site.btaCommemorative Plaque in Honour of Former National Assembly Deputy Chair Dimitar Peshev Unveiled in Washington, D.C.

The Embassy of Bulgaria in Washington, D.C. organized an official ceremony for the unveiling of a commemorative plaque in honour of Dimitar Peshev - deputy chair of the Bulgarian National Assembly in 1940-1943 and initiator of a political protest against the deportation of Bulgarian Jews to Nazi concentration camps. This was reported through a Facebook post on the official page of the Bulgarian diplomatic mission in the US.

In his speech, Bulgarian Ambassador to US Georgi Panayotov paid tribute to Peshev's brave and valiant actions, among which a protest letter signed by 42 MPs. This act, along with the determined resistance of Bulgarian society - intellectuals, civic organizations, ordinary citizens, as well as the key role of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church - contributed to the rescue of nearly 50,000 Bulgarian Jews during World War II, the Embassy underlined.

Back in 2013, the intersection in front of the Bulgarian Embassy was named after Dimitar Peshev. The newly unveiled memorial plaque will give further visibility to his valour and humanity shown during one of the darkest periods in human history - the Holocaust. A speech was also delivered by Neil Goldstein Glick, Honorary Consul of Bulgaria for the State of Maryland, who as a member of the Washington, D.C. municipal administration played a key role in the process of renaming the intersection in front of the Embassy in honor of Peshev 12 years ago.

The ceremony was attended by leaders of American Jewish organizations, representatives of the US State Department, including Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues Ellen Germain and Scott Lasensky, senior representative of the Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism.