Tag #141783 - Interview #78803 (Leon Mordohay Madzhar)

My father’s ancestors were Sephardi Jews. His family comes from Salonika [see Expulsion of the Jews from Spain] [1]. My father’s father, Sabitay Aron or Rahamin – I don’t remember exactly which of the two names was his second name – Madzhar, came to Bulgaria as a young man and settled in Dupnitsa. [According to the Tirnovo Constitution of 1878 of the newly created Bulgarian state, Bulgarian citizens were required to adopt a third name. The patronymic Aron or Rahamin was attached to Sabitay Madzhar’s name in his Bulgarian documents after he moved from the still Ottoman Salonika to the Bulgarian Dupnitsa.] I don’t know when that happened, probably when he was young. I know nothing about his parents, or his brothers and sisters. But I know that he had siblings. They remained in Salonika. After World War II my father and I tried to find them, but we found no one. Most probably, they died in the death camps.

My grandfather Sabitay married Klara Pilosof in Dupnitsa. This was his second marriage. He was first married to another woman, from whom he had two sons and a daughter – Rahamin, Aron and Miriam. I never knew my paternal grandfather, because he died in 1925, one year before I was born, but I remember Grandmother Klara very well. She was born in 1850 in Dupnitsa and died in 1954 at the age of 104. She grew up in Dupnitsa. She and my grandfather had three daughters and one son – Buka, Vida, Rashel and my father Sabitay. My grandfather processed guts used to wrap sausages, a job my father inherited from him. They didn’t make the sausages themselves, they only processed the guts and sold them.