Tag #138211 - Interview #96722 (Tinka Kohen)

Our second child, Valeri, was born in 1947. We lived in a rented apartment, we were not well off, but we managed to educate our children. Leah graduated from the Academy of Music and became a music critic, and Valeri earned 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 isn’t 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.

All of our relatives left for Israel when the Jewish state was established in 1948. We met with them when we went to visit. Before democracy came in 1989, we went to Israel three times and after that three more times. When we were leaving for the first time, we went to get our passports at the police station. There they delicately hinted to us that if we saw or heard anything special, we should call them when we got back. But we told them that we were going on a friendly visit to see our relatives and friends and weren’t interested in anything else, so we wouldn’t be of use to them.