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YEREVAN, Armenia (JTA) — Simply outdoors a distant village two hours’ drive east of Yerevan, in a clearing reachable solely by climbing down a steep embankment and crossing a rickety wood bridge, looms a outstanding sight: a blue steel gate adorned with a Star of David that guards the doorway to one of many world’s most uncommon Jewish cemeteries.
Right here, in a pastoral setting disturbed solely by the chirping of birds and the dashing waters of the Yeghegis River, lie 64 full tombstones and fragments of others relationship from 1266 to 1346. Their inscriptions, written in each Hebrew and Aramaic, have been studied by students for years.
Amongst them is the epitaph of a younger Jewish boy that displays the profound grief of his dad and mom: “Your useless [shall live], corpses shall rise, awake and sing for pleasure, O dwellers within the mud! For [your dew] is a radiant dew.”
The medieval cemetery, not often visited lately and in an apparent state of neglect, is however proof {that a} Jewish neighborhood has lengthy existed and even flourished in Armenia — residence of the biblical Noah’s Ark and the world’s first Christian nation.
That neighborhood is immediately among the many smallest of the 15 republics that, till 1991, fashioned the Soviet Union — though it has swelled in current months, if solely briefly, with Jews fleeing Russia. As well as, whilst Israel is residence to the oldest Armenian diaspora neighborhood and Jerusalem’s Outdated Metropolis boasts an Armenian quarter, Armenia’s relationship with Jews and Israel is tough, each for historic causes and since Israel is a key ally of Armenia’s archenemy, Azerbaijan.
Rimma Varzhapetyan, 74, chairs the Yerevan-based Jewish Group of Armenia. Her group, which has been round for 25 years, occupies a small workplace on the bottom flooring of an institute for deaf and mute folks.
Rimma Varzhapetyan, chair of the Armenian Jewish neighborhood, at her Yerevan workplace. (Larry Luxner)
Varzhapetyan took concern with a 2019 ballot by the Pew Analysis Heart, by which 32% of Armenian respondents mentioned they wouldn’t settle for Jews as fellow residents — the very best proportion of any of the 18 European nations included within the survey.
“There isn’t a antisemitism in Armenia,” mentioned the Russian-speaking Varzhapetyan, who was born in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk area however has lived in Armenia for the final 52 years. “It’s true that our economic system isn’t that developed, so many Jews — scientists, docs, journalists and others — made aliyah. Right now, there isn’t a lot non secular life, however we do attempt to have a good time all of the Jewish holidays.”
After the Soviet collapse, about 15,000 Armenian Jewish households emigrated to Israel, she mentioned, and lately, the Maryland-size nation of about 3 million is residence to round 280 Jewish households, although it’s exhausting to say for certain for the reason that nation’s few Jews are largely intermarried.
Varzhapetyan’s numbers are much more optimistic than these of Rabbi Gershon Burshteyn, the non secular chief of Yerevan’s Mordechay Navi Jewish Non secular Heart of Armenia since 1996.
Burshteyn, a regionally born Orthodox Jew with a placing resemblance to Tevye the Dairyman — he even speaks with a Yiddish accent — mentioned most Jews listed here are from households that arrived after World Warfare II from Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Uzbekistan and, to a lesser extent, Azerbaijan.
Rabbi Gershon Burshteyn, non secular chief of the Mordechay Navi Jewish Non secular Heart of Armenia, seen outdoors the middle he leads. (Larry Luxner)
“Earlier than the Twenties, there have been two Jewish communities right here: one from Poland and one from Iran. On the time, they made up 17% of the inhabitants of Yerevan,” mentioned Burshteyn, 60. “However throughout the Armenian genocide of 1915, there have been rumors that the Russian Military would hand Yerevan to the Turks, so the Persian Jews went again to Iran.”
Right now, he mentioned, not more than 100 to 200 of Armenia’s 2.9 million inhabitants are Jews; practically all of them stay in Yerevan, apart from a handful in Vanadzor, Armenia’s third-largest metropolis. However these numbers are complicated, since at the least 500 Armenians would qualify for aliyah underneath Israel’s 1953 Regulation of Return, that means they’ve at the least one Jewish grandparent.
Alternatively, as a result of intermarriage is so prevalent right here, solely 20 or so Armenians are the offspring of Jewish moms and dads, in accordance with Burshteyn.
Not more than 25 folks attend Shabbat providers, and the worshippers are virtually all 45 years of age or older. Kosher meat is on the market because of a schochet, or ritual slaughterer, who visits a few times a month from Tbilisi — the capital of neighboring Georgia — whereas Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur providers appeal to about 100 folks.
Members of Armenia’s tiny Jewish neighborhood collect at a restaurant in Yerevan. (Larry Luxner)
Ida Zilman, 71, is a painter and designer who teaches arts and crafts at a neighborhood major faculty. Her father, a Ukrainian Jew from Odessa, was significantly wounded whereas combating for the Soviet Pink Military, and in 1944 he was demobilized and despatched to the Caucasus to work as a geologist.
“He helped set up the metallurgy trade in Armenia, and it was right here that he met my mother,” mentioned Zilman, a grandmother who attends synagogue providers on Jewish holidays. Together with her late husband, she additionally visited Israel, the place she has a stepsister in Ashdod.
“I am keen on Israel, however I really feel comfy right here in Armenia,” she mentioned. “There are rumors that it’s antisemitic, however that’s not true. Once I inform folks I’m Jewish, they smile.”
Mount Ararat seen from the Cascade Advanced at sundown towering above Yerevan, Armenia, Could 31, 2019. (Getty Photographs)
Six years in the past, Israel issued a stamp commemorating the famed French-Armenian crooner Charles Aznavour, his dad and mom and his sister Aida, all of whom had sheltered Jews at their residence throughout World Warfare II. As well as, dozens of different Armenians throughout Europe who protected or saved Jewish lives are honored at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.
Nonetheless, these heat emotions should not common, cautions Ilya Dorfman, a software program entrepreneur in his early 50s who lived in Moscow, Toronto, San Francisco and New York earlier than deciding to return to his native Armenia.
“Typically, I converse with younger folks right here and so they have the concept Jews are all the time towards Armenians. But it surely by no means interprets into hatred towards the Jews,” he mentioned. “It’s definitely not something just like the antisemitism I felt once I lived in Russia, and even Ukraine after independence.”
A lot of the sick will that exists between Armenia and Israel stems from Israel’s in depth army assist of oil-rich Azerbaijan, with which Armenia has fought quite a few wars over the Nagorno Karabakh area claimed by each former Soviet states. Combating raged from 1988 to 1994, claiming the lives of 16,000 Azerbaijanis and 4,000 Armenians.
The long-simmering battle exploded into warfare once more in late 2020. Azerbaijan — led by President Ilham Aliyev and closely aided by Turkey and Israel — ultimately recaptured the 20% of its territory it had misplaced to Armenia in 1994. (Azerbaijan’s forces included troopers from that nation’s Jewish inhabitants of about 8,000.)
Final month, renewed border skirmishes between the 2 nations left practically 300 folks useless on either side, with predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan and largely Christian Armenia buying and selling accusations of genocide and human-rights atrocities.
“The actual fact is that Israel equipped weapons to this prison gangster Aliyev and his brainwashed elite. He gave medals to troopers who lower off the heads of Armenian and Yazidi troopers,” Dorfman mentioned. “You wouldn’t imagine what number of letters we wrote from the Jewish neighborhood right here exposing what actually occurred. However in Israel, this isn’t a very talked-about topic.”
Artiom Chernamorian, founding father of a nonprofit group known as Nairi Union of Armenians in Petah Tikva, Israel, says he’s disgusted with official Israeli coverage towards the nation of his delivery — in addition to Israel’s alliance with Azerbaijan.
“Israel has a lot cash for NGOs around the globe, however not even one shekel to assist the Jewish neighborhood of Armenia. It’s a disgrace,” mentioned Chernamorian, who made aliyah 20 years in the past. “Why is Israel — a nation that suffered genocide — serving to an Islamic dictator kill Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh? Everyone knows he’s a killer, and Azerbaijan is unquestionably not a democracy.”
Armenians additionally deeply resent the truth that Israel refuses to formally acknowledge the Ottoman slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 as a genocide, for worry of offending Turkey — with which it reestablished diplomatic relations this 12 months after an extended hiatus.
Individuals stroll previous the Holocaust memorial in Yerevan, which is inscribed in Hebrew and Armenian: “To be or to neglect: Bear in mind the victims of the Shoah.” (Larry Luxner)
On the entrance to Yerevan’s Armenian Genocide Memorial Advanced, guests are greeted with a quote from Adolf Hitler, who, one week earlier than his 1939 invasion of Poland, mentioned, “Who, in spite of everything, speaks immediately of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
One man working exhausting to enhance Israeli-Armenian relations is Achot Chakhmouradian.
Since 2013, Chakhmouradian has been Israel’s honorary consul in Yerevan. His workplace, on the second flooring of his family-owned auto dealership, is adorned with framed certificates in Hebrew and Armenian, alongside along with his pet python, which he retains in an infinite glass tank.
“Our two nations have a lot in widespread,” says Chakhmouradian, who’s not Jewish. “Each are landlocked and surrounded by Muslim nations. And we’re each historical folks with fashionable tragedies — the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the Holocaust. As a consequence, we’ve got massive communities overseas, however the Armenian diaspora is even larger than the Jewish one.”
Portrait of Armenian Ceramics artist Vic Lepejian in his store within the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Outdated Metropolis, Oct. 3, 2018. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)
Chakhmouradian mentioned that in 2018, following a change of presidency in Armenia, his nation lastly determined to open an embassy in Tel Aviv, and relations flourished, with high-level visits and an energetic interparliamentary friendship group. However two years later — when warfare broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan — the ambassador was recalled in protest over Israel’s weapons gross sales to the Baku authorities.
“For my part, that was not the proper choice,” he mentioned. “Israel is just not the one nation promoting weapons. For instance, Russia is a a lot larger ally of Armenia, and so they had been additionally promoting weapons to either side.”
Chakhmouradian mentioned practically 180,000 Israelis visited Georgia in 2019, earlier than the pandemic hit; that very same 12 months, Armenia obtained barely 5,000 vacationers. Whereas there are extra Israelis with ties to Georgia than Armenia, Chakhmouradian mentioned he was optimistic that the variety of vacationers to Armenia may improve dramatically with direct flights from Tel Aviv to Yerevan — a flying time of lower than two and a half hours.
Issues could also be trying up, in truth. In April, Israeli president Isaac Herzog met Arman Akopian, Armenia’s new ambassador to Israel, who offered his credentials and signed the official visitor guide in unusually fluent Hebrew. The 2 males then mentioned the 1,700-year-old historical past of the Armenian neighborhood in Israel and affinities between the 2 peoples.
As well as, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s current mobilization of reserves to battle that warfare has led tens of 1000’s of Russian residents to to migrate to Armenia, one of many solely locations the place they’ll nonetheless journey simply. That features at the least 450 Jews who’ve taken up residence in Yerevan, in accordance with Rabbi Burshteyn — dramatically boosting the scale of the native Jewish neighborhood, even when solely briefly.
And on Oct. 6, Azerbaijan’s Aliyev met informally with Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — marking the primary top-level talks between the Turkish and Armenian leaders in a long time. That follows Erdoğan’s current rapprochement with Israel and the resumption of diplomatic ties between Israel and Turkey.
“There’s an enormous Armenian presence within the Outdated Metropolis of Jerusalem, and lots of Armenians wish to go to Israel on pilgrimage. However no one needs to lose a complete day touring,” Chakhmouradian mentioned. “If there have been direct flights, I’m certain a few of these vacationers may additionally turn into businessmen or potential buyers. The potential is gigantic.”
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