Monument

A monument to the victims of Holocaust was placed in Dr Mustakov Square, also known as the American Market, in 2018.

Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti (1905-1984) was born into one of the Ruse's important Jewish families. In 1911 they left Ruse for good and settled first in England and then in Austria. Young Elias would go on to become a writer, and in 1981 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

A book of memoirs, entitled Die Gerettete Zunge, or The Tongue Set Free, is possibly his best-known work. Even though he spent just the first six years of his life in Ruse, many Bulgarians claim that Elias Canetti is the only Bulgarian to have won a Nobel Prize.

The square located near Elias Canetti House Cultural Institue bears the writer's name, and there is a small monument to him. 

Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti (1905-1984) was born into one of the Ruse's important Jewish families. In 1911 they left Ruse for good and settled first in England and then in Austria. Young Elias would go on to become a writer, and in 1981 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

A book of memoirs, entitled Die Gerettete Zunge, or The Tongue Set Free, is possibly his best-known work. Even though he spent just the first six years of his life in Ruse, many Bulgarians claim that Elias Canetti is the only Bulgarian to have won a Nobel Prize. 

The house where he was born was recently restored. 

Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti (1905-1984) was born into one of the Ruse's important Jewish families. In 1911 they left Ruse for good and settled first in England and then in Austria. Young Elias would go on to become a writer, and in 1981 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

A book of memoirs, entitled Die Gerettete Zunge, or The Tongue Set Free, is possibly his best-known work. Even though he spent just the first six years of his life in Ruse, many Bulgarians claim that Elias Canetti is the only Bulgarian to have won a Nobel Prize. 

Elias Canetti's grandfather's shop, described in Die Gerettete Zunge, has been preserved and houses the Canetti House Cultural Institute.

A late 3rd century CE mosaic of a menorah, exhibited in the Museum of Archaeology Plovdiv, is the only visible remain from Plovdiv's ancient synagogue.

Perhaps the most spectacular remains of this early Jewish presence in Bulgaria is the ancient synagogue in Philippopolis, modern-day Plovdiv. Philippopolis was a major city on the road connecting Constantinople with Central Europe. It emerged as a large cosmopolitan centre, a patchwork of nationalities and religions that outshone other large cities of the colourful Roman Empire. 

The synagogue of the Philippopolis Jews had a splendid mosaic floor, with intricate geometrical motifs as well as lions, birds, panthers and menorahs. It was constructed in the 3rd century CE, but would be destroyed and rebuilt several times over the next several centuries. 

The trials and tribulations of the Philippopolis synagogue illustrate how easily the fate of the Jews changed under the Romans. The Roman Empire was tolerant towards the various faiths and religions, but with an important caveat. Regardless of what gods they venerated, its subjects had to respect the imperial cult, which deified whoever emperor happened to be in power at any given time. Obviously, this created a problem for both Judaism and Christianity. On the other hand, unlike Christianity, Judaism had the status of Religio licita, a "tolerated religion." In the 4th century, when Christianity gained momentum as an official religion, the pressures being put on Jews intensified, yet official attitudes could change like the breeze. Emperor Theodosius I , who in the late 4th century made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire, officially ordered the governor of Moesia, in present-day northern Bulgaria, not to persecute Jews and not to demolish their synagogues. 

The Philippopolis synagogue is proof of these changing attitudes. When Theodosius died, his sons Arcadius and Honorius ruled the eastern and the western parts of the empire respectively. Anti-Jewish sentiment was on the rise. During their reign, the Philippopolis synagogue was destroyed for the first time, either as a result of antisemitism, or when the Huns conquered and ravaged the city in 441-442. 

The synagogue would be rebuilt and then destroyed yet again a century later.

It was discovered in the 1980s, during the construction of a block of flats. Its most spectacular mosaics were moved to the archaeology museum. When the archaeological survey ended, the block's construction continued. 

Well known for its excellent security, the Israeli national airline, El Al, has had only one incident in its history when one of its aircraft was shot down. This happened over Bulgaria at the height of the Cold War. 

In the early morning of 27 July 1955 El Al Flight 402, a Lockheed L-409 Constellation, took off from London bound for Tel Aviv. It carried 58 people onboard. It was supposed to flfly over Yugoslavia and Greece, because Communist Bulgaria did not allow non-Warsaw Pact aircraft in its skies. 

West of the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border, however, the aircraft changed course and entered Bulgarian airspace near Tran. Two Soviet-manufactured MiG-15s were immediately sent from Sofifia to tail the El Al aircraft through western Bulgaria. 

The MiG pilots would later contend that the Israeli aircraft was not clearly marked as a passenger plane and that they had used all means of warning it, including fifiring tracer bullets. But the Israeli plane continued on southwards towards Greece. Shortly before it was due to leave Bulgarian territory, radio orders to shoot it down were transmitted. 

Flight 402 ended in a fifireball near the Bulgarian town of Petrich. All onboard died. The Bulgarian Communist government did not concede what had happened until a day later. It did appoint a commission of investigation, which concluded that the Israeli aircraft had violated Bulgarian airspace, but also that the Bulgarian response 

was disproportionate. Bulgaria refused to allow a six-member Israeli team of investigators 

to look into the case. It did not permit even its own prosecutors to interrogate the pilots. Three Israeli experts would later be admitted near the site of the crash, but almost all the debris had already been cleared away. The Israelis concluded that the plane had deviated from its course owing to high winds. 

In 1957 Israel sued Bulgaria at the International Court in The Hague. The court ordered Israel and Bulgaria to settle the dispute themselves. Bulgaria paid out $500,000 to the families of the dead passengers, a fraction of the $6,850,000 originally demanded. 

The reasons for the shooting-down continue to be unclear. Some suggest that the El Al pilots made a navigational error through fatigue, others surmise that the aircraft was downed because it was carrying a contraband shipment of silver. Yet others claim the plane was shot down because a Mossad agent being sought by the Soviets had boarded the plane in Vienna, and Bulgaria merely acted on Soviet orders. 

The location of the crash in the area of Rupite, near the border with Greece, remained unmarked up to 2019 when the Israeli Embassy unveiled a small monument to commemorate the victims. The idea for the monument had been put forward by a students' club called Anne Frank in Petrich.

A street that runs perpendicular to Tsar Kaloyan is another reminder of Plovdiv's Jewish past. It is named after the banker Eliezer Moshe Kalev (1815-1889), who managed to save from the death punishment many Bulgarian revolutionaries following the failed April 1876 Uprising against the Ottomans. 

The white Monument of Gratitude on Tsar Kaloyan Square was erected in 1998 by local Jews. Its inscription reads in Bulgarian, Hebrew and English: "To all who helped to rescue us on 10 March 1943. From the grateful Jewish community of Plovdiv." Every year the citizens of Plovdiv gather at the monument to mark the date on which their fellow Jewish citizens were not deported. 

The old Jewish Bath House is across Sixth September Boulevard, on Tsar Kaloyan Square. Erected in the 15th-16th centuries, the Orta Mezar bath house was initially used by Turks. Jews started attending it as they settled in that area of town. The building was slated for demolition as early as the 1920s but that never came to be. Elderly Jews in Plovdiv can still remember going there with their families to take a bath. The Orta Mezar bath house survived even the massive construction effort of the 1980s. Following the collapse of Communism in 1989, the local city council, whose property the building was, started renting it out to shops and businesses. Lastly, the former bath house was a furniture shop – until a fire gutted it, in 2016. Since then the charming Ottoman building has laid in ruins.

Pleven is where the ancestral home of Jacob Levy Moreno (1889-1974), the world-famous founder of psychodrama, group psychotherapy and sociometry, still stands. There is a plaque on the house's fence, stating "The road starts from Pleven".