Bulgarian Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Ekaterina Zaharieva hosted on April 5 a Passover Seder attended by leaders of Jewish communities from Bulgaria and the Balkans, as well as leaders of other faith communities.
Zaharieva and participants expressed the hope that the occasion, the first of its kind hosted by a Bulgarian Foreign Minister at the ministry’s headquarters in Sofia, would be the first of a new tradition.
The 2018 event was held in the year that Bulgaria marks 75 years since the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews from the Holocaust and commemorates the more than 11 000 Jews from the “new lands” under Bulgarian administration in northern Greece and Yugoslavia who were deported to their death at Treblinka.
Addressing the event, which also was attended by leaders of Jewish communities from Greece, Macedonia and Serbia and ambassadors representing member states of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, Zaharieva said that 75 years ago, the Bulgarian people were on top of the historical moment and defended the country’s Jews.
She described the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews in the pre-Second World War borders of the country as one of the brighest pages in Bulgarian history, “an unprecedented act and manifestation of civil courage, the fruit of the joint actions of politicians, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, intellectuals and ordinary citizens”.
No other European state, an ally of Nazi Germany at the time, had managed to protect the vast majority of its Jewish population, Zaharieva said, adding her regret about the deportation of the Jews from the territories that had been under Bulgarian administration.
Referring to the fact that the dinner was held in the Holy Week for Orthodox Christians, Zaharieva said: “Thank you for being with us today, Great Thursday, to send a common message that we are working together for a peaceful, wise and stable Balkans that does not generate problems but looks with confidence to the future. That will be a contemporary expression of the ethnic and religious tolerance we have inherited through the ages”.
Dr Alexander Oscar, President of the Organisation of the Jews in Bulgaria “Shalom” – the country’s EJC affiliate – dwelt on the theme of how, at a Passover Seder, Jewish tradition commits children to ask the question, “Why is this night different from all the others?”
“The Talmud teaches that in every generation, every person is obliged to view themselves as having personally just come out of Egypt. We celebrate our freedom, our exemption from the plagues. Yet, as we sit at our tables tonight, during these days of Passover, we must remember that the story that the festival recalls may be an ancient one, but there are principles that are eternal, that remain topical today,” he said.
“The plagues on a society. The quest for freedom from bondage. Because today, there are plagues. Because today, we remember that freedom is not a given but always must be
campaigned for.” The plagues of today for which a cure had to be found included hate speech, intolerance, populism and false patriotism.
“Today, we may be physically free, but that does not mean stopping the struggle with all the forces who want to take away our freedom. True freedom is the freedom to be yourself, to be part of a community of one’s choice without fear of discrimination; the freedom to honour your cultural heritage, the freedom to realise the potential of one without enslaving others.”
