Tag #125486 - Interview #78561 (Sofi Eshua Danon-Moshe)

We played, sang, there were a lot of organized activities. We didn’t have free time to walk aimlessly on the promenade. Every year Maccabi games were organized which meant that from all towns - Ruse [city in Northeastern Bulgaria, 251km from Sofia], Plovdiv, Sofia - members of Maccabi came to Pazardzhik because it was a Zionist center at the time. At that time, before the Holocaust, there were about a thousand people in the Jewish community but that wasn’t all, the Jews in Pazardzhik were very learned, convinced Zionists. It was known that Herzl [22] had visited Pazardzhik before going to the Turkish Sultan. That was the rumor among the Jews in the community.

All the participants in the Maccabi games had to present their exercises. We used to make pyramids, took part in different competitions, for example, we had to put our feet in sacks, to have a thread and a needle in your hand and while jumping with the sack you had to put the thread through the ear of the needle. Or we had to run with the sacks holding a raw egg on a spoon. We had to run and were trying to come first. We used to jump on a vaulting horse, on parallel bars, we made some exercises with very beautiful figures: we all moved to the left or to the right and as a result we achieved some very beautiful tableaux.

We also paraded on the streets of Pazardzhik with our blue and white flag. One of us was holding the national flag, another, our flag. And when we were passing, the people watching us said that we had our own holiday. Nobody tried to stop us; there were such parades in Pazardzhik between 1935 and 1939.