HOLOCAUSTS REMEMBERED
St. Petersburg Times (Florida)
May 3, 2008 Saturday
More than 100 people gathered April 24 at the Florida Holocaust
Museum in St. Petersburg for a service in memory of the 1-million
to 1.5-million men, women and children who perished between 1915 and
1923 in what is referred to as the Armenian Genocide.
The service, led by the Rev. Hovnan Demerjian of St. Hagop
Armenian Church in Pinellas Park, above, also remembered the more
than 11-million people who died during the Holocaust of World War
II and "all who have perished because of their creed, the family
they were born into and their background." The evening’s program,
which included a curator talk by Mary Johnson and a presentation by
Eileen Barsamian Jennings, a child of Armenian Genocide survivors,
marked the opening event of a new museum exhibit, "The Greatest Crime
of the War: the Armenian Genocide during World War I." Armenians,
a Christian minority in a Muslim community, lived in what is now
eastern Turkey and in the southeastern part of the country that is
today occupied principally by Kurds. Historians say that in 1915,
the Central Committee of the Young Turk Party of the Ottoman Empire
deported thousands of Armenians, sending them to starvation and death
in the Syrian desert. Many were attacked and killed, and young women
were raped and forced into harems or to marry their abductors. The
Florida Holocaust Museum exhibit, at 55 Fifth St. S, opened April 19
and will run through Oct. 19. The exhibition begins with a history
of the Armenian people and follows the political and international
events leading up to the genocide and the genocide itself.