by Shelomo Alfassa
thecuttingedgenews.com
Annually, it is repeated in the contemporary media how ‘Bulgaria became the only Nazi-allied country in World War II to protect its entire Jewish population’ or that ‘Bulgaria saved all of its Jews from the death camps.’ While ultimately, members of the Bulgarian government, the Bulgarian public, and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, did in fact take laudable actions which halted the deportation of 50,000 Jews from ‘Old’ Bulgaria to German death camps in Poland, there is no reason why the Bulgarian government should not discuss the 13,000 Jews they dispossessed, imprisoned, and deported from their own land of ‘United’ or ‘New’ Bulgaria.
Here are the facts. On March 1, 1941, Bulgaria...
by Pr. I.K. Hassiotis
Lengthy extract from an article published in Chronika, 25/178 .March-April 2002, p. 6–12
There is historical evidence of the presence of a Jewish population in Eastern Macedonia in general, and in the Drama district in particular, from at least as far back as the early centuries of Turkish rule. This presence becomes more marked in the 19th century, a period when Drama and its neighbouring cities of Serres and Kavala were developing into notable production and trade centres within Northern Greece. Indeed, it is highly significant that some of the Jews of Drama, breaking to a certain degree with the tradition that identified them always and exclusively with urban craft and commercial trades, were associated with economic sectors directly dependent on rural activities – particularly so on tobacco cultivation. This change was marked in the early years of the 20th century by an increasingly broad rapprochement between Christians, Muslims and Jews in the occupational sector, after centuries of socio-religious demarcation.
This rapprochement continued during the difficult period of the first Bulgarian occupation (1912–1913). It is worth noting that this convergence, which constituted a kind of defence against the persecution of the new rulers, was encouraged by the religious leaders of all three communities, with...
