Sofi Danon-Moshe in Maccabi

Here I?m in the middle with two other kids whose names I don?t remember, in Maccabi. The photo was taken in the Jewish school in 1936 ? 1937 in Pazardzhik. After finishing the fourth grade I was accepted in Maccabi. All the children in it were divided into groups according to their age: Maccabi bands. Our mothers would sew the uniforms for us: white shirts with pleated skirts and sailor's hats. Maccabi was a Zionist, sports organization, which means that it encouraged the desire to found a Jewish state and at the same time our slogan was: sound mind in a sound body. The members of Maccabi were always in a dispute with the boys from Betar who believed that the Jewish homeland should be won by fight and war whereas we raised money because we believed the right thing to do was to buy the Palestine lands. We had some blue money-boxes, which were used for collecting the donations for that purpose. Every week we went from shop to shop, from house to house, to raise funds. My brother was a member of Maccabi, too. We talked a lot with him there, not so much at home but in the organization. I can say he was extremely active. He was very good at sports and always got awards for that. And there we had something common to talk about; otherwise we didn't communicate so much with each other. He was four years younger than me and was a boy and I was already a grown-up girl. He was a little jealous when I went out with boys. He never liked the boys I went out with. My parents didn't like those boys either. They somewhat overestimated me. At Maccabi we used to put on stage literature trials. For example, for the novel 'Martin Eden,' a novel by Jack London. The protagonist commits suicide at the end of the novel. We appointed a judge, a prosecutor and a defending lawyer. There was an audience. And the prosecutor started settling the case by asking, 'Is it power or weakness to commit suicide?' The defender started defending. The audience expressed their opinions. And at the end the judge returned a verdict of 'guilty' or 'not guilty.'