Tag #126198 - Interview #78424 (Raina Blumenfeld)

I have been a widow for two years now. My husband died in 2000. I had a very good life with him and I miss him terribly now. I live alone. Now, together with members of the Golden Age Club of our Shalom organization in Sofia, I often go to concerts and to the theater whenever I have a chance. The problem is that I have to come home quite late and with the current rate of crime this is a bit frightening. I have a friend who lives in the same block of flats as me and although she is much younger than me, we go out and come back together. I always take two invitations to concerts or theater performances – one for my friend – and thus, I satisfy my passion for cultural life. My daughter even finds that I lead a much more diversified life than her. I participate in the management of the Section ‘Disabled Persons’, because I am myself a disabled person. There we also have organized life. We meet once a month, deliver communications and try to go to some theatrical or musical performance. The community pays for the tickets.
I went to visit my brother in France the year that my husband passed away. My brother invited me to cheer me up because I was crushed with grief. We went to the Rossini Festival in Italy, then I visited my niece in Vienna. She took us to the synagogue twice. The Vienna synagogue is very nice, but ours in Sofia is more beautiful. The community there, however, is better. The singers in the synagogue in Vienna were very good tenors and sang magnificently. I liked it so much that when we went out, my sister, my niece and I started singing a Jewish song in Hebrew. Then a woman came to us and hugged us because we had made an impression on her – being Jews and knowing that song.