My wife Bela Ishakh with our grandsons Aron and Emil in the 1970s.
I met my wife Bela Alfandari in 1945. At that time we were UYW members and we had to prepare a wall-newspaper. We gathered on 6 Gurko Street in the UYW club. I accompanied her to her house on the way home and we became friends. We married on 19th September of the same year. Ours was one of the first civil marriages in Ruse. She was born in Ruse. She is a hairdresser and has two sisters; she was the youngest and the first to marry. Her sisters' names are Victoria Markus and Ester Alfandari. Both are now in Israel. Ester Alfandari lives in Rishon Le Zion; she has a son, who is a doctor. Victoria lives near Haifa.
We have two daughters - Sonia, born in 1946 and Roza, born in 1953. My older daughter graduated from the mechanical technical school ‘Yuriy Gagarin’ in Ruse. Now she works in ‘Shalom’ and chairs the finance division at the local ‘Shalom’. She collects the rent from the organization's properties. This money is used to run the Jewish organization in Ruse. My younger daughter works as a statistician. Roza is divorced. Her surname was Dalakmanska by her husband, now she is Ishakh once again. My elder daughter's surname is Grigorova. Her son, Aron, lives in Ramat Gan. He graduated from college in trade and industry management and is now in his last year of studies for a degree in engineering. He works in a company and the management is very happy with his work. His name was Roman before, because there was a regulation in Bulgarian law that children from mixed marriages were Bulgarian nationals and could not have Jewish names. That law was adopted during the totalitarian regime in Bulgaria. Emil, who was born in 1973, is Roza’s child. Victor, born in 1997, is our great-grandson, Emil’s son. They live with us in Ruse.
