Vidin
"I went over and sat with Pascin and two
models who were sisters. Pascin was a very
good painter and he was drunk; steadily,
purposefully drunk and making good sense."
The author of this is, of course, Ernest
Hemingway, who liked Jules Pascin so much
that he described him in a chapter in his
Moveable Feast (1964). Pascin, born in Vidin in
1885, originally bore the name Julius Mordecai
Pincas, but would later be known as the Prince
of Montparnasse. His father, a Sephardic Jew,
was a grain merchant. The family moved to
Bucharest in 1892. Pascin studied in Vienna
and by 1905 was already a part of the Parisian
Boheme. His new name, Pascin, was a partial
anagram of Pincas. He spent most of his life
in Paris, producing exquisite artwork and
drinking in the Montparnasse cafs. Jules Pascin
committed suicide in 1930. The Vidin house
where he was born has not been preserved.

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Vidins Jewish cemetery is among the most mercilessly
vandalised in Bulgaria

The synagogue fell into disrepair after

almost all of Vidins Jews left for Israel in
the late 1940s. In 1950 the Communist
authorities turned it into a warehouse. In
1964 it was declared a monument of culture,
but plans to convert it into a concert hall
never materialised.
Today the Vidin Synagogue is a sorry
sight. It still stands there with its domes and
turrets on the bank of the Danube, but it
is nothing but a skeleton. Its roof has caved
in, its windows have been broken, its paint
has peeled off, and its prayer hall has been
overwhelmed by weeds and even trees.
The only remains of its former grandeur
are some intricately crafted wrought-iron
ornaments and a few wooden Stars of David
in the windows. The building is ringed with
a wire fence, but the fence door is usually
unlocked and unprotected. Enter at your
own peril because the structure may collapse
at any time.
Another Jewish site in Vidin is the Jewish
Cemetery, located at what the locals refer
to as Nula Redut, just off the road leading to
Vidin Ferry Port. The last burial took place
there in 1965.

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The cemetery is indeed a gruesome

sight. While under Communism it was just
ignored, in the turbulent years of Bulgarias
transition to democracy it was actively
vandalised. Many of the porcelain portraits of
the deceased have been crushed with stones,
and many graves have been dug up and left
gaping to the sombre northern Bulgarian
skies. With its broken effigies, overturned
tombstones, scattered human and animal
bones and graves that look as if their
occupants have just risen from the ground,
the huge cemetery evokes an eerie feeling of
Doomsday revisited. Trees grow from inside
the holes that were once tombs, and local
Gypsies can still be seen digging in the hope
of finding a golden tooth here or a bit of
metal there.
The Vidin Cemetery is perhaps the
best (or worst) example of the general
dilapidation of Bulgarias Jewish heritage. It
stands as a monument not so much to the
individual people who were buried there, but
as a memento to a whole culture, once rich
and vibrant, that has irrevocably disappeared
from the Bulgarian lands.

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Portraits of deceased Vidin Jews still adorn
what remains of their tombs

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In a pitiful condition, Samokovs former synagogue (previous
page) still retains some of its decorations: a wood-carved
ceiling (right, top), a sign (right, middle), and a fresco (right,
bottom)

Samokov is now a quiet town at

the foot of the Rila Mountains, known mainly
for its potatoes and its proximity to Borovets,
a major ski resort. No Jews live here.
The town looked completely different
150 years ago, however. It was, in fact, an
industrial town, one of the first in Bulgaria,
and the centre of a lucrative mining
enterprise. The Iskar River was lined with
many tall chimneys belching out smoke. Iron
ore was smelted in many foundries, and the
very name of the town comes from the
heavy water-driven hammers that pounded
the metal into ingots. Trade was carried
on with places as varied as Walachia and
Stamboul and over 120 Jewish families lived
in the large Jewish neighbourhood.
The Sephardis came to Samokov at the
end of the 17th Century, probably from
Salonika. A century later they had been
joined by Jews from as far away as Vidin and
as nearby as Dupnitsa.
Business picked up after 1802, when
the local authorities permitted Jews to buy
and own plots of land as well as houses in
the centre of town. In 1813, the Ottomans
allowed the local Jews to set up their own
neighbourhood, and in the following years it
grew into Dolna Mahala, or Lower Quarter,

spreading roughly across todays Vasil

Zahariev Street (formerly Moyseeva Street),
Hristo Maksimov Street and Targovska
Street.
Foreign travellers in the Balkans were
impressed by the Jewish neighbourhood of
Samokov. Behind whitewashed brick walls
there were large houses with intricate
ornamentation and wood-carved ceilings.
The furniture was European, and many of

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A huge wood-carved Star of David adorns the central hall of

the Arie House (above); The Jews in Samokov were often the
importers of European culture (right)
Oriental in exterior design, the Arie house in Samokov was
distinctly Western European inside (opposite page, left and
middle); The Aries had a special short-cut entry into the
synagogue next door (opposite page, right)

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them had both running water and in-house

water closets.
In 1857-1860 the local Jews built a new,
modern synagogue. It was a large building,
at 330 square metres, and was 8 metres tall,
with 38 windows. Accounts of who built
it vary. According to some archives, it was
erected by Edirne workers commissioned
by the wealthy Arie family. Another theory
is that the synagogue was built by local
craftsmen. It appears that the same builders
also worked on the impressive Bayrakli
Mosque, in the middle of the town.
Soon after the completion of the
synagogue, one of the first secular Jewish
schools in the Bulgarian lands was founded in
Samokov, in 1874.

A couple of decades later, however, the

hustle-and-bustle of industrial Samokov had
evaporated as fast as the Iskar mist.
One of the side effects of Bulgarias
independence from the Ottoman Empire
was the loss of lucrative markets. The
producers of iron and textiles lost their
contracts with the Ottoman army. The
young Bulgarian state, pressed for cash,
would rather import cheap materials for
its own army uniforms than buy the highquality but expensive woollen cloth from
Samokov. The villagers around Samokov
ceased going to its market, and preferred
to travel the 60 kilometres to Sofia. One
of the last blows to the local economy was
the decision to have the Sofia-Stamboul

railway pass through Ihtiman instead of

through Samokov.
The town was impoverished and many
locals emigrated to Sofia. The Jews were no
exception. While in 1887 and 1919 there
were 962 and 1,000 Jews respectively in
Samokov, in 1943 there were 374. They all
made the aliyah to Israel in the late 1940s.
Under Communism most of the Jewish
neighbourhood, including the old synagogue
and many Jewish merchant houses, was
demolished to make way for new housing
projects.
Yet the New Synagogue (at the
intersection of Prince Alexandr Dondukov
and Neofit Bozveli streets) survived. In 1965
it was a listed as a cultural monument and

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Antisemitism in Bulgaria

Unfortunately, Bulgaria has never

eschewed the sort of antisemitism prevalent
in the rest of Europe in general and Eastern
Europe in particular. That said, over the
centuries antisemitic sentiments have rarely
turned violent. Bulgaria has never witnessed
Russian or German-style anti-Jewish
pogroms, and even in the darkest years of
the Defence of the Nation Act, the states
enforcement of anti-Jewish regulations was
at worst tepid.
While the earliest acts of antisemitism
predate the official Christianisation effected
by King Boris I in 865, the first real antiJewish polemic appeared in the writings
of early Mediaeval Bulgarian writers.Yoan
Ekzarh, Presbyter Kozma and others now
taught in Bulgarian schools often indulged in
acrid antisemitic speech.
An instance of violent antisemitism
occurred in the mid-14th Century when
King Ivan Aleksandar divorced his Bulgarian
wife and married a Jewess, Sarah. Sarah
converted to Christianity, but the king still
ordered mass lashings and banishment of a
sect thought to be associated with Judaism.
One possible explanation for this was the
plague which was ravaging Europe at the
time: popular belief had it that it had been

started by Jews poisoning Christian wells.

Another is that the Bulgarian aristocracy
wanted an easy way out of its burgeoning
debts, owed mostly to Jewish merchants and
tradesmen.
Bulgaria was conquered by the Ottomans
in 1393-1396. An urban myth was put
into circulation that the gates of Tarnovo,
the Mediaeval Bulgarian capital, had been
surreptitiously opened for the invaders by
a Jew, an act of high treason that would
condemn Bulgaria to 500 years of Ottoman
"yoke." The myth lives on to this day.
The great man of letters of the Bulgarian
National Revival, Ivan Vazov (1850-1921),
produced an unusually acrimonious rhyme
about that "dirty Jew"; and as late as 1930
Angel Karaliychev, a popular writer of
childrens fiction, published a story about this
"Jewish treachery."
In the late 15th Century the number
of Jews in the Bulgarian lands increased
significantly when the High Porte in
Constantinople welcomed thousands
of Sephardic Jews fleeing persecution in
Spain and Portugal. The Sephardis were
exempted from some Ottoman taxes and
in some places even allowed to mint their
own coins. Antipathy between the Jews and

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A must book for the Jewish traveller in Bulgaria.
I have visited my birth country a dozen times in the
past 40 years. Invariably Jewishtourists ask me "Is
there a handbook in English that will help giveme the
background I need to further understand and enjoy my
visit there more fully?"
It is my belief that Ms Trankova and Mr Georgieff
have presented us with a very practical "Guide to
Jewish Bulgaria." Congratulations to the writers. Enjoy
your visit!
Rabbi Haim Asa, Orange County, California, USA

Dimana Trankova is an archaeologist by

education and a journalist by vocation. For five years
she has been the executive editor of HIGHFLIGHTS,
Bulgaria's Airport magazine, and of Go Greece!,
Bulgaria's magazine about Greece. Widely traveled
in Europe and elsewhere, Dimana Trankova is
the co-author and editor of Hidden Treasures of
Bulgaria and East of Constantinople/Travels in
Unknown Turkey.
Anthony Georgieff worked for the BBC/World
Service in London and Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty in Munich and in Prague before starting
a successful career as a freelance writer and
photographer in Copenhagen. In 2004 he started
Vagabond Media, Bulgaria's premier Englishlanguage publisher of magazines and books. His
work has circulated in Denmark, Sweden, Germany,
the UK and the United States. He is the author of
Vienna, a novel.

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This book is for anyone with an

interest in Jewish history in Eastern
Europe and the Balkans. It is designed
to be a journey through both territory
and time, illuminating the backgrounds
while guiding the reader through the
topography. Many of the monuments
described are hard to find and in
various stages of disrepair: poignant
reminders of a long-disappeared
culture.
Unless the traveller knows exactly
where he is going and what he is
seeking, these landmarks of history
can easily be overlooked. But once
discovered, they will open up
gateways to a fascinating if largely
forgotten part of Europe's Jewish
heritage.

R. R. P.
BGN 20.85
$15.99
10.99
9.49

ISBN 978-954-92306-3-5

9 789549 230635