Branch of

Mordechai-Shabat Behmoirav

by Iris Alkalay and Cecilia Merenzon Alkalay
From Edirne to Jaffa

On hot Saturday afternoons in Jaffa, my grandmother, Sarah Nina Alkalay, would smoke a single long cigarette - her weekly vice. While her daughter Lily told story after story, making my father laugh until gasped 'Stiga! Stiga!' ' red-faced and helpless ' my mother and grandmother would sip sweet coffee and break the crusts of their honeyed baklava with tiny forks. Through the haze of tobacco and rich cardamom-scented coffee, my mother would ask my grandmother what her life had been like in Bulgaria, and before that, in Turkey. Israel was an endpoint the family had reached - the last, they thought ' after emigrations pursued following war and loss. My mother, an Argentine-born Jew, had left her Punta Alta home at sixteen for Israel where she met my Bulgarian father at an Afula hospital where they both worked.
My grandmother was born Sarah Nina Behmoiras in Edirne, Turkey in August 1903. She was one of six children born to Haim and Sol (Barizak) Behmoiras of Edirne. Haim was the son of Haribi Shabat Behmoiras; Shabat's father, Moshe Rahamim, was Chief Rabbi of Edirne. Shabat Behmoiras intended that his son pursue the rabbinate, and so Haim did rabbinic studies in Edirne. However, Haim had a secret he kept from his father for several years, aided by his mother: he wanted to become a lawyer.
Haim's mother began to buy books for his law studies each time she visited Istanbul to shop for silks. Each night, as his family slept, Haim studied law by candlelight in the attic ' all the while continuing his study of the Torah. After he was ordained as a rabbi, Haim announced to his father that he would practice law instead. His father was devastated at the break in family tradition but reluctantly accepted his son's decision.
Haim's career would include a government role as Turkish representative in Bulgaria, most likely during the radical politics of the 1920's, and successful criminal defense work. My father often repeated the story of my great-grandfather's most well known case. His client ' who came from a poor family ' had been wrongly accused of murder, and Haim's defense resulted in his exoneration. The man's family held a huge celebration in honor of his lawyer. For years after Haim's death people who walked by his home would remove their hats in a gesture of respect.
Haim married Sol Barizak of Edirne, who came from a wealthy Jewish family. The couple had six children, and their mother, who suffered chronic health problems, was unable to nurse them as infants. Haim fashioned nipples out of cloth and fed all four infants by hand. The Behmoiras children included Bella, who married a Mr. Kanetti; Leon, who married Suzan Benadava; my grandmother, Sarah Nina; and Rafael, who had been pressured by his father to pursue the rabbinate but stowed away on a ship sailing for Cuba instead. After a break with his father, Rafael reappeared in Turkey briefly to marry the woman his father had selected ' Lucia Toledo - before returning to his new life in Cuba.
On a trip to Bulgaria in the 1920's, Haim was invited to represent Turkey at a government function. He asked my grandmother to join him. She met my grandfather, Shabat Alkalay - a dermatologist - at the function, and asked her father to arrange an introduction between them. The two were married within the year and my grandmother immigrated to Bulgaria.
'I didn't know anything!' she would later tell my mother. 'In Turkey I had never stepped into the kitchen. I had to learn from my sisters-in-law if you put the water or the rice first into the tenjere.' But she did learn to cook. Although my grandfather's work allowed the Alkalay family to live comfortably in Sofia until the middle of World War II, my grandmother would never again know the privileged life she had led in Turkey.
My mother recalled the cold kuftas on homemade mayonnaise, cold steamed fish with parsley, zukini and celery root steamed with olive oil, lemon juice and sugar; agvolemono soup, bantiza di leche, a Spanish bread cake filled with milk custard, huevos haminados (baked eggs) with sirene (feta cheese with anise liquor), sutliash (a sweet rice pudding), lamb banitza, tarator salad, spinach and cheese banichkas, an eggplant and onion salad called kiopulu, and at Passover, burmelikos, fried cakes of matzah and egg dipped in sugar. Many of these dishes appeared on our holiday tables in New Bedford decades later, startling our Ashkenazi guests, who had never heard of baking eggs with coffee grounds and onions or shaping crushed matzah into cakes. My mother, whose Argentinean parents were Ukrainian-born, spent years at her mother-in-law's side in her tiny Jaffa kitchen. She learned to prepare foods with Spanish and Arabic roots as my grandmother recreated the dishes of her childhood from the memories of taste, from recipes, and with the advice of her own new Bulgarian family, whose cuisine ' heavily influenced by 500 years of Turkish rule - mimicked her own.
My grandmother spent approximately twenty-five years in Bulgaria before she immigrated to Israel in 1952, settling in Jaffa like so many other Bulgarian Jews. Her early years in Bulgaria had been relatively uneventful; she had married for love, and the family lived comfortably in a large apartment occupying the second floor of a building at 74 Avenue Tzar Simeon in Sofia's center, with their two maids living in an attic space above the third-floor medical office. My grandfather and two of his brothers also purchased a pharmacy in Sofia's center. The pharmacy was razed after the war and replaced with a large Stalinist-style hotel, which would later become the Sheraton Balkan Sofia.
Bulgaria joined the Axis during the Second World War, and although anti-Semitism in Bulgaria was quite limited, my grandparents wore yellow stars and were subject to Nuremberg-style laws. My grandfather was eventually stripped of the right to practice medicine, although he continued to treat patients in secret. Most Bulgarians were dismayed by the laws and tried to help their Jewish fellow citizens.
In the late winter of 1943, my grandfather was ordered to a Bulgarian departure center holding Greek Jews awaiting transport to Treblinka. Along with other Sofia doctors and nurses, he was expected to perform limited medical services for the inmates of the center. My grandmother was distraught when he boarded a train in Sofia, certain that he would not return.
A week later, a telephone operator in the city where the departure center had been set up ' most likely a Bulgarian town called Gorna Dzhumaia - learned that the doctors would be deported from Bulgaria by train along with the other camp inmates. The operator relayed this news to my grandfather. With the operator's help, he was able to phone my grandmother, and tell her to inform Sofia's Minister of Health (who had been his patient) that the doctors would be deported along with the other detainees.
Over the course of that week, the Minister of Health concocted a ruse to present to the guards in charge of the doctors: that a typhoid epidemic had broken out in another province of Bulgaria. The Minister of Health sent transfer documents for the doctors, stating that their services were requested right away to combat the epidemic. The ruse worked. When I heard this story as a child, I imagined the citizens of this province painting themselves with red spots using cotton and tincture. 'The Nazis were gullible,' my father explained. 'If you told them there was an epidemic, they wanted to take care of it immediately.' My grandfather was given transfer papers; when he arrived in the other province, the local health official told him that he was free to go home.
The family, along with all of Sofia's Jewish population, was expelled from the capital that spring. They were relocated to a provincial Bulgarian town called Lovech, which linked the Danubian Plain with the Valley of the Roses. My father attended the local high school there until the end of the war, when the family returned to Sofia. He was accepted back into his graduating class at the First Moshke Gymnasium (the prestigious Sofia high school he had attended before the war) and began medical school in the fall of 1945 as the postwar kingdom became a communist state.
Following the wave of emigration which saw 45,000 of Bulgaria's 50,000 Jews leave for Israel, my father boarded a Yugoslavia-bound train on the first leg of his journey to Israel in August, 1951, just after he graduated from medical school. My grandparents and his sister, Lily, followed him a year later and settled in Jaffa, where my grandfather continued to practice dermatology.
My father began his medical career as an army doctor and eventually settled in Afula. He married my mother, a pharmacist, in 1959. He spent a year in Boston as a Harvard Medical School research fellow in 1962 before returning to Israel. I was born in Afula in 1963. In 1965 we immigrated to the United States, and my father continued his medical research, first at Brown University and later at Philadelphia's Albert Einstein Hospital. My sister Yael was born in Philadelphia in 1968. My father specialized in internal medicine and became Chief of Respiratory Care at St. Luke's Hospital in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where we came to live in 1970.
I visited my grandparents in Israel only once after my parents and I had immigrated to America. On August evenings in Jaffa, when I was eight years old, my grandmother would serve gyavetch , a stew of smoky meat and potatoes, or cold steamed fish with silky puddings. I loved to stand on their tiny balcony after dinner, and one night I saw a shooting star trailing across the sky.
After my grandfather died of cancer in 1974, my grandmother came to visit my family in New Bedford. She had planned to live with us for six months. A week after she arrived, on June 1, 1974, she died during an afternoon nap. We buried her in New Bedford's Jewish Cemetery, facing Israel.
My father's sister Lily, a pianist, lived in Tel Aviv and had a daughter, Dafna Hazan, before divorcing her husband. Lily died of ovarian cancer in 1987, and is buried in Israel like her father. Dafna has a son Tomer, whom her mother never met. My father died of sudden heart failure on October 26, 1997. He is buried close to his mother in New Bedford's Jewish Cemetery. In the summer, when I bring my sons to place pebbles on their graves, we listen to the crickets and the drone of small planes above the nearby airport, and look for the brown toads that hop in the sweet grass among the stones.

19 March 2003
Iris Alkalay