Jerusalem’s Armenians face uncertain future

Armen­ian Kevork Kahved­jian sits inside the Elia Photo Ser­vice shop that he owns, as he poses for a photo, in Jerusalem

MATTI FRIEDMAN

Asso­ci­ated Press

JERUSALEM — One of the four quar­ters of old Jerusalem belongs to the Arme­ni­ans, keep­ers of an ancient monastery and library, heirs to a tragic his­tory and to a stub­born 1,600-year pres­ence that some fear is now in doubt.

Buf­feted by Mideast forces more pow­er­ful than them­selves and drawn by bet­ter lives else­where, this his­toric Jerusalem com­mu­nity has seen its num­bers qui­etly drop below 1,000 peo­ple. The Arme­ni­ans, led by an ail­ing 94-year-old patri­arch, find them­selves caught between Jews and Mus­lims in a Mid­dle East emp­ty­ing of Chris­tians, and between a deep sense of belong­ing in Jerusalem and a real­iza­tion that their future might lie elsewhere.

“Very few will remain here if it goes on like this,” said Kevork Kahved­jian, a Jerusalem storeowner.

Kahved­jian sells vin­tage black-and-white pho­tos of the Holy Land from a store founded in 1949 by his father, who arrived in Jerusalem as a child after mass killings of Arme­ni­ans under Ottoman rule dur­ing World War I claimed his own par­ents. Today, Kahved­jian said, he has sib­lings in Canada and the U.S., a son in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., and a daugh­ter who plans to move away soon.

The insu­lar world of the Jerusalem Arme­ni­ans is reached through a mod­est iron door set in a stone wall.

The door, locked every night at 10:30, leads into a monastery com­pound that is home to a con­tin­gent of cloaked cler­gy­men and also to sev­eral hun­dred Armen­ian laypeo­ple: grand­par­ents, par­ents and chil­dren, liv­ing in a war­rens of small apart­ments along­side their priests in a self-contained out­post that has existed here, in some form, at least as far back as the fifth cen­tury A.D.

Also inside is a library, a health cen­ter, two social clubs and a school where each grade now has an aver­age of only six or seven pupils.

“We worry about this, of course. But we haven’t found a solu­tion,” said Samuel Aghoyan, 71, one of the community’s senior priests.

On a recent after­noon in the Armen­ian monastery’s nerve cen­ter, the medieval cathe­dral of St. James, cler­ics in black cowls chanted under dozens of oil lamps sus­pended from the vaulted ceil­ing. Next to a priest wav­ing a censer was an inlaid panel con­ceal­ing the entrance to a stair­case ascend­ing inside the wall to the church’s sec­ond floor.

The monastery, led by the patri­arch Torkom Manoogian, 94, guards other secrets. It holds the world’s second-largest col­lec­tion of ancient Armen­ian man­u­scripts, 4,000 texts guarded in a chapel opened only once a year. It also owns the Bible of Keran, a gold-covered man­u­script named for an Armen­ian queen and kept in a trea­sury whose loca­tion the priests will not divulge, and the staff of King Hetum, made from a sin­gle piece of amber and revealed to the pub­lic for a few min­utes every January.

The sev­eral dozen priests, most of whom are sent to Jerusalem by the church from else­where, will remain, as will their edi­fices and relics. But the com­mu­nity itself, made up of laypeo­ple sub­ject to the pres­sures and pulls of this world, may not.

Aghoyan arrived at the monastery as a 16-year-old sem­i­nar­ian in 1956 from Syria, where his par­ents had fled from Turkey. He found the Jerusalem monastery crowded with fam­i­lies, most of them refugees or descen­dants of refugees who escaped the killings.

Many inter­na­tional his­to­ri­ans say up to 1.5 mil­lion Arme­ni­ans were killed by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I, which they call the first geno­cide of the 20th cen­tury. Turkey dis­putes this, say­ing the death toll has been inflated and those killed were vic­tims of civil war and unrest as the Ottoman Empire collapsed.

The result­ing refugees swelled the small exist­ing com­mu­nity of Armen­ian priests and lay­men, and by the time Jerusalem was split between Jor­dan and Israel in 1948 the Arme­ni­ans num­bered over 25,000, by some counts. They were traders and crafts­men whose dis­tinc­tive mosaics of painted tiles remain one of the city’s sig­na­ture design features.

After 1948, with the city divided, the Old City under Jor­dan­ian con­trol and eco­nomic prospects bleak, most Arme­ni­ans left, join­ing thriv­ing exile com­mu­ni­ties in places like Fresno, Cal­i­for­nia, and Toronto.

Per­haps 3,000 remained by the time Israel cap­tured the Old City in 1967.

The Arme­ni­ans, along with Arab res­i­dents of east Jerusalem, were given res­i­dency rights in Israel, and some have since applied for full cit­i­zen­ship. But the com­mu­nity has tried to plot a neu­tral course in a place where that is dif­fi­cult. Ties with both Israelis and Pales­tini­ans have been tense at times.

Israel’s Inte­rior Min­istry does not have sta­tis­tics on the num­ber of Arme­ni­ans. Com­mu­nity lead­ers like Aghoyan and Tso­lag Momjian, the hon­orary con­sul of Arme­nia, agree there are now fewer than 1,000 in the city.

The slow decline of the Jerusalem Arme­ni­ans reflects a broader shrink­ing of the Mid­dle East’s ancient Chris­t­ian pop­u­la­tion. For much of the past cen­tury, Chris­tians in Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, the Pales­tin­ian ter­ri­to­ries and else­where have been mov­ing to the West, flee­ing poverty, reli­gious intol­er­ance and vio­lence like the anti-Christian riot that erupted this week in Cairo, leav­ing 12 dead and a church burned.

Young Arme­ni­ans, expected to marry Arme­ni­ans, are faced with a short­age of poten­tial spouses. Because they are typ­i­cally well-educated, flu­ent in Eng­lish and have fam­ily con­nec­tions abroad, they are equipped to leave. Those who do join a dias­pora that num­bers an esti­mated 11 mil­lion peo­ple world­wide and sup­ports churches, com­mu­nity cen­ters and at least a dozen inter­na­tional online dat­ing sites with names like Arme­ni­ans Con­nect and armenianpassion.com.

“Who­ever leaves still dreams about Jerusalem and says they’ll come back. But they won’t,” Aghoyan said.

Oth­ers are more opti­mistic. Rup­pen Nal­ban­dian, 29, a com­mu­nity youth leader with a master’s degree in neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy from an Israeli uni­ver­sity, said the out­flow has slowed. Of 11 stu­dents in his class at school, he said, only two have left. Ten men he knows have found brides in Arme­nia and brought them back to Jerusalem, he said.

Some in the com­mu­nity point to an unex­pected boon in the form of Armen­ian Chris­tians — pos­si­bly more than 10,000 of them, though esti­mates vary — who arrived in Israel as part of a mass immi­gra­tion of Soviet Jews in the 1990s and were eli­gi­ble for cit­i­zen­ship because they had a Jew­ish par­ent or spouse. Some have mixed with the estab­lished Armen­ian community.

Not long after the Arme­ni­ans adopted Chris­tian­ity in 301 A.D. in their home­land around the bib­li­cal Mt. Ararat, on the east­ern bor­der of modern-day Turkey, they dis­patched priests to Jerusalem.

They have remained ever since, through often dev­as­tat­ing con­quests by Arab dynas­ties, Per­sian armies, mounted Turk­ish archers, Cru­saders, the Ottoman Empire, Eng­lish­men, Jor­da­ni­ans and Jews.

“As we have lived here for 1,600 years, we will con­tinue to live here,” Nal­ban­dian said

Posted by AP News on May 12 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.