Tinka and Pepo Kohen

Tinka and Pepo Kohen

This is me and my husband Pepo, in March 1971 in our home in Sofia. We lived in a rented apartment, which was owned by the state. It had two rooms. We lived there with our children, Leah and Valeri. We were not well off, but we managed to educate our children. We didn’t have much money - as most Bulgarian citizens we depended on the state salary during socialism. Our daughter Leah graduated from the Academy of Music and became a music critic, and our son Valeri got a university degree in engineering. We were never very religious so there was no conflict between our membership in the Bulgarian Communist Party and the Jewish traditions. And we didn’t observe all Jewish holidays - we only observed Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, but not Sabbath. And we did that not out of piety, but in order to keep the tradition alive. There is not such a big gap between the Jewish traditions and socialist ideas, because both of them value justice most of all. Reality, however, turned out to be quite different from our ideals. So the year 1989 had to come for us to get rid of our delusions.
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