Sent: Friday, December 12, 2003 3:24 PM
by e-mail from Joseph Meshofer

Subject: Bulgaria and Jews
A Lost Piece of Jewish History

He was born in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia in 1938. After W.W.II, when he was 10, his family immigrated to Jaffa, Israel. He did his military service in Air Force intelligence and paratroopers, and became a journalist and writer of books (including David Ben Gurion's biography), as well as a public servant. - Part of the year he spends in the United States, where he is a professor at Emory University and a very busy speaker.

It was at Emory in 1993 that he read a New York Times article about the wartime rescue of about 7,200 Jews in Denmark He wrote to the newspaper about the much bigger rescue in Bulgaria, and, only after much checking, did the newspaper publish it. - The flood of positive reaction to this little known tale, and colleagues at the university, convinced Bar Zohar to write the book.

A True Story Never Told

A great many Jews know the story of how the Danes rescued 8,000 Jews from the Nazi's by smuggling them to Sweden in fishing boats. Very few Jews, including me, until yesterday, know the story of how all 50,000 Bulgarian Jews were saved. - Not a single Bulgarian Jew was deported to the death camps, due to the heroism of many Bulgarians of every walk of life, up to and including the King and the Patriarch of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

In 1999, Abraham Foxman, the National Director of the Anti Defamation League flew with a delegation to Sofia to meet the Bulgarian Prime Minister. - He gave the Prime Minister the first Bulgarian language copy of a remarkable book, "Beyond Hitler's Grasp," written in 1998, by Michael Bar Zohar, a professor at Emory University. (A Bulgarian Jew who had migrated to Israel and then to the USA)

This book documents the rescue effort in detail. The ADL paid for and shipped 30,000 copies to Bulgaria, so that the population could partake in the joy of learning about this heroic facet of their history. This story is clearly the last great secret of the Holocaust era.

The story was buried by the Bulgarian Communists, until their downfall in1991. All records were sealed, since they didn't wish to glorify the King, or the Church, or the non Communist
Parliamentarians, who -at great personal risk - stood up to the Germans, and the Bulgarian Jewish Community, 45,000 of whom went to Israel after the War, were busy building new lives, and somehow the story remained untold.

Bulgaria is a small country and at the outset of the War they had 8 million people. They aligned themselves with the Nazi's in hopes of recapturing Macedonia from Yugoslavia and Thrace from Greece. Both provinces were stripped from them, after W.W.I.

In late 1942 the Jews of Salonica were shipped north through Bulgaria, on the way to the death camps, in sealed box cars. The news of this inhumanity was a hot topic of conversation. Then, at the beginning of 1943, the pro - Nazi Bulgarian government was informed that all 50,000 Bulgarian Jews would be departed in March. The Jews had been made to wear yellow stars and were highly visible.

As the date for the deportation got closer, the agitation got greater. Forty-three ruling party members of Parliament walked out in protest. Newspapers denounced what was about to happen. In addition, the Patriarch of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Archbishop Kirili, threatened to lie down on the railroad tracks. - Finally, King Boris III forbid the deportation.

Since Bulgaria was an ally of Germany, and the Germans were stretched militarily, they had to wrestle with the problem of how much pressure they could afford to apply. -They decided to pass.

Several points are noteworthy. The Bulgarian Jews were relatively unreligious and did not stand apart from the local populace by virtue of garb, or rites. They were relatively poor by comparison to Jewish in other countries, and they lived in integrated neighborhoods. Additionally, Bulgaria had many minorities, Armenians, Turks, Greeks, and Gypsies, in addition to Jews. - There was no concept of racism in that culture. The bottom line here is that Bulgarians saw Bulgarian Jews as Bulgarians, and not as Jews.

And, being a small country, like Denmark, where there was a closeness of community, that is often missing in larger countries.

So, here was a bright spot that we can point to as example of what should have been. The most famous of those saved was a young graduate of the Bulgarian Military Academy. When he arrived in Israel, he changed his name to Moshe Dayan.

FROM THE WEB EDITOR:

I just received by e-mail this interesting text from Peter Alapin. I don’t know the author, but I would like those of our readers who know something more about this story to write a letter to :
editors@polish-jewish-heritage.org