Book presentation on "Your Guide to Jewish Bulgaria" at Kehila Kedosha Janina

Jewish Bulgaria
Join us on December 30th
for a special program and book presentation
Where: Kehila Kedosha Janina
280 Broome Street
New York, New York 10002
When: December 30th at 2:00
Open to the public
Free Refreshments

In 1943 Bulgaria, then a Nazi ally, did not deport 47,000 of its Jews to Nazioccupied Poland. At the same time, Bulgarian troops and police rounded up 11,343 Jews in Vardar Macedonia, Aegean Thrace and southern Serbia, territories it had occupied and referred to as its «new lands». These people were loaded onto Bulgarian State Railways cattle cars and transported, through Bulgarian territory, to the Danube port of Lom. There, they were put into barges and shipped upriver to Vienna, whence they were sent to the gas chambers of Treblinka. None returned.

Bulgaria stands unique in war-time Europe in that it rescued virtually its whole Jewish population, but Bulgaria of the 21st century refuses to recognise it was not only an accomplice, but an executor in the Holocaust in Greece, Macedonia and southern Serbia.

Why?

Who were the main players in the rescue and in the deportations?

Who is to take the credit and the blame? Why did Bulgaria of the Warsaw Pact had so few Jews left, provided its postwar Jewish population was in fact larger than it had been before the war?

What happened to their communal property such as synagogues, schools and cemeteries?

Anthony Georgieff will answer this and other questions related to a little known episode of Eastern Europe’s Jewish history and will talk in detail about probably the least known lands in Europe.

Anthony Georgieff, the author of «A Guide to Jewish Bulgaria,» will be present to sign copies of his fascinating book.

About the author

Anthony Georgieff was born in 1963 and fled Communist Bulgaria at the beginning of 1989. Having settled in Denmark, he started work as a journalist with the BBC/World Service in London and later moved to the US broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich and in Prague. In 2002 he returned to Bulgaria and set up a publishing business which now carries various books as well as «Vagabond,» Bulgaria’s English Magazine.

In 2011 Anthony Georgieff co-authored and edited «A Guide to Jewish Bulgaria,» the first-ever English language compendium on Bulgaria’s Jewish heritage.

He is also the author of half a dozen books on travel and heritage in Bulgaria and the Balkans.

More on this book on www.vagabond.bg/jewishbulgaria