Tag #137579 - Interview #78062 (korina solomonova)

Both Bulgarians and Jews lived in our neighborhood in the center of Sliven. My parents got along very well with their neighbors; they had both Bulgarian and Jewish friends. As a child I didn't notice if the other children were Bulgarians or Jews. There was no evident anti-Semitism in Sliven. Our Bulgarian neighbors weren't of the fascist type.

The Jewish community included several thousand people. There was a Jewish municipality, whose management's offices were in the Jewish school. It was a new two-story building with a big nice yard, where we played. We also had a synagogue. It had its own building, situated near our house in the Jewish neighborhood. While in Sofia the Jews had no legal right to buy houses in the center of the city after 1939 [because of the so-called Law for the Protection of the Nation] [4], which led to the forming of the Jewish neighborhood [Iuchbunar], this wasn't the case in Sliven, where relatives wanted to live closer to one another. So, there was a big Jewish neighborhood in the center. We had a rabbi and a shochet. We didn't have a special store where kosher food was sold, but we went to the shochet at the synagogue where he ritually slaughtered hens and calves.