Monument

JEWISH MUSEUM OF HISTORY

The only Jewish museum in Bulgaria was set up in the early 1990s, in an upstairs room in the Sofia Synagogue, which was used as a rehearsal hall for the Jewish Choral Society before the Second World War. Some of its exhibits started as early as 1968 with a permanent collection entitled "The Rescue of Bulgarian Jews 1941-1944." In 1992, the Shalom Organisation of Jews in Bulgaria transformed it into a larger exhibition focusing on the development and evolution of the Jewish communities throughout Bulgaria. A section of the one-room museum is dedicated to the Jews of Aegean Thrace and Vardar Macedonia who perished in the Holocaust. 

The museum is managed by the Bulgarian Culture Ministry. 

Jewish history in Bulgaria is displayed chronologically and feature photographs, lithographs and drawings. 

These represent many aspects of Jewish life in the Bulgarian lands, including famous people such as Sarah-Theodora, the Jewish-born queen in mediaeval Bulgaria; the first Chief Rabbi Gabriel Almosino; Col Moreno Grasiani, a Balkans War hero; young athletes from a Jewish sports club doing their exercises, and so on. 

Rimmon, end of the 19th century
Rimmon, end of the 19th century

Some of the photographs show the earliest dated Jewish artefact in Bulgaria, the tombstone of Archsynagogus Ioses, who lived in the Roman City of Oescus in the 2nd century CE, and the mosaics of the 3rd century synagogue in Plovdiv. 

The bulk of the museum's exhibition dates back to the 18th-20th centuries. These include artefacts sent to Sofia during and after the Great Aliyah by the now disappeared Jewish communities of Kazanlak, Samokov and Provadiya, among many others. 

Much of the museum collection is devoted to various Torahs, Torah mantles and shields, and other religious artefacts like exquisite Torah crowns and finials; Scrolls of Esther; Banylonian Talmud Zevahim, written in Salzbach in 1768; kiddush silver cups; rabbi caps; and a heavily embroidered tunic for Bar Mitzvah. 

Some bindalli, Sephardi women's festive clothes from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, are also noteworthy. Together with some period furniture as well as embroidered fabrics and pillows, they give a good impression of the life of urban Jewish communities at the turn of the 19th century. 

Some of the artefacts have a very strong emotional value. These include a collection of yellow stars of the sort Jews were ordered to wear during the Second World War, and archive photographs of Jews in Bulgarian forced labour camps as well as portraits of internees in the provinces. 

PILGRIMAGE SITE TO RABBI ELIEZER PAPO

In the 2000s Silistra, which once had a sizeable Jewish community, became a site of pilgrimage for Jewish travellers. Coming in their thousands throughout the year but especially in the weeks preceding Rosh Hashanah, their destination is Kapitan Krastev Street, a dusty side road that leads to the Romanian border. There, in front of a Communist-era block of flats rather incongruously called Havana, is the memorial to Rabbi Eliezer Papo, a man of many skills and vocations, who is credited, among other things, with stopping a cholera epidemic from reaching the Bulgarian lands. 

Eliezer Papo was born in Sarajevo in 1785 but settled in Silistra, where he became rabbi to the Sephardi community, in existence there since 1477. He was a truly remarkable Judaic scholar. His books include classics such as Pele Yo'ez, Elef HaMagen and Hesed La Alafim, but what made him so popular was his belief that a truly pious Jew must divest himself of all worldly pleasures. Significantly, he not only preached asceticism but also practised it, to the extent that he came to be referred to as HaKadosh, or the Saint. 

When Silistra found itself on the frontline in the 1828-1829 war between Imperi- al Russia and the Ottomans, a cholera epidemic broke out. Papo, who had also been trained in medicine, set up field hospitals to isolate the sick and prevent the decease from spreading. Unfortunately, he did not survive, but the grateful residents of Silistra erected a monument in his memory. 

The old Jewish cemetery of Silistra, where he was buried, has long since been destroyed. Papo's original tombstone is also gone, but the site opposite the Havana has a new memorial, a mikveh and a prayer room. 

JEWISH WATERFOUNTAINS, SHUMEN

In the 1830s the old wooden Sephardi synagogue in Shumen became too small for the congregation. It was decided to construct a new one, but this led to a rift in the community. The more elderly wanted a simple, cheap building while the younger Jews favoured a large, modern and expensive one. Following protracted debates those who supported the expensive project gained the upper hand. The new synagogue of Shumen was officially consecrated in 1860. 

The synagogue survived for the next 130 years until its demolition in the 1990s. 

Next to nothing remains of Shumen's once rich Jewish legacy. After the Jews emigrated to Israel in the late 1940s their synagogue was used as a warehouse and then as art studios. There were projects to modernise it and convert it into a concert hall, but none ever materialised. In 1975 it was listed as a monument of culture, but the years of neglect and decay had already taken their toll. In 1995 the synagogue collapsed. 

The only remains of Shumen's synagogue are two embroidered parochets for the Aron Ha-Kodesh, donated in 1964 to the Sofia Synagogue, and two 19th century stone water fountains. These are now located at the side of the Shumen Museum of History, facing Karel Shkorpil Street.

One of them came from the yard of the synagogue, where it was placed by Gabbai Yomtov Shmuel in 1902. It bears an inscription: "To everyone thirsty for water." The second fountain used to stand beside the Jewish school and has two clasped hands carved into the stone. It was dedicated to Baron Hirsch, the great benefac- tor to Shumen's Jewry, upon his death in 1896. It says: "Every Jew is responsible for another Jew." 

JEWISH TOMBSTONES AT BAYRAKLI MOSQUE

The other Jewish remnants in Samokov are a few Jewish gravestones now scattered in very unlikely locations. 

You will need more concentration when you go to visit 19th century Bayrakli Mosque in the centre of town. Explore the floor of its porch carefully and you will see a number of "reused" Jewish tombstones, with inscriptions in Hebrew, Ladino and French. They were added to the mosque as late as the 1960s during renovations. 

Old Jewish tombstones were used to cover the floor of Bayrakli Mosque porch

 

ARIE HOUSE, SAMOKOV

Next to Samokov's synagogue is the Sarafska House, the smallest of the three sumptuous residences of the Aries, one of the richest of Samokov's Jewish families. It is the only old Jewish house to survive the post-Second World War modernisation. A few years after 1944 it was sold to the state and renovated, and for several decades was used by visiting Communist dignitaries. Since 1986 it has been the property of the 13th Centuries Bulgaria Foundation, the heir to a Communist fund masterminded by the daughter of erstwhile state leader Todor Zhivkov to celebrate Bulgarian culture. It is now a museum of urban culture. 

The house's wood carvings and structures have been restored, but what strikes you most is the sophisticated furniture imported later from Europe for the purposes of the museum. Some traces of its former owners remain, including some furniture bearing lions' heads, the eponym of the Arie family. 

GRATITUDE MEMORIAL, DUPNITSA

In 1943 the trains carrying Jewish deportees from Aegean Thrace stopped at the Dupnitsa railway station. Over 1,400 Jews from Komotini, Xanthi and Alexandropouli, in Greece, were incarcerated at a tobacco warehouse called The Cartel, from 7 to 9 March. Five died, but 18 were rescued following the intervention of Mois Hadzhi Davidov from the local Jewish community and Dimitar Ikonomov, an MP. Ikonomov was later sentenced to death by the People's Court. The tobacco warehouse, located at 64 Prince Boris Street, has been demolished. 

In 2018, a commemorative plaque was placed at the station to express "gratitude to the citizens of Dupnitsa for protecting their Jews from deportation and for alleviating the suffering of the 4,000 who passed through town on their way to the death camps." 

JEWISH TOMBSTONES

The Jewish tombstones now exibited by Stara Zagora's municipal swimming pool date back to the 18th and 19th centuries. They were "rescued" by the local museum from the town's old Jewish cemetery (located by the railway line, off Slavyanski Boulevard), when it was partly demolished in the 1950s to make room for an industrial compound. Though some of the tombstones have been vandalised with spray paint, they are the "lucky" ones: many more were just destroyed without a trace. 

JEWISH RUSE

Exquisite arches, decorative columns and balconies, fine stucco ornaments depicting prosperity and fertility: Ruse's best known feature is its splendid Secession architecture. Some of Ruse's old houses have been restored, others have been ignored and neglected, but the whole city centre as it stands now is a major tourist attraction and leaves little room for doubt why Bulgaria's largest town on the River Danube used to be referred to as "Little Vienna." 

Take in the small plaques listing these buildings as monuments of culture and you will see some non-Bulgarian names. The truth is that many of the townhouses were commissioned and owned by Jews. Indeed, Ruse used to be home to what was perhaps Bulgaria's most prosperous and Europeanised Jewish community. 

The earliest trace of a Jewish population in what was then Rustchuk dates back to the 1780s. At that time two groups of Jews arrived. They had come from different places and were fleeing different kinds of trouble. 

Jewish Ruse

One came from Adrianople. Despite its relative proximity to the High Porte, the town had been left to the mercy of brigands and highwaymen. Constantly the victims of crime, the Jews of Adrianople decided to leave. Some went southwards, to the capital Stamboul, but others headed north and eventually reached the shores of the Danube. 

The other came from the west: from Belgrade and Nis. They fled the uncertainties of yet another war between the sultan and the Austrian Empire. 

The newly-arrived Jews were quick to partake of the commercial opportunities Ruse offered, and their communities quickly grew bigger and richer. But ill fate soon befell them: the 1806 war between the Russian and the O toman empires forced them to flee again. After a prolonged siege, the Russians captured Ruse in 1810. Jewish shops were plundered, the synagogue was turned into a stables and was torched soon thereafter. 

Jews would return to Rustchuk in 1812, after the end of the war. In the ensuing years the wealth of the whole Danubian Plain continued to flow through the city, whose importance for the Ottoman Empire grew exponentially, especially as it had already lost a number of markets in the Balkans as a result of the independence of Serbia and Greece. Ruse's heyday came after the 1853-1856 Crimean War, when trade and cultural contacts along the Danube intensified, and the city emerged as a lower-Danube rival to all the other large cities upriver. 

jewish ruse

A Jew is somewhat stereotypically depicted as a money changer in a modern mural at a posh restaurant in Levent Tabia fort, celebrating Ruse's post-1878 multiculturalism. In the first decades after Bulgaria regained its independence, the Jews of Ruse were involved in a wide area of activities from industry to culture