Dora and Liza Behar

My daughters, the identical twins Dora and Liza. The photo was taken at home. I know that photographer was the Jew Dorcho Illel, the oldest Jew I have ever known, who died at the age of 94. The photo was taken in Plovdiv in 1958. In the photo the twins are showing with their index fingers how old they are – one year old. The one on the left is Dora, the one on the right is Liza. We used to dress them identically and even now they are very close.

[My wife] learned how to cook a lot of typical Jewish dishes - agristàda and apio, andjinara and burmolikos. At Chanukkah we are still visiting uncle Nisim to light a Chanukkiyah - only once, and the children come then.

Our twins – our children grew up in this atmosphere but, of course, there is an important detail – my wife [a Bulgarian] paints 40 or 50 eggs every Easter and she prepares Easter cookies. At Christmas we celebrate with her kin.

My two daughters were raised as Jews. For a short period of time they attended the Jewish kindergarten. In 1979 my daughters got married on one and the same day. They feel very strong connection even nowadays despite living in different countries. Liza has a college education and is a sanitary inspector – to control the quality of the food – but she doesn’t work in this field. Now she lives in Israel and works at a hotel in Elad. She married twice and has two children from her two husbands. From her marriage with Svetozar Zhelyazkov is her son Branimir, and from her second marriage to Tsenko Kunchev is her daughter Vanya, who is a student.

Dora is married to George Spasov, a master of sports – mechanized water sports. She has a secondary education of technology. She lives in Plovdiv and works as a beautician here.

Liza, who lives in Israel at the moment, is more committed to the Jewish organization whereas Dora, who lives here, is not committed to that extent. She is a member of Shalom but comes rarely, and her children, too, but on the other hand Liza is very devoted. Her daughter Vanya, who lives in Plovdiv, is an activist and a madriha.
Dora has two children, Nikolay and Iva. Iva is a third-year student. My two daughters are married to Bulgarian men. The Jewish origin of my daughters has never been an obstacle for the choice of their Bulgarian husbands, otherwise they wouldn’t have married them, right? Irrespectively of the fact that they have different professions and destinies, they feel very strongly connected. I’ll tell you a very interesting fact. When Dora was pregnant, Liza could feel her labor pains from a distance.