The Jewish Museum of History in Sofia, Bulgaria (http://www.sofiasynagogue.com) is housed on the second floor of the Sofia Synagogue in the center of Bulgaria's capital, just steps away from an Orthodox Church, and Sofia's Mosque. This clustering of places of worship — it's hard to find another example of this in Europe — is part of the unique story of Jewish people in Bulgaria.
While the museum tells the full story of the Jewish people in Bulgaria (http://www.sofiasynagogue.com/index.php?content_id=5) from ancient Roman times to today, Yulina Mihaylova of the Jewish Museum of History says that the culmination of the story is the rescue of the Jews in Bulgaria from deportation to Nazi death camps during the Second World War. The museum takes on the complexities of this story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_of_the_Bulgarian_Jews), including the fact that not all Jews in Bulgarian-controlled territories were saved from deportation, and uses it to challenge young visitors.
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Topics Discussed:
00:00 Intro
00:14 Jewish Museum of History in Sofia, Bulgaria
01:10 Yulina Mihaylova
01:50 The Sofia Synagogue
02:10 Jews in Bulgaria in the Early 20th Century
04:00 Jews in Bulgaria During World War Two
04:50 The Holocaust and the Rescue of the Jews in Bulgaria
09:44 Jews in Bulgaria During Communist Times
10:45 Educational Programming Moral Message
12:05 Outro / Join Club Archipelago



Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 51. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.




View Transcript



Sometimes in the Museum Archipelago, museums are isolated from other institutions by vast bodies of water, and sometimes, points of interest are clustered in dense island chains.

The Jewish Museum of History in Sofia, Bulgaria is one of the latter. The museum is housed on the second floor of the Sofia Synagogue in the center of Bulgaria's capital, just steps away from an Orthodox Church, and Sofia's main Mosque. This clustering of places of worship -- it's hard to find another example of this in Europe or the rest of the world -- is part of the unique story of Jewish people in Bulgaria.


Yulina Mihaylova: It's very unique because it makes this triangle of the three religions. The combination and interaction between the ethnic groups together shows this very rich historical past when the Jews live among the others. It's also part of our unique narrative which we try to say in the museum itself.”


This is Yulina Mihaylova.


Yulina Mihaylova: Hello my name is Yulina Mihaylova, and I'm working for the Jewish Historical Museum in Sofia for the past 15 years. My job combines working with visitors and. Our main task is to represent the history of the Bulgarian Jews back 2000 years. It’s just not the story of the Jewish people. It’s more than it because we try to say the story of the interaction of the Jewish people and the Bulgarians also.


The Sofia Synagogue is the third largest in Europe. This particular Synagogue, built on the site of earlier Jewish prayer houses, opened in 1909, with a ceremony that included Sofia's political and religious elite. The opening ceremony took place 31 years after Bulgaria's liberation, which guaranteed equal civil rights to minority religious groups.


Yulina Mihaylova: We speak about the early time of the early 20th century, and just to make comparison to what happened at that time in Europe, mainly in Eastern Europe, in Russia with the persecution of Jews there, and on the same time we have in Bulgaria quite a good relation between the regime and the