Matilda Israel's 80th birthday

The photo was taken at my 80th birthday anniversary in 2000. This is me with my two sons Michel and Marcel. They organized an incredible party on the occasion in a restaurant in Sofia. They invited all my friends. We had a wonderful time. Many of my friends from the Jewish organization Shalom in Sofia were at my 80th anniversary. Nowadays the Jewish community in Bulgaria and especially in Sofia seems to me to be very united. Marcel was so stubborn, that I remember how once he cried for three days because his father did not allow him to study in a technical school, but wanted to send him to a language high school. Later he sat for an exam to go to study in Germany, he passed the exam and left without even telling us, because his father and I were somewhere abroad at that time. So Marcel graduated as an engineer in Germany. He worked for a while in the Institute for Computing Machinery and then in the Robotics Institute at the Bulgarian Academy of Science. In 1990 he left to work in Spain, in Madrid and he still lives there now. He is not married. Our other son, Michel, earned a degree in physics, then in biology and now works in the Health Center. He is an associate professor, member of the World Health Organization and teaches medical physics in Sofia University. He has a nice family. He has a wife Sultana, who is not a Jew, and they have two daughters, Matilda and Leontina. We didn't object to the fact that our daughter-in-law wasn?t a Jew. We saw that she was a good girl and they loved each other and have a wonderful family. Our daughter-in-law learned to observe the Jewish traditions together with us. Their older daughter, Matilda has been living in Israel for four years now, which makes me very happy and unfortunately a little worried because of the events taking place there now.