Bulgaria 3: Plovdiv

The pensioners'  'gymnastics' class at the Jewish Community centre in Plovdiv, Bulgaria is a crowded affair.  Broom handles are laid out on chairs in a large high ceilinged room, and despite looking like they might be for tap dancing, I realise that massaging finger joints and reaching arms to the ceiling are more the order of the day.  The women are a youthful looking lot for their years.  Anna, in her late 60s, emigrated to Israel only to come back to Plovdiv.  Others, like Rivka looks 75 but is actually 90.  She used to run the class herself.  Rifka's husband is the cantor at the synagogue because, she says, he is the only one left who reads Hebrew well enough.  They rarely open the synagogue but still make a show of a minyan on important holidays.   In the adjoining room the chat buzzes along with plates of boicos (cheese pastries) and salad served to the pensioners.  Not everyone is officially Jewish (quite a few have Jewish fathers, or perhaps even more tenuous connections) but like elsewhere in Bulgaria, numbers make it an inclusive community.  The religious side of things seems to be expansive.

The same goes for Sofia.  The beautiful main synagogue, the third largest in Europe, stands towering over my hotel is a focus for community life.   At the succah meal after the shabbat service I chat to a few women as we sit on separate tables.  The Chabad House's director's wife, from Israel, who has been a number of people, mainly the older generation .  From visiting religious Israelis,  the religion is passed down via the mother But for the decayed stucco frontage and everyone nodding for no, and shaking their head for yes this could be Finchley Road on a Sunday outing for Jewish pensioners.

I hand them a pcture of my grandmother and mention my father's family name to see if anyone can remember them.  all the various staff who smile and help out.    But there can't be more than a few hundred jews here, 5000 in the whole of Bulgaria (it's an inclusive community - if your father was jewish, well that's good enough for most people).

I sometimes wonder whether staying flexible has been the watchword of the Bulgarian Jews who stayed in the country after 1947.  That was when (until the early 50s about) the vast majority of Bulgaria's 50,000 Jews were told - you're free to go.  Helped by American payments and a new state's gratitude for their salvation from the worst of Nazi extermination, the Bukos, the Meyers, the Lilyas, the Chanas of Sofia, Plovdiv, Bourgas, Kustendil and all the little towns where Jews had lived since Byzantine times got on trains like my mother and ships to Israel, or like my father boarded rickety old boats bound for Palestine, sometimes caught by the British and being interned in Cyprus before partition in 1947.

So here I am.  In Plovdiv, the second city, where my family lived in the centre of the old city.  In big compounds of houses, long ago split up into tiny flats by the communists.  The Jewish centre is a vibrant place.  Old men with serious faces sit playing Bellot (a french card game popular in Bulgaria, like an easier version of bridge) in the afternoon, and old women looking tremendously youthful chat over free snacks for gymnastics, sukkah and all sorts of other activities for the whole community.