Plamen’s path to leading ORT Bulgaria began far from Sofia, in Byala Slatina, a small town on the river Skat. From the Mathematical High School in Vratsa he went on to study mathematics and informatics at Sofia University, later specialising in educational technologies at MASHAV, Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation, and in Jewish studies at New Bulgarian University.
He joined the recently opened “Dimcho Debelianov” Jewish School as a teacher and technical assistant and, by 2005, had risen to National Director of ORT Bulgaria, for years holding both roles at once, teaching in the classroom in the morning and running the national organisation in the afternoon.
In 2015, Plamen received the Robert Singer Award for Outstanding Senior ORT Professionals, with his pivotal role in creating the World ORT Digital Skills Academy cited among the reasons. The Academy remains his signature achievement: the Sofia school hosted its first edition in July 2015 and, this summer, it concluded its ninth run under his direction. It was once again a resounding success, providing intensive training in video, audio and digital photography for students drawn from across ORT’s network in Europe and Israel.
Around it he has built much else — the school’s redesigned ORT STEM laboratories in 2018, the Dr Emil Kalo STEM Center for Technology in the Creative Industries in 2021, and collaborative projects linking Sofia with ORT schools across Europe, the Former Soviet Union, Israel and Mexico, This included leading a Bulgarian student delegation to a Holocaust commemoration at Colegio Olamí ORT in Mexico City, which was attended by nearly a thousand people.
In 2022, Plamen added a PhD to his credentials, successfully defending his dissertation, Models and Methods for Application of Virtual and Augmented Reality in Education, for the educational and scientific degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
When war came to Ukraine in 2022, Plamen threw enormous effort into supporting Ukrainian refugees and above all the families of ORT students finding their footing in Bulgaria.
His view of the network explains the whole career: a single school, he says, is like a lab with a solitary computer, while ORT’s schools are a lab full of connected ones. And his advice to ORT students is pure Plamen — “Work hard and stay close to nature!”