Musée séfarade Yitzhak Ben-Zvi de Sofia

At the Heart of the Bulgarian Capital

In the heart of the Bulgarian capital, within the walls of one of the largest Jewish places of worship in the Balkans, the Yitzhak Ben-Zvi Sephardic Museum preserves the memory of an ancient community and of a singular episode in twentieth-century European history: the near-total survival of Bulgaria's Jews during the Second World War. The museum occupies part of the Great Synagogue of Sofia, a Sephardic sanctuary inaugurated in 1909, and is devoted to documenting the Jewish presence on Bulgarian soil as well as the circumstances that, in 1943, prevented the deportation of the roughly 48,000 Jews within Bulgaria's "historical" borders to the German extermination camps [Encyclopaedia Judaica; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum].

The institution bears the name of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (1884–1963), the second president of the State of Israel, a historian and ethnographer whose work on Oriental and Sephardic Jewish communities remains a point of reference. This onomastic choice places the museum within a twofold lineage: that of scholarly research on the diasporas, and that of the Mediterranean Sephardic memory of which the Sofia community was one of the Balkan centers. The present work retraces, as far as the sources allow, the history of the community that founded and sustained this institution, the building that houses it, the central event it commemorates, and the memorial function it fulfills today. Where the archive is certain, we speak of History; where tradition transmits without being able to establish everything, we say so honestly.

Jewish presence in the territory of present-day Bulgaria is attested from late Antiquity. Remains and inscriptions bear witness to communities established in the Roman and Byzantine provinces of the Balkans, notably at Oescus, on the Danube, where an ancient synagogue was identified through archaeology [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. These first Jews, of Greek rite and Romaniote language, formed the most ancient substratum of Bulgarian Judaism, joined in the Middle Ages by Ashkenazi communities arriving from Central Europe and Hungary.

The character of the community was profoundly transformed by the massive arrival of the Sephardim expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. After the decree of expulsion promulgated by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492, and the forced conversions in Portugal in 1497, thousands of exiles reached the Ottoman Empire, which welcomed them favourably [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. The Ottoman Balkans — Salonika, Adrianople, Sofia, Plovdiv (Philippopolis), Vidin — became Sephardic centres of the first rank. In Sofia, the newcomers brought the Judeo-Spanish language (Ladino or Djudezmo), their liturgical traditions and their communal institutions, eventually absorbing the older Romaniote and Ashkenazi cores under Sephardic cultural and ritual hegemony [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

Under Ottoman rule, the community of Sofia organised itself around its synagogues, its rabbinical courts and its charitable confraternities. Judeo-Spanish remained, until the early twentieth century, the vernacular language of the great majority of Bulgarian Jews, which explains the predominance of the qualifier "Sephardic" in the very name of the museum. After the creation of the autonomous principality of Bulgaria in 1878, following the Russo-Turkish War and the Treaty of Berlin, Jews obtained civic rights and took part in the economic and cultural life of the young state [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. It was in this context of emancipation and urban growth that the project of a great synagogue worthy of the capital took shape, the physical matrix of the future museum.

The Great Synagogue of Sofia ranks among the most imposing Jewish places of worship in southeastern Europe. Its construction answered the rise of a capital-city community that, at the turn of the twentieth century, numbered several thousand souls. The building was designed by the Austro-Hungarian architect Friedrich Grünanger, who worked at length in Bulgaria, in a style blending Moorish inspiration, Venetian reminiscences, and an eclectic vocabulary characteristic of late nineteenth-century historicism [according to reference architectural notices on the building].

The inauguration took place in 1909, in the presence, according to community tradition, of King Ferdinand I of Bulgaria, a gesture that marked the official recognition of the place of the Jews within the nation [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. Crowned with a vast dome and richly ornamented, fitted with one of the largest chandeliers among European synagogues, the building was conceived as a symbol of prestige and rootedness. Its seating capacity — several hundred worshippers — bore witness to the vitality of a community in full demographic and social expansion.

The building suffered considerable damage during the Allied bombings of Sofia in 1944, which severely struck both the neighborhood and the synagogue itself. After the war, the massive emigration of Bulgarian Jews to the newly created State of Israel — nearly the entire community departed between 1948 and 1951 — sharply reduced the number of worshippers, and the upkeep of the building went through difficult decades under the communist regime [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. Restoration campaigns carried out after 1989, supported by international Jewish organizations and by the Bulgarian authorities as part of the national heritage, restored part of the synagogue's splendor and made it possible to establish, in its outbuildings, the museum space devoted to the country's Jewish history.

The patronage of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi gives the museum a dimension that extends beyond local memory alone. Born in 1884 in Poltava, in the Russian Empire, under the name Yitzhak Shimshelevitch, Ben-Zvi was a pioneer of Labour Zionism, one of the founders of the institutions of the Yishuv in Mandatory Palestine, and later the second president of the State of Israel, an office he held from 1952 until his death in 1963 [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

Beyond his political career, Ben-Zvi was a scholar of considerable stature, passionate about the study of scattered Jewish communities and particularly of Oriental and Sephardi "tribes" and groups. He founded in Jerusalem a research institute — the Yad Ben-Zvi (the Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities of the East) — which remains a major centre of scholarship on the Mediterranean and Asian diasporas [according to the publications of the Ben-Zvi Institute]. His works on exiled Jews and on little-known communities bear witness to a desire to reintegrate into collective memory the peripheral fringes of the Jewish people.

Associating this name with a Sephardi museum in Sofia is therefore not incidental: it signals the scholarly ambition to document a Balkan diaspora of Judeo-Spanish speech, in keeping with the interests of the scholar-president. The connection is all the more fitting in that many Bulgarian Jews emigrated to Israel at the very time when Ben-Zvi held the supreme office there, weaving between Sofia and Jerusalem a human and memorial continuity that the museum's name comes to enshrine.

The central purpose of the museum is the commemoration of an exceptional episode in the history of the Shoah: the non-deportation of the Jews within the former Bulgarian borders. As an ally of Nazi Germany from 1941, Bulgaria adopted as early as 1940–1941 an anti-Jewish legislation, the "Law for the Defense of the Nation," modeled on the racial laws, imposing professional restrictions, spoliations, and the wearing of a distinctive badge [United States Holocaust Memorial Museum].

In February–March 1943, an agreement concluded between the Bulgarian Commissar for Jewish Affairs, Alexandre Belev, and the SS emissary Theodor Dannecker provided for the deportation of several thousand Jews to the death camps. This agreement was effectively applied to the territories occupied by Bulgaria in Macedonia and Thrace, from which some 11,000 Jews were deported and murdered, most of them at Treblinka — a tragic page that the narrative of the "rescue" must never obscure [United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]. By contrast, the deportation of the Jews of Bulgaria proper was suspended.

This suspension resulted from a singular mobilization. The vice-president of the National Assembly, Dimitar Peshev, alerted by the deportation preparations targeting the Jews of Kyustendil, organized a parliamentary protest and addressed to the authorities a letter of protest signed by several dozen deputies [United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]. To this intervention were added the vigorous protests of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, in particular of Metropolitans Stefan of Sofia and Kiril of Plovdiv, as well as of intellectuals and figures of civil society [United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]. King Boris III, subjected to these contradictory internal pressures and mindful of his sovereignty, ultimately did not authorize the deportation of the Jews of the "old kingdom." Historians still debate the respective roles of the sovereign, the parliamentarians, the clergy, and civil society in this rescue [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. What remains established is that some 48,000 Jews within the historic Bulgarian borders escaped extermination, even though many were subjected to expulsion from the capital, forced labor, and spoliation until the end of the war [United States Holocaust Memorial Museum].

Housed in the annexes of the Great Synagogue, the museum offers a journey that articulates two major strands: the history of the Jewish presence in Bulgaria since Antiquity, and the detailed account of the events of 1943. The first section displays Sephardic communal life — religious objects, manuscripts, photographs, documents of associative and economic life — which restore the Judeo-Spanish culture of the Balkans before the upheavals of the twentieth century [according to the institution's presentations].

The second section, which constitutes the identity-defining heart of the place, exhibits archival documents, testimonies, photographs and reproductions relating to anti-Jewish legislation, to parliamentary and ecclesiastical protests, and to the differentiated fate of the Jews of the "old kingdom" and of the occupied territories. The museum strives, according to its own orientations, to present the rescue without detaching it from its tragic reverse: the deportation of the Jews of occupied Thrace and Macedonia, whose memory is gradually being integrated into Bulgarian museal and historiographical discourse [United States Holocaust Memorial Museum].

By its very location, the museum makes the building a document in its own right: to visit the place is to experience the monumentality of a synagogue conceived at the apogee of the community, today serving a very reduced Jewish population, a direct consequence of post-war emigration. The museum thus functions as a space of transmission aimed at a Bulgarian and international public, contributing to inscribe Jewish history within the national narrative and to sustain the memorial dialogue between Bulgaria and Israel [according to the institution's presentations]. In the absence of an accessible exhaustive scholarly catalogue, certain precise data on the inventory of the collections remain to be confirmed, which historical prudence requires us to note.

The narrative of the "rescue of the Jews of Bulgaria" became, after 1989, a structuring element of Bulgarian national memory and a source of public pride. It has given rise to official commemorations, international recognition — several Bulgarian figures, including Dimitar Peshev, have been honored with the title of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem — and an active memorial diplomacy between Sofia, Jerusalem, and the diasporas originating from Bulgaria [Yad Vashem; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum].

This memory, however, is not free of tensions, and it is here that transmitted tradition and the archive enter into dialogue. The heroic narrative sometimes tends to attribute the rescue to a near-unanimous decision of the nation, or even to the person of King Boris III, whereas historiography tempers this picture: the responsibility of those in power for the anti-Jewish legislation, for the spoliations, and above all for the actual deportation of the Jews from the occupied territories, complicates the image of a unanimously protective Bulgaria [Encyclopaedia Judaica; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]. The debate over the sovereign's exact role — protector or temporizing ally of the Axis — remains open among scholars.

The museum stands precisely at this intersection: it transmits a memory of pride while being traversed by the historiographical demand for truth. By documenting both the survival of tens of thousands of people and the annihilation of more than eleven thousand others, it embodies the complexity of a history that neither triumphalism nor amnesia could honor. It is in this fragile balance, between celebration and lucidity, that the singular value of the institution resides.

The Yitzhak Ben-Zvi Sephardic Museum of Sofia condenses, in a single place, several strata of history: that of a Mediterranean Sephardic diaspora rooted in the Ottoman and later Bulgarian Balkans; that of a monumental edifice, witness to the communal apogee of the early twentieth century; that of a rescue that was controversial yet real, become an emblem of memory; and that of an erudition embodied by the scholar who lends it his name. By bringing these threads together, the museum does not merely preserve objects: it offers a reading of European Jewish history in which survival and catastrophe coexist, in which the memory of pride is disciplined by the archive. For the visitor as for the historian, it remains an indispensable place of learning, equal to the grandeur and the fragility of the community that gave rise to it.