adio, adio

The Balkan Peninsula is unlike any other part of Europe I've been to. I've been constantly and consistently amazed by its layers in history and my total lack of previous knowledge concerning this part of the world. Our last day in Sofia, we visited the Central Sofia Synagogue, which is remarkably beautiful and so so Sephardi in design and art. The walls are covered in colorful, graphic paint, and the ceiling in a blue with stars to resemble the heavens; their chandelier dominates as the largest in Bulgaria. Seating about 1300 congregants, the shul is barely used. Simply speaking, the Sofian or even Bulgarian Jewish community does not have the capacity or interest to support an active religious minyan. We then visited the Jewish museum there as well, attached to the shul. 

Upon finishing another classic Kivupicnic lunch, we left for Skopje, Macedonia. The predicted three to four hour bus ride totaled about six hours. By the time we arrived to Skopje for dinner, it was one hour behind and still about 9:30pm. The following morning, we visited the Holocaust Museum of Skopje and met with Roza Kamhi, an elderly Macedonian Jewish woman who joined the partisans and evaded deportation. Roza's story can be found on Centropa, which we watched in Civilizations and Society a few weeks ago:

http://centropastudent.org/?typ=subtitel&fLang=ENG&movID=46&nID=78&q=m

Centropa, which Beth Tfiloh introduced to my Jewish history class junior year, describes themselves as an "interactive database of Jewish memory." They collect oral histories and testimonies of elderly Jews from Central and Eastern Europe; their mission inspired my own junior year Jewish history class project of interviewing my paternal grandmother, Sylvia Berue (Abramowitz) Abbott, and her own experiences as a second-generation American born to Russian Jewish immigrants. 

Meeting and speaking with Roza constituted one of my favorite Balkan experiences thus far. Her testimony helped me recreate and visualize the Macedonian Jewish history class I had had previously and even her own Centropa video. Moreover, we sang Adio Querida, an old Ladino song, that she gleefully sang with us. The Sephardi Bulgarian elders of Sofia, too, knew Adio Querida.

A high point of the museum for me constituted a sculpture of 7144 beaded strands representative of the 7144 Macedonians deported to Treblinka. Each strand distinctive to each individual victim, "they form a tapestry, joining together as one image of struggle and survival" and creating an optical illusion of a flickering burning bush. Moreover, the theme of the memorial, the burning bush "burns intensely yet is not consumed."

Last night, we arrived in Thessaloniki or Salonika, Greece. I'll continue a Greek post tomorrow.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rebecca Abbott

(Kivunim - www.kivunim.org) - a gap year before Barnard