Tag #141568 - Interview #78604 (Adela Nissimova Levi)

We weren’t particularly well-off after 1950. We lived a normal life and went on holidays to the mountains, to rest homes. So, we weren’t rich, but not poor either. I was very scared by the wars in Israel in 1967 [see Six-Day-War] [29] and in 1973 [see Yom Kippur War] [30] and especially when the Six-Day-War started. At that time my mother, mother-in-law and my father-in-law were in Israel on a visit. And they hurriedly came back: they boarded a ship, because there were no planes at that time. My husband and I went to Varna to meet them and they were absolutely exhausted when they arrived. They needed a whole day to recover. We were badly affected by the disconnection of the diplomatic ties with Israel because we had a lot of relatives there whom we visited every year. Especially with my younger sister, who traveled to international youth festivals and always passed via Bulgaria. Her husband was a conductor and took part in choirs and youth festivals. My sister was a singer in a choir and they almost always passed via Bulgaria to visit us.

Otherwise, we had no problems to visit Israel even when the diplomatic relations with Israel were banned. The Netherlands was representing the interests in Israel in Bulgaria and their embassy issued the necessary documents. It wasn’t a problem to get a visa for Israel if you could prove that you had relatives there, except if your whole family was leaving with you. The condition in Bulgaria for traveling to the so-called ‘capitalist countries’ was to leave a member of the family behind: if the child went somewhere, the parents had to stay, and if the parents left, the children had to stay. The aim wasn’t to allow families to emigrate. I have been there four or five times. Once I also took my daughter who was 13 or 14 years old. I had a feeling that I had been denied a promotion at work for being a Jew, not only when I worked for the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but later on too. But no one said anything.