The wedding of Lea and Leon Beraha

This is our wedding photo, taken in Sofia in 1952. It was a civil marriage, a modest one. I?m the one on the right, standing, my husband, Leon Beraha, is next to me. My husband came back from the USSR in 1952, after graduating in mine engineering. We married on a Sunday. On Monday he 'disappeared' - he was appointed at the mine in Pernik and got very busy. My husband was extremely modest, industrious and honest. He climbed the career ladder all by himself, without any intercessions. The newspapers wrote about him. I have a large file of press clippings. First he worked as a mining engineer in Pernik, then he was advanced to the post of mine director. Then he was in charge of the industry in Pernik - the Crystal Plant, the mines, the Lenin State Metallurgy Plant, the Cement Plant, etc. As a next step, he was promoted to a job at the Council of Ministers because they needed someone who was simultaneously a mining engineer and an economist. In 1966 Stanko Todorov decided to send him to Italy because meanwhile my husband had graduated from the diplomats' school in the USSR. He also worked for the Council for Mutual Economical Support [the economic organization of the former socialist countries] as well as for UNESCO. He was regularly sent to its head office in Geneva. My husband was the ideal example that in communist times there wasn't any anti-Semitism in Bulgaria. As he was a diplomat for 28 years and traveled a lot, I used to accompany him. In Italy he was the Bulgarian embassy's first secretary. In Angola he was a minister plenipotentiary, and in Cambodia ambassador. Finally, when he got very ill, he was sent to Geneva to defend Bulgaria with regard to the Revival Process.