The Government will further speed up the procedures for claiming Bulgarian citizenship, Prime Minister Boiko Borissov told representatives of the Bulgarian community in Israel.
 
After World War 2 and the communist takeover in Bulgaria, large numbers of Bulgarian Jews moved to Israel. Some have problems claiming Bulgarian citizenship because of legal complexities arising to communist-era laws on renunciation and deprivation of Bulgarian citizenship.
 
Since Borissov’s Government came to power in July 2009, it has pledged to improve procedures for applying for Bulgarian citizenship, a process that has been mired in inefficiency and corruption and that has produced huge backlogs.
 
Amendments to legislation on citizenship are in the works, especially to benefit people claiming citizenship on the basis of Bulgarian ancestry.
 
Strategically, Bulgaria hopes to step up the rate at which it grants citizenship as a way to work against the country’s large demographic shortfall. Surveys indicate that most of those who want Bulgarian citizenship intend living in Bulgaria.
 
Apart from people in Israel, the amendments are intended to benefit applicants from communities of Bulgarian descent in Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, Romania, Ukraine, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Russia and all former Soviet republics, Turkey and Greece.
 
According to Bozhidar Dimitrov, the Minister in charge of Bulgarians abroad, the Ministry of Justice had objected to some of the planned amendments, which also include outlawing the use of intermediaries in citizenship applications.
 
Borissov said during the meeting in Tel Aviv on January 11 2010 that the Government in Sofia already had doubled the pace at which citizenship applications were processed.
 
Earlier, separate reports quoted official figures as saying that just more than 9000 citizenship applications were granted in 2009, about 2000 higher than in the previous year. The stated goal of Borissov’s Government is to increase the rate of issuing citizenships to 30 000 a year.
 
According to a report by Bulgarian National Television (BNT), Borissov told the meeting that their children and grandchildren should know that in Bulgaria, they would always find friends willing to help.
 
Borissov recalled that Bulgarians had resisted sending Jews to the Holocaust, unlike other European countries that become complicit in the genocide.
 
During World War 2, the government in Sofia was allied to Hitler’s Nazi Germany, but some top Bulgarian Orthodox Church and political leaders defied Berlin’s plans to deport Jews from Bulgaria to Holocaust death camps.
 
The BNT report said that immigrants from Bulgaria to Israel, whether from decades ago or recently, retained great love and affection for the country of their birth.
 
Members of the community complained about the bureaucratic hurdles in applying for citizenship, along with the huge sums of money that had to be spent on lawyers.
 
On the second and final day of his visit to Israel, Borissov made a stop at the Wailing Wall, inserting – as is customary – a paper with a prayer at the remnant of the Second Temple, reading "God protect Bulgaria".