Tag #126045 - Interview #78405 (Rafael Beraha)

Of course, there was a difference between the Jewish communities in Kazanlak and Ruse. In Kazanlak there was a community of more than 250 Jews, who were all some distant cousins. There were more Jews in Ruse – 2,500, some of whom didn’t even know each other. But there were some families of intellectuals with very famous family names. The world-famous writer, Nobel laureate Elias Canetti [19], was born in Ruse. So were the great Bulgarian director Leon Daniel and many others. There was also a Bnai Brith lodge. That was a Masonic lodge, which had its club. That club was run by my uncle Yako Bidjerano – my mother’s third brother. I must say that he was only an organizer and not a member of the club. So, I didn’t know what its activities were. It wasn’t a charity one. In any case, only rich Jews gathered there, for example the families Lazar, Aron, Uziel, Ventura – the father of Ana Ventura, who was a factory owner –, Iskovich, Levi and Mizrahi, who owned the socks factory ‘Fazan’. To be honest, they were the color of Ruse. They helped us: for example I worked in the factory owned by Ventura, ‘Zhiti’. But their help wasn’t motivated by principles, valued by the members of the Bnai Brith lodge. While in Kazanlak there were only one or two rich families and they were something like the local aristocrats.

Both Ruse and Kazanlak had their Jewish neighborhoods. The typical Jewish professions at that time were those related to trade. The market of Kazanlak was in the center of the town – around the so-called ‘Tsarska Cheshma’ [King’s Fountain], which was built on the occasion of the visit of King Ferdinand to the town. Usually the vendors coming from the villages were arranged in a line. It was very interesting for me to watch the famous Bulgarian writer Chudomir Chorbadzhiski, who went around and took down in shorthand what the village women were saying to each other. His wife was my teacher in drawing. In Ruse there were a number of markets. We went to the one closest to the Jewish neighborhood. It wasn’t much different from the other markets in the country.

There was only one synagogue in Kazanlak, while there were two in Ruse – a Sephardi [20] one and an Ashkenazi one. But there was a wonderful rabbi, Heskiya, the father of Zako Heskiya [a famous Bulgarian film director], in Kazanlak. I don’t know about Ruse, because I wasn’t from a religious family and I didn’t go to the synagogue. But I know that the Sepharadi synagogue is very interesting, because its dome is built without supporting beams. However, the Jews in Ruse sold it to an Evangelic sect [a neo-protestant church] at the beginning of the 1990s. Of course, the Evangelists renovated it, with the help of an American foundation.