Moni Ovadia

Salomone "Moni" Ovadia (born 16 April 1946 in Plovdiv) is a Bulgarian-born Italian actor, musician, singer and theatrical author. He is one of the most highly regarded figures in contemporary Italian culture. His theatrical performances recall the lost world of eastern Jewish culture, its Yiddishkeyt core, with its profound "burden of pain, wisdom and folly". as it was before the devastations of the Holocaust cancelled it, and murdered almost half of the world's speakers of Yiddish.
Ovadia was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in 1946 to a Sephardi Jewish family, His father, a violinist, had Greek-Turkish roots, while the family of his mother, a singer, was of Serbian origin. In March 1943, the 1,500 Jews of Plovdiv, including Ovadia's family, were saved from the Holocaust by the actions of Metropolitan of Plovdiv, Kiril, one of the heads of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church who threatened to throw…