This is a photo of haribi [rabbi] Meshulam and Jan Solomon during a religious holiday (I don’t remember which one exactly). The photo was taken in Sofia in the 1990s.
At the beginning of the 1980s Maxim Kohen and Jan Solomon were sent by the Jewish community to Budapest, where there was a yeshivah. [Editor’s note: The last yeshivah in Hungary closed in 1956. It was the famous Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest that did not close even during communism.] They studied there for six months. As the Budapest yeshivah was an Ashkenazi one, they stayed for six months more in Bucharest, where there was a Sephardi one. They had some practice there helping the rabbi in reading the prayers.
Jan Solomon has a wife who used to work in the Institute for Foreign Students in Sofia and she was sent from there to specialize further in France. He followed her and they remained there. His father's name is Isidor Solomonov: he used to be editor-in-chief of 'Evereiski vesti' [Jewish News] newspaper for a long time.
Haim Meshulam used to be the rabbi at that time. He was born in Plovdiv and his father was from Odrin, and was a rabbi also. He remained in Bulgaria and was a rabbi in the synagogue at the end of the 1940s. He was also a mohel. He traveled around in different towns in order to do the job. At that time rabbis had the right to perform weddings, and so he did that job also. He became a rabbi in 1986 and people respected and honored him very much.
