Tinka Kohen and Valeri Kohen

This is me and my son Valeri Kohen, but I don’t remember exactly where and when the picture was taken. After the changes in 1989 and his father's death Valeri gradually took up his business as attorney of Jewish estates in Bulgaria. The wars in Israel in 1967 and 1973 brought us to marry our son Valeri to a Jewish girl. At that time our daughter Leah was married to a Bulgarian from a family who did not have any feelings for the problems of the Jews. At this point I told my son that only a Jew who experienced and understood the problems of Israel, could understand the Jewish tragedy. And so if he would marry a Jew, I told him, she would have a different view on the events there. The breaking of diplomatic ties between Bulgaria and Israel also hurt me a lot - here the Jews were called aggressors and so we mixed only with Jewish friends so that we could talk and share our opinions more freely.