Jacky Comforty is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning documentary filmmaker, oral historian and media creator who has worked for over thirty-five years making films and videos in the United States, Germany, Israel, and Bulgaria. He has created, crafted and produced three full-length documentary films about the Holocaust in Bulgaria. The Optimists 2001, Monument to Love (2023), and Balkan Jazz (2024) His two recent films are currently in the festival circuit and have won over 250 awards. He has conducted over the last 35 years oral history 150 interviews with survivors and eyewitnesses, at filmed on-location visits in Bulgaria, Northern Macedonia and Greece which he combines with archival document, film, and photograph research in a unique way of visualizing History, telling the Jewish narrative, while connecting individual stories with global events.

Martha Aladjem Bloomfield is an award-winning author, artist, oral historian, and independent scholar. Her published works focus on immigrants, migrants, and the formerly homeless.

They have collaborated on several creative projects. Their book The Stolen Narrative of the Bulgarian Jews and the Holocaust, came out in April 2021, published by Rowman and Littlefield, in the series, Lexington Studies in Jewish Literature (now Bloomsbury). Comforty and Bloomfield also collaborated on Comforty’s most recent documentary film “Monument to Love” where they share script credits. The film is the winner of more than 250 international awards.

“We offer this alternative perspective on the Holocaust in Bulgaria that includes stolen, silenced, but now reclaimed voices who experienced, witnessed and survived the tragedies,” Comforty said. “We include oral histories of our people and friends who helped them, which fills a void in the Bulgarian Holocaust literature–specifically first-hand accounts of memory of survivors and eyewitnesses, photographs, official publications, laws, and newspaper articles.

“Very little visual documentation—films and photographs—exist specifically about the Bulgarian Jewish narrative of most of the tragic events during the Holocaust—peoples’ stories of grief and trauma, abuse, violence, loss and tragedy,” Bloomfield said. “As an artist in the surreal, primitive and naive genres, I became inspired to paint pictures of the Bulgarian Jewish peoples’ stories to give them visual representation, to honor those who had lived or died and to help preserve their experiences and memories so others will know their stories.”