Tag #141604 - Interview #98916 (Lilia Levi)

My parents and grandparents only ate kosher meat. But the young people changed that. We couldn’t make my grandmother eat pork or anything prepared with fat even during the war, when it was hard to find absolutely anything to eat. Anyway, my mother usually mixed fat with vegetable oil when she was cooking. All the old traditions just faded away after the war. Or the families that really wanted to keep them left Bulgaria.

When I was young families often gathered together for every holiday. For example when a boy was born, all the relatives gathered on the day of its circumcision;,then again for the Bar-mitzvah. If there were weddings, or deaths, my grandmother’s relatives always gathered together.

As far as wedding go, there was such a tradition in the past – if the wedding was supposed to take place on Sunday, all the women together with the future bride went to the baths on Friday. And after that everybody went outside the baths, which were of Turkish type, there was some room for sitting outside, and they had a small party. Afterwards they went to the bride’s house. And the very wedding procedure was taking place at the synagogue. Nowadays young people are restoring this tradition little by little. Recently I went to a wedding only to refresh my memory about how it used to be in the past.