Tagged Bulgaria

(JTA) — Bulgaria’s Jewish community opened its first Jewish school in over 20 years. The opening last week of the Ronald S. Lauder Day School in Sofia is a significant development for the some 6,000 members of the Jewish minority in Bulgaria. Lauder, the president of the World Jewish… Read more »

Israeli ZAKA emergency rescue team evacuating bodies from the scene of the terrorist attack in Burgas, Bulgaria, July 19, 2012. (Dano Monkotovic/FLASH90)

BRUSSELS (JTA) — Bulgaria claims it has previously undisclosed evidence that further implicates Hezbollah in a deadly terrorist attack last year on Bulgarian soil, JTA has learned. A Bulgarian representative to the European Union said Wednesday that investigators have discovered that a Hezbollah operative was the owner of a… Read more »

TEL AVIV (JTA) — Hezbollah may have landed a strike against Israel with last week’s bus bombing in Bulgaria, but the Lebanese terrorist faction faces an uncertain future as one of its main sponsors — Syria’s Assad regime — faces a serious revolt and weakening support from once Arab… Read more »

Israeli ZAKA emergency rescue team examining the remains of the bus at the scene of the terrorist attack in Burgas, Bulgaria, July 19, 2012. (Dano Monkotovic/FLASH90/JTA)

SOFIA, Bulgaria (JTA) — Until this week, leaders of Bulgaria’s small, generally placid Jewish community said felt untouched by hate crimes or terrorism. But after Wednesday’s apparent suicide bombing of a bus carrying Israeli tourists in the Black Sea city of Borgas, Jews in the country are speaking of… Read more »

Survivors of the terror attack on the Israeli tour bus in Burgas, Bulgaria, returning to Israel with the help of the Israeli Air Force, July 19, 2012. (Yossi Zeliger/FLASH90/JTA)

TEL AVIV (JTA) — Vered Kuza was standing with her daughter, Amit, on an airport shuttle bus at Sarafovo International Airport in Burgas, Bulgaria, when she suddenly heard a blast. “It’s an attack!” Kuza, 54, shouted at Amit, 26. “We need to get out of here!” She pushed her… Read more »

Yana Levy, left, and her husband, Harry, and their three children inside their apartment in Sofia. (Courtesy Bulgaria Office of the American Joint Distribution Committee)

SOFIA, Bulgaria (JTA) — The stories – some months or years in the making — started trickling in last year. Young successful families were showing up desperate. As Bulgaria’s program director for the American Joint Distribution Committee, Julia Dandalova ran social services programs for the Jewish community’s most needy:… Read more »

Alexander Oscar, 32, the president of Sofia’s Jewish community, speaks at a Holocaust day ceremony in the Bulgarian capital, March 10. (Ben Harris)

Under a cloudless blue sky, in a square wedged between the National Assembly and the Rectorate of the University of Sofia, Alexander Oscar, the young president of Sofia’s Jewish community, issued a blunt message to his countrymen. The occasion was Bulgaria’s Holocaust remembrance ceremony on March 10, a day… Read more »