Elena Shtereva, March 09 (BTA/GNA) – The 80th anniversary of the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews from the death camps was commemorated with rallies, a minute of silence and the laying of wreaths at monuments throughout the country.
The salvation of the Jews in Bulgaria is a remarkable, exceptional phenomenon, the Israel Council on Foreign Relations (ICFR) Director and Editor-in-Chief of the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, Dr Laurence Weinbaum, said in a lecture on dignity in the face of indifference and moral decadence at the international conference an international conference on “The Role of Jurists for the Salvation of the Bulgarian Jews,” held in Sofia on Thursday.
The salvation of the Bulgarian Jews was a civil society initiative, Weinbaum recalled. According to him, Bulgarians are rightly proud of this.
We cannot discuss in detail the biographies of 28,000 people, but if one leafs through them quickly, one will see that these rescuers were from different parties, and different walks of life in society, they did not have a single unifying factor, people were quite different, Dr Weinbaum added.
“We should all follow the light which Bulgaria emitted during World War II, it is the light that should guide us,” Israeli Ambassador in Sofia Yoram Elron said at the conference’s opening.
Ambassador Elron said Bulgaria stood up against the forces of evil during World War II and became the only country in which the number of Jews was larger after the war than before the war. He noted the important role of the Church, politicians, law professionals and ordinary citizens in rescuing the Bulgarian Jews.
But he added that the 11,000-plus Jews in the Bulgarian-administrated regions of Western Thrace and Vardar Macedonia, who were not saved, should not be forgotten either.
“Eighty years after the events of 1943, it is with particular anguish that we recall the tragic fate of 11,343 Jews who were not Bulgarian citizens and then resided in parts of the then Yugoslavia and Northern Greece, whom the local Bulgarian administration was unable to save. We deeply moan those innocent Holocaust victims and will never forget them,” Bulgarian Foreign Minister Nikolay Milkov said, addressing the opening of the conference.
Not enough is known about the bright example of Bulgaria, which saved its Jews, Vice President Iliana Iotova said addressing the conference “The Jurists’ Role in Saving Bulgarian Jews”. According to her, various experts, specialists and historians should do a lot of research into the facts so that it could be known for sure what happened in those dark months in late 1942 and early 1943.
Eighty years ago, Bulgaria succeeded in saving 48,000 Jews. This unprecedented act recorded one of the brightest pages not only in Bulgarian but in world history, the Vice President said.
She noted that in other European countries, there were individual acts, certain people, who managed to save thousands of Jews, but what was different in Bulgaria was that the entire Bulgarian public rose against the deportation, and the individual representatives, whose names are known, expressed the opinion not only of the public but also of institutions.
The forum is co-organized by the Bulgarian foreign and culture ministries, the Israeli Embassy in Sofia, the Association of Prosecutors in Bulgaria, the Chamber of Investigators in Bulgaria, and the Federation of Zionists in Bulgaria. The initiative is part of the National Programme for Marking the 80th Anniversary of the Salvation of the Bulgarian Jews during World War II and is co-financed by the Ministry of Culture.