Tag #147696 - Interview #98803 (Reyna Lidgi)

I’ll tell you a story – in 1967, for the first time I got the chance to visit my beloved, craved for Soviet Union - as a teacher of Russian for a qualification course. This coincided with the Six-Day-War [30], which started on 6th June 1967. I was in Moscow. A severe campaign against Israel started there. There started a TV program in which all the eminent actors, writers, artists were included and they had never even suspected they were Jewish, but there started a campaign against Israel, against the Jews. I called Sofia to ask what was going on, whether I needed to leave for Bulgaria right away. But mum told me ‘Don’t worry, here in Bulgaria there is nothing wrong.’ So I continued my stay in Moscow but there the reaction against Israel was appalling and then Bulgaria discontinued its cultural and its diplomatic relations with Israel [31]. But we didn’t break our correspondence with our relatives and in 1961 my aunt Sarah Beniesh came to Sofia for the first time. We sent her a declaration to testify that she would stay with us but, due to change of circumstances, she was put up at uncle Mois Beniesh’s house. From the militia, they came to our home to ask why she wasn’t staying with us. Of course, I got a little scared, but I explained to them that my mother was on holiday; I couldn’t receive her so she had to go to my uncle’s. Everything that happened was closely monitored in that way.