Purim in Bulgaria

By June Brott

Dr. Astroukov, thoracic surgeon, placing flowers on the monument.

My family has started a new Purim tradition: we say Kaddish for two Bulgarian Orthodox priests named Stefan and Kyril. I first learned about these courageous men during our year in Bulgaria when my husband was a volunteer legal liaison and I taught English.

Experiencing the annual cycle of religious holidays far from our California family, we learned a lot about the Sephardic customs and practices of the Bulgarian Jewish community. When new friends invited us for Purim, we learned a modern Bulgarian version of the ancient story. More than 2000 years ago in Persia, Mordecai and Esther saved Jews from Haman, who wanted to kill all the Jews. In 1943 in Bulgaria, Stefan and Kyril helped prevent Hitler, another Haman, from deporting Jews to Nazi death camps. Their saga belongs to a lesser known WW11 story: while Europe’s Jews were being murdered, not one of Bulgaria’s 50,000 Jewish citizens was taken to a concentration camp.

During the Megillah reading at the magnificent, 100-year-old synagogue in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, we heard Haman’s name drowned out by groggers, various noisemakers, stomping feet, and the banging of wooden lids that cover the original prayer book holders. In the century-old synagogue in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second largest city, we joined the Purim celebration and recited the Kaddish prayer for Stefan and Kyril, leaders of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, respectively, in Sofia and Plovdiv.

Jews have lived in Bulgaria since Roman Empire days, but unlike most of Europe, Bulgaria never had a tradition of antisemitism. In the Middle Ages, Ashkenazi Jews persecuted in Europe, and Sephardic Jews fleeing the Inquisition, both found refuge in tolerant Bulgaria. In the 1930s, though, Bulgaria’s tolerant reputation dimmed and by 1940 its fascist-leaning government became Hitler’s ally. In 1941 antisemitism became state policy for the first time, when the government passed the “Law for the Protection of the Nation (LPN)”–its version of Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws.

Many Bulgarians opposed the government, but Stefan and Kyril’s voices were the most powerful. Stefan called Hitler “an insane Fuhrer,” and Kyril said Bulgaria’s Law for the Protection of the Nation (LPN) “shames the good name of the Bulgarian people.” Others protested too– antifascist communists, intellectuals, writers, some parliamentarians, and many ordinary citizens. Nevertheless, the LPN curtailed Jewish civil rights, required Jews to wear yellow stars, confiscated homes and businesses, forbid Jewish children to attend Bulgarian schools, and ordered Jewish men into forced labor camps.

In a secret, sudden deportation ‘installment,’ 12,000 ethnic Bulgarian Jews living in Nazi-occupied Macedonia and Greek Thrace were dragged from their beds on March 4, 1943, a freezing night. Bulgarian police forced them into open railroad cars on tracks that passed through Bulgarian, to internment sites, and then on to Poland. Stefan happened to witness these Nazi-guarded trains filled with shivering Jews, “young and old, packed like sardines, and begging for mercy.” Outraged, he protested to King Boris, who said the deportation had happened too fast to stop. The doomed Jews perished in Treblinka.

On March 9, 1943 –during the Purim season –the government planned to deport Jewish Bulgarian citizens. In many towns, terrified Jews were already under house arrest or had been rounded up—their belongings sold, their houses sealed. Held by police in schools, warehouses, or synagogues, they nervously awaited an unknown fate. When Stefan offered mass conversations and christenings to willing Jews so their names would be removed from deportation lists, the government threatened to close down the churches. Kyril, stating he would excommunicate King Boris if Jewish citizens were taken, declared he would throw himself on the tracks to stop deportation trains.

Memorial from Plovdiv Bulgaria

For the first time in Bulgarian history, revered “princes of the Church” refused to obey the law of the country. Infuriated, the government was forced to cancel the deportation and the Jews were saved. This was a respite, though, not an end to the Jews’ hardships. Jews were ordered from their homes, sent to provincial towns, and didn’t return until 1945 after the war. They found their property looted, but they were all alive.

At the Batchkovo Monastery outside Plovdiv, where Stefan and Kyril are buried, we recited Kaddish and again at a public ceremony in Sofia where government officials and Jewish leaders spoke, remembered, and laid flowers on a monument recalling what happened on March 19, 1943.

So when our California family enjoys tasty Purim hamentashen and hears the Megillah read, we tell our time in Bulgaria and we say Kaddish for Stefan and Kyril.