Sabbath Lights Go Out for Bulgarian Jewry
By GABRIEL LEVENSON
(Copyright 1967, JTA Inc.)
SOFIA, Bulgaria—The Sabbath
lights are going out all over this
small Balkan nation; they will not
be rekindled in our time.
Thirty elderly Jews gather every
week for Friday evening worship
in the Midrasha of Sofia's great
Central Synagogue at 16 Exarch
Josif Street. The cantor holds high
an ancient silver cup and chants
the kidush in the trad:tional Sep-
hardic version. His congregants--
the youngest in his mid-sixties; the
oldest, 92—respond as their ances-
tors have done since the first Jews
settled in the Balkan Peninsula
two centuries before the Christian
era.
Except for occasional appear-
ances at Purim or the High Holy
Days, their children never attend
services; to their children's chil-
dren, the synagogue is as remote
as is the splendid, gold-domed
Alexander Nevsky Memorial Church
(half a mile away) to the young
Sof ia ns whose grandparents ob-
served the Russian Orthodox ritual
there.
Unused, like the Nevsky
church, the synagogue is now a
national historical monument.
But 85 years ago, 1,000 persons
filled every seat at its dedica-
floe, with King Ferdinand him-
self, his queen and members of
the foreign diplomatic corps par-
ticipating in the ceremonies.
Bulgaria had won its freedom
only 10 years earlier, after five
centuries of Ottoman rule; and the
new synagogue was designed in
the still-dominant Turkish style.
A huge chandelier hangs from the
interior of the hundred-foot-high
dome. Graceful, fluted columns,
separated by curved Moorish
arches, support the galleries. The
floor is inlaid with an intricately
patterned mosaic tile.
With disuse, decay has set in
at the synagogue. The wrought-
iron gate, topped by the Star of
David, which leads into the court-
yard is rusty. The cobblestones
of the yard are sprouting grass. A
gypsy woman sells tomatoes at a
stand in front of the building;
across the street, busy shoppers,
carrying their mesh bags, hurry
into a long, barn-like building
which houses dozens of vegetable
and fruit stalls.
The Midrasha, a small anteroom.
is now used for services, but the
doors leading into the main syna.
gogue are fastened with an old
brass padlock. Curator and gate-
keeper is Isac Moscona, president
of the Central Religious Council
of Israelites in Bulgaria.
He is a man in his mid-sixties,
with the deeply-lined face and
stooped shoulders of a scholar. He
speaks eight languages well, in-
cluding Turkish Spanish and He-
brew. In his office, across the en-
trance hall from the Midrasha,
hangs a large drawing of the syna-
gogue at the time of its dedication.
Against one wall is a bookcase,
whose glass doors protect the
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parchment-bound books and docu-
ments of Sofia's once-thriving Jew-
ish community.
Before World War II, Mr.
Moscona says, there were 45,000
Jews in Bulgaria, 26,000 in Sofia
alone — supporting their five
major synagogues and ten small-
er midrasha. Now there are only
6,000 in the entire country —
out of a total population of
8,000,000; and 3,000 Jews are in
Sofia.
Despite German penetration and
control of the country, the 45,000
Jews survived the war. So deep
were their roots in the country,
and so fierce the Bulgarian deter-
mination to defend them, that even
Himmler's SS elite forces did not
dare to carry out — in Bulgaria
— the policies of deportation and
extermination which virtually liq-
uidated the Jewish populations of
the other occupied countries.
The Jews survived, but the great
majority of them chose to migrate
to Israel, leaving behind the elderly
and the dedicated Communists who
felt a much stronger identity with
their homeland than with the new
Jewish state. Until the June war,
contact between Jews in Bulgaria
and relatives in Israel was exten-
sive: there was great freedom of
travel and communication between
the two countries.
Despite the recent diplomatic
break between Israel and Bulgaria,
the close ties persist. "We grieve
that eight Sofia Jews were killed
in the first three days of the war,"
Mr. Mosconi says.
Neither he, nor the cantor, Chaim
Mordecai Meshullam, nor the mem-
bers of the congregation, who greet-
ed me warmly in Hebrew and Span-
ish, would enter into any direct
discussion of the war. "We are
very sorry that in the war people
on both sides are killed," Mr. Mos-
cona says in careful, halting Eng-
lish. "We think that the best vic-
tory in a war is not as good as a
bad peace." He adds, "We are sad
from the war but what can we do?
We are little people, and we have
political and economic freedom
here."
Like Cantor Meshullam, Mr.
Moscona is paid by the state for
his services as president and his-
torian of the community. He says
the government has allotted
funds to keep the synagogue in
good repair and he points to a
wall, shattered, he says, by
American bombs during an air
raid in Nazi-held Sofia, which
will be restored finally as part
of this year's budget for the
synagogue's maintenance.
Mr. Moscona has recently com-
pleted a history of the Jewish fam-
ilies of Bulgaria, written in Bul-
garian, which will be printed by
the government's publishing house.
He showed me the handwritten
manuscript of a Spanish Ladino
dictionary on which he has been
working for the past two years and
in which the government demon-
strates little interest.
Ladino, the "Yiddish" of Sep-
hardic Jewry from Spain to Yemen,
is a polyglot tongue made up of
Spanish, Greek, Turkish and the
other languages acquired by the
Jews in their centuries of migra-
tion throughout the Mediterranean
lands. Like Yiddish, it uses Hebrew
characters, although its- vocabulary
and grammar are primarily Span-
ish.
Mr. Macona has a compilation
of 12,000 words in his dictionary.
"The vocabulary is limited," he
says, "because the language is dy-
ing. No new words have been in-
troduced into it since the end of
the 19th Century."
The Bulgarian government, with
scant resources, cannot publish a
work of such relative obscurity, Mr.
Moscona fears. It is to be hoped
that sponsors can be found—per-
haps in the United States—for his
record of a disappearing culture.
Some people have a perfect
genius for doing nothing, and do-
ing it assiduously. —Haliburton.
Of all sad words of tongue or
pen, the saddest are these: it
might have been.
—John Greenleaf Whittier.
Friday, October 6, 1967-
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