My father’s elder sister, Buka, had four girls and one boy. One of the girls went to Palestine illegally in 1932-33. She was followed by my aunt’s son. At that time they were forced to go to Palestine illegally, using different routes. In 1939 my aunt Buka, her husband Buko and their children Reni and Mati decided to emigrate to Palestine, too. They took their chance with a small Turkish sailing vessel, which wasn’t quite stable and somewhere close to the Turkish coast it sank. The whole family drowned. Only a few people survived this disaster.
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Displaying 17941 - 17970 of 50826 results
Raina Blumenfeld
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My father had a brother who was killed in the Balkan War [the First Balkan War] [3]. One of his sisters went to the city of Plovdiv to work as a maid for a wealthy family, but the son of the landlord raped her and she, incapable of bearing the disgrace, drowned herself in the Maritsa River. Thus, four brothers and two sisters remained in Sofia, where they lived together in the same yard. Their small houses were positioned close to each other in a common yard.
Bulgaria
My father’s family used to live in a yard in the Jewish quarter, known as Iuchbunar [2], and more precisely, Konyovitsa, on the corner of Positano Street and Pernik Street. This is the house where my father’s family used to live and where I was born on 15th January 1929.
My ancestors came to Bulgaria from Spain in the 15th century when they were expelled by Queen Isabella – and were accepted by the Ottoman Empire. All Jews who originate from Spain are called Sephardi. The language we speak is Old Spanish – Ladino, which is very precious, because it is spoken almost nowhere else. As far as I know, this language is maintained only in Toledo and fewer and fewer people speak it now – mainly people of my generation. The young ones don’t know Ladino, because we couldn’t pass it on to them, and therefore it is becoming extinct. Until 1944 [9th September 1944] [1] we used to speak that language, and I also spoke it as a child. It has been passed on from generation to generation, but after 1944, an assimilation of the Jewish population began in Bulgaria and that language ‘declined’. I myself feel guilty for not having taught that language to my children. They don’t understand it, and on some occasions, when my husband and I wanted to communicate something confidential to each other, we spoke Ladino.
Bulgaria
My children have their own commitments. They have set up their lives well and have no time for me. The Jewish community helps me diversify my life. On Mondays and Wednesdays I attend the Health Club, where I was the bursar for a few years. I participate in the Ladino Club where I hope to regain my knowledge of that language. Next summer a meeting of Ladino speaking Jews called Esperanza will be held and I will take part in it. I also attend the Golden Age Club and participate in all events organized by it.
I have been to Israel three times – in 1966, 1987 and 1992. Within half a century only, Israel has turned the desert into a garden. Despite all efforts of the Jewish state, the situation continues to be depressing due to the conflicts with the Arabs. People in Israel live from day to day and do everything as best as they can, because they aren’t sure if they’ll live to see the next day. I think that America must direct its efforts towards terrorism in Israel, too, where terror against the population has increased lately.
Bulgaria
I have been a widow for two years now. My husband died in 2000. I had a very good life with him and I miss him terribly now. I live alone. Now, together with members of the Golden Age Club of our Shalom organization in Sofia, I often go to concerts and to the theater whenever I have a chance. The problem is that I have to come home quite late and with the current rate of crime this is a bit frightening. I have a friend who lives in the same block of flats as me and although she is much younger than me, we go out and come back together. I always take two invitations to concerts or theater performances – one for my friend – and thus, I satisfy my passion for cultural life. My daughter even finds that I lead a much more diversified life than her. I participate in the management of the Section ‘Disabled Persons’, because I am myself a disabled person. There we also have organized life. We meet once a month, deliver communications and try to go to some theatrical or musical performance. The community pays for the tickets.
I went to visit my brother in France the year that my husband passed away. My brother invited me to cheer me up because I was crushed with grief. We went to the Rossini Festival in Italy, then I visited my niece in Vienna. She took us to the synagogue twice. The Vienna synagogue is very nice, but ours in Sofia is more beautiful. The community there, however, is better. The singers in the synagogue in Vienna were very good tenors and sang magnificently. I liked it so much that when we went out, my sister, my niece and I started singing a Jewish song in Hebrew. Then a woman came to us and hugged us because we had made an impression on her – being Jews and knowing that song.
I went to visit my brother in France the year that my husband passed away. My brother invited me to cheer me up because I was crushed with grief. We went to the Rossini Festival in Italy, then I visited my niece in Vienna. She took us to the synagogue twice. The Vienna synagogue is very nice, but ours in Sofia is more beautiful. The community there, however, is better. The singers in the synagogue in Vienna were very good tenors and sang magnificently. I liked it so much that when we went out, my sister, my niece and I started singing a Jewish song in Hebrew. Then a woman came to us and hugged us because we had made an impression on her – being Jews and knowing that song.
Before the political change in Bulgaria in 1989 our life was better. My husband had a good salary and a pension then. We had a better life, traveled a lot, and had good friends. We used to go to the movies, to theater, and to restaurants all the time. I am used to this way of life and now I miss cultural life very much. Before 1989, my husband and I used to go on holiday very often, and when he was offered a plot of land at the seacoast, he refused to take it, because whenever we wanted to go on holiday we could go anywhere. Our elder daughter, however, got very enthusiastic about the idea of having a villa and she takes great pleasure in going to Lakatnik, where she has a piece of land and a house.
Bulgaria
Zoya’s sons observe Jewish traditions and they emigrated to Israel two years ago [in 2000]. With the assistance of our relatives who emigrated there in 1948/49, they succeeded in settling very well. They adapted themselves very quickly and learned the language. They even managed to come back to Bulgaria twice.
My elder daughter Hertzelina graduated as pharmacist and now owns two chemist shops. She is well off, but is preoccupied with the problems that small businesses are currently experiencing in Bulgaria. She has to spend whole days [working] to solve bureaucratic things. Her husband is a textile engineer, but it is very difficult for him to find a job. My younger daughter is an economist. Her husband is also economist, and it was not until a few months ago that he found a job with a company for trademark alcohol. Both of my daughters have mixed marriages – they married Bulgarians. They have two children each – Zoya’s sons are called Martina and Andrey, and Hertzelina has a son, Victor, and a daughter Irena.
My husband and I went to Hungary on holidays soon after the events of 1956 [8]. I was against the provoked military actions even more so because I had seen very young men there whose hair had turned completely white from the horrors they had seen. Now I positively evaluate Eastern Europe’s opening to the West. This terminated the division and confrontation between different societies. This change facilitated world politics.
All my relatives immigrated to Israel in 1948/49. During the years that followed, my ties with them were very limited. My husband worked for the Ministry of Interior and for that reason his sister couldn’t go to Israel. In the 1960s and the 1970s relations between Bulgaria and Israel were not very good. We had certain problems with the authorities and were summoned to give explanations. When my husband was sent to the Soviet Union to study in 1964, his sister took advantage of that and left for Israel. We were also summoned to give explanations about my brother who had emigrated to France in 1946 and was declared a non-returnee.
When our first daughter was born in 1949 we had to name her after someone from my husband’s clan. Chaldeans, however, have a tradition not to give a child the name of a living grandfather. This is why my first daughter was named after her great-grandfather on my husband’s side, whose name was Hertzel. So we gave her the name of Hertzelina Blumenfeld. My second daughter’s name is Zoya. She was born in 1953. I wondered for six days after she was born what name I should give her. Then I asked my elder daughter, who at that time attended a nursery school, and she said she wanted her younger sister to be called Zoya.
My husband didn’t allow us to speak Ladino at home and when we had to say our names, he would always ask me do give my name first, which sounded more Bulgarian – particularly after the mistake of my name-change from Reina to Raina. His family name Blumenfeld was unintelligible for Bulgarians. We had an incident when even a medical nurse found it difficult to write his name. Despite all this I am very proud of my family name. Even when my second daughter was born and I was told I had a baby girl, I felt sorry that there was no one to inherit my family name.
Before we were interned, I had studied at a vocational school for one year. Later we were denied right of education, but when we returned to Sofia, I passed the 6th grade exams [which corresponds to the 10th grade at high school in the present educational system] and a year later I graduated with a diploma. I started working as a commercial worker in shops and warehouses. Wherever I worked I have never experienced any problems due to my Jewish origin. But I felt a covert assimilation of the Jews, which manifested itself in the fact that we could not openly speak Ladino and also in the uneasiness caused by our different-sounding names.
My husband studied at a Jewish school until 5th grade. After about 40 years, when the relations between Israel and Bulgaria were re-established, somehow suddenly all his knowledge of Hebrew came back to him.
I met my husband in 1946. We went out for three years before we got married. I was 19 when I got married in 1948 and moved to Bratya Miladinovi Street, where my two daughters were born. Thus, my mother and one of my sisters remained in our house at Pernik Street. In the 1980s we were given an apartment, and then my mother and my sister moved to the house at Bratya Miladinovi Street.
After 9th September 1944, I became a member of the Uniform Youth Students Union and I had leftist convictions. Afterwards, I also became a member of the Revolutionary Youth Union [7]. This club of this organization was at Strandja Street in our district. It was there that I met my husband. He was a member of the Communist Party, but I wasn’t.
I remember that after 9th September 1944, we received aid from the Joint [6] – not financial aid, but mainly foodstuffs and clothes. We were entitled to six pieces of clothing per person and, being six in the family, we got a lot of clothes. Since my elder sister had learnt to sew, my father instructed us to take large sizes of clothes, which my sister altered to make them fit. I remember tasting margarine for the first time in my life then and we were also given chocolates and blankets. This aid started in the first years after the war and continued till 1948/49, when a large part of the Jews immigrated to Israel. During the big economic crisis in Bulgaria in the 1990s we also received considerable aid in foodstuffs.
During the internment, Jewish men endured an incredible stress and it was their shoulders, which were overburdened with worries to provide for their families. Many young men died due to the huge torment they were subjected to. These include my father, too, who died at the age of 47. The fathers of a number of my relatives and friends passed away young as a result of what they had lived through.
When we went back to Sofia around 9th September 1944, we found strangers living in our house. We filed a lawsuit straight away in order to recover possession of it. During that period we lived with one of my father’s brothers, who occupied a room and a kitchen. He moved to the kitchen and let us have the room. After a while we managed to regain possession of our house, which still exists at Pernik Street. Currently this house is unoccupied. For a long time my niece lived there, but she bought an apartment and moved away. We tried to lease it, but things didn’t work out, and we now prefer to keep it empty.
In 1943 we were interned to the town of Ferdinand [today Montana]. We were isolated there in a Jewish quarter and were permitted to go out for only two hours a day. Something funny happened there. My father had an employee from Ferdinand in his tinsmith workshop in Sofia – he was called Peno. This man Peno had a tinsmith workshop in Ferdinand. My father got in touch with him and he became Peno’s worker. We were not allowed to work then, but my father used to sneak into his workshop to help him.
Ferdinand was a small town with a population of about 5,000. We lived in terrible conditions. Initially we were accommodated in a school with another ten families. We, children, however, couldn’t feel the impact of the situation as it was felt by our parents, who strived for our bare existence. On the other hand we, the youths, led an exceptionally organized life – perhaps our Jewish gene was such – and that helped us cope with the adversities. The authorities allowed us to go out only between 5 and 7pm. We were banned from going out at any other time. We always used to get together during those two hours of freedom, organizing countless literary evenings with lots of poetry reading and songs. We didn’t feel bored then – we read a lot and exchanged books amongst ourselves. I remember that there were times when I read 50 pages an hour. We had a very intensive and rich cultural life because we had nothing else to do. We were not allowed to work or to go out, and this enabled us to occupy ourselves with arts.
After some time, we were allowed to rent a house and, we rented a three-roomed village house with a family that hade been our neighbors in Sofia. The owners went to live in the barn; two rooms were occupied by our parents and in the third room our fathers knocked up two rows of wooden plank-beds, where the lot of us – six children – slept. We lived like that till 9th September 1944. Then we received a notice that our house had been sold. That notice stated the amount for which it had been sold and the taxes charged, calling on my father to receive the money from the sale. My father said that he had no house for sale and that he didn’t want to receive any money. Thus the sale of the house didn’t materialize.
Ferdinand was a small town with a population of about 5,000. We lived in terrible conditions. Initially we were accommodated in a school with another ten families. We, children, however, couldn’t feel the impact of the situation as it was felt by our parents, who strived for our bare existence. On the other hand we, the youths, led an exceptionally organized life – perhaps our Jewish gene was such – and that helped us cope with the adversities. The authorities allowed us to go out only between 5 and 7pm. We were banned from going out at any other time. We always used to get together during those two hours of freedom, organizing countless literary evenings with lots of poetry reading and songs. We didn’t feel bored then – we read a lot and exchanged books amongst ourselves. I remember that there were times when I read 50 pages an hour. We had a very intensive and rich cultural life because we had nothing else to do. We were not allowed to work or to go out, and this enabled us to occupy ourselves with arts.
After some time, we were allowed to rent a house and, we rented a three-roomed village house with a family that hade been our neighbors in Sofia. The owners went to live in the barn; two rooms were occupied by our parents and in the third room our fathers knocked up two rows of wooden plank-beds, where the lot of us – six children – slept. We lived like that till 9th September 1944. Then we received a notice that our house had been sold. That notice stated the amount for which it had been sold and the taxes charged, calling on my father to receive the money from the sale. My father said that he had no house for sale and that he didn’t want to receive any money. Thus the sale of the house didn’t materialize.
Before we were interned, we started selling our belongings. Villagers bought our furniture dirt-cheap. We sold absolutely everything. A lot of goods remained in the house. For example, my mother had prepared a suitcase full of dowry for us, the three girls. She gave it to some acquaintances of hers for safekeeping, but we never saw it again.
In 1939 the Law for the Protection of the Nation was adopted and all Jews had to wear yellow badges. I was already 10 and had to wear one. I remember that there was another girl of Jewish origin in the School of Economics where I studied. We both wore badges, but that was not a big problem because the other girls didn’t pay attention to it.
When I was a child we went on holidays very often. We had to do it because my father suffered from sciatica, and every summer we used to go to the hot mineral spas in Gorna Banya [a village close to Sofia, which is now a district of Sofia]. We used to load a horse cart with our luggage, rent a room in the village and spend a month there. We went to Gorna Banya for three years, then to Ovcha Kupel for three years. At that time my mother took good care of all her four children and used to make ‘chateau’ for us every morning. It is made of well-beaten egg white, and then the yoke and sugar are added, all this is stirred well and is eaten with bread. I will not forget an incident, when our whole family of six persons had gathered in an alcove in Ovcha Kupel to have our meal and a woman who was a tenant in the same house, asked mother whether all the children were hers. My mother answered with a saying in Ladino: ‘Your eye – in a basket!’ This meant to protect oneself from bad thoughts of other persons.
When I was a child I knew a lot of games, which are not played nowadays. Boys and girls used to play The King-Gateman. This game wasn’t only known by the Jewish population in Sofia. Two boys hold each other’s hands above their heads to make a gate. All the others line up in a queue and pass between them, singing: ‘King-and-Gateman! Open the gates and let the King’s army pass through! Open, close, leave only one man!’ When the last word is sung, the two boys, through whose ‘gate’ the others pass, suddenly drop their hands and catch somebody. The last one to remain takes the place of one of ‘gate-boys’ and so everything is repeated on and on. We also used to play a men’s game, ‘jelick’, we would dig a hole, put a piece of wood on top of it and with another piece of wood had to throw it out as far as possible.
On Yom Kippur nothing is eaten until sundown. The last meal before the fast is at six o’clock the previous night. I remember that we, children, did not eat in memory of all who had died for Palestine (then). We, children, used to carry only a quince in our hand, which we were supposed to only smell and we had to show our tongues to prove that we hadn’t eaten anything – when the tongue was white, it proved that you hadn’t eaten and that you had endured the hours you were not allowed to eat.
The other big holiday is the Festival of Light or, as we call it, Chanukkah. According to the history of this festival when the Roman Empire devastated the Temple and placed their idols there, five thousand warriors calling themselves Maccabees, liberated the temple. They wanted to light a candle in the Temple, but couldn’t find that special oil which had to burn. Finally they found a mug with a tiny quantity of that oil, which had to be treated in advance in order to make it burn. It happened so that that small quantity of oil kept burning for eight days and this is why there are special candelabras for this holiday and every day of it one candle more is lit to commemorate it.
We celebrated Purim, too. We used to walk the streets masked, and the children gave performances, for which we were given money. We celebrated Fruitas [5]. The first day of this holiday is when almonds in Palestine begin to blossom. I was born on this holiday. The date of the Purim holiday changes with respect to the official calendar, therefore my birthday does not always coincide with the holiday. I always celebrate my birthday on 15th January. For Purim mothers used to tie up 40 different fruits, put them in a pouch and in the morning, when we awakened, we would all find such a pouch next to our beds. Positano was the main Jewish street at that time and there were many shops there, from which one could buy such fruits. Every family would buy fruit according to their possibilities, so that Fruitas could be celebrated.
My family used to celebrate Sabbath. My mother did the shopping and cooking on Fridays. On Friday nights the whole family gathered. The traditional meals like chicken, ritually killed in the synagogue, pastry with minced beef bought from the kosher butchery, and chicken soup or meatball soup from that minced meat were served. I remember that there was even one pear on the table, my father would cut it into four pieces and would give a piece to each of us, his children. On Friday night before Sabbath and on Saturday morning we used to go the synagogue. The atmosphere on Sabbath was always more special and more solemn than on other days. The table was always rich and full of kosher food. On Sabbath my father also used to read the Torah people’s history in Ladino.