Author: Chmshkian Vicken

A1 Plus | 15:01:44 | 31-03-2004 | Social |
“A1+” TV COMPANY WILL RESUME BROADCASTING THIS YEAR
“Banning “A1+” TV Company from broadcasting area is not just ceasing that TV
Company. It is much more. It means that there is a speech freedom problem in
Armenia”, Nikol Pashinyan, Editor-in-Chief of “Armenian Times” Daily
announced at the press conference of “Speech Freedom Support” Fund.
He added that the rally and the march on April 2 will be not only for “A1+”
TV Company defense but also for speech freedom in general.
SFSF member advocate Avetiq Ishkhanyan accused the public: “We all are to
blame for “A1+” cessation. We tolerated it and “A1+” has been out of air for
2 years”.
Another attorney, Vardan Harutyunyan said that by banning “A1+” speech
freedom in Armenia was restricted.
Ex-Editor of “Ayb-Fe” Daily Vasak Darbinyan confirmed the standpoint that
stopping “A1+” was of political reasons. “Aravot” Daily Editor-in-Chief Aram
Abrahamyan said that there is no politics in the measures on April 2.
Tigran Ter-Esayan, Chair of International Union of Advocates, talked about
2-year-long legal procedures “A1+” was involved in to gain administration of
justice. But justice can be expected only from the European Court of Human
Rights, he said. He added that there are 2 applications there and extra 2
will be sent by May. It will become clear in April whether “A1+” claim will
be put under jurisdiction or not.
The conference participants announced irrespective of Municipality decision
and “persuasions” of law-enforcement bodies, Fund will conduct the rally and
the march.
“A1+” TV Company Chair Mesrop Movsesyan said that the measure is as well of
symbolic character. He wants to prove all those who think “A1+” staff to be
dispersed that it is entire and no one has left. Just the operating
personnel found temporary jobs.
“We will work as long as the staff exists”, Mesrop Moveseyan says.
The organizers of April 2 measure announced that they will do their best to
achieve resuming “A1+” broadcasting.
“A1+” is to be opened by public demand”, Avetiq Ishkhanyan said.
For that purpose Edik Baghdasaryan, Chair of Investigating Journalists’
Association, called upon the journalistic society to partake in the measure.
—

A1 Plus | 22:25:48 | 30-03-2004 | Politics |
JOURNALISTS CONDEMN
A number of journalists’ organizations such as Yerevan Press Club, Armenian
Journalists Union, Internews and Fund for Speech Freedom Protection came up
with a statement on Tuesday condemning assault on the head of Armenia’s
Helsinki Association Mikael Danielyan.
“We consider that as one of consequences of intolerance atmosphere in the
republic”, the statement says.
The organizations hope the law enforcement bodies will eventually break the
mould and track down the criminals.
—

Connecticut Law Tribune
March 22, 2004
Vol. 10; No. 10; Pg. 372
Attorney NeglectedImmigrant’s BIA Appeal
Keshishyan v. Burrier;
STATEWIDE GRIEVANCE COMMITTEE
CASE-INFO: 8 pages. Statewide Grievance Committee [Doc. No. 02-0037]
In May 2001, Bardukh Keshishyan, the complainant, hired Attorney
Walter Burrier to represent him in the appeal of a decision by the
Board of Immigration Appeals, which denied his application for
political asylum from Armenia. Keshishyan claimed he faced
persecution and death if forced to return. Burrier accepted a $135
retainer, but didn’t file the appeal on his client’s behalf. When
Keshishyan discovered, one year later, in May 2002, that there wasn’t
a pending appeal with the BIA, he spoke with Burrier, who admitted
that he forgot about Keshishyan’s case. After reviewing the file,
Burrier told Keshishyan that the deadline for filing the appeal had
expired and refunded the retainer. In a written response to the
Statewide Grievance Committee complaint, Burrier attributed the error
to his heavy workload and to a mistake by his office employee. The
SGC found, by clear and convincing evidence, that Burrier didn’t
provide competent representation, in violation of Rule 1.1. Although
Burrier blamed his office employee, keeping track of the appeal was
his responsibility, especially in this instance, where he had only
three weeks from the first meeting with Keshishyan to file a timely
appeal. Burrier admitted that he forgot about Keshishyan’s case. It
was essential for him to act with diligence and promptness. His
failure to do so violated Rule 1.3. Burrier previously was
reprimanded three times, and the SGC ordered that he be presented to
the Superior Court for discipline.

Los Angeles Times
March 28, 2004 Sunday
Home Edition
On the other side of darkness;
Holocaust Literature An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work Edited
by S. Lillian Kremer Routledge: 1,500 pp., $295, two volumes
by John Felstiner, John Felstiner is the author of “Paul Celan: Poet,
Survivor, Jew,” which won the Truman Capote Award for Literary
Criticism, and editor of “Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan,”
which received translation prizes from the Modern Language Assn., the
American Translators Assn. and PEN West. He teaches at Stanford
University.
Years ago in Long Island, I visited a Berlin-born poet, Ilse
Blumenthal-Weiss. As a young woman in 1921, having written to Rainer
Maria Rilke admiring his poetry, she’d evoked Rilke’s fervent
response about her good fortune, about the Jews’ God “to whom you
belong” because “every Jew is emplaced in Him, ineradicably planted
in Him, by the root of his tongue.”
Later, Blumenthal-Weiss had her own poetry to write. “Landscape With
Concentration Camp” begins: “The earth is black, the sky sheer
steel.” Although her husband was gassed at Auschwitz and her son
Peter murdered in Mauthausen, she survived Westerbork and
Theresienstadt. Her lines “For Peter” (1946) sound like this in
translation:
When they say Murder! I must learn
That this word, that this single term
Means you, means you a mere child’s blood,
You: Boyish! Jubilant! Brave moods! —
God taketh. One time hath God given.
You’re gone — and I should go on living?
When this woman in her 80s asked what brought me to see her and I
said I was studying Holocaust poetry, she drew a blank. What did that
phrase mean? The abstract topic now sounds callow, hollow, in the
face of Ilse’s loss and desolate voice.
Think too of the German-speaking Paul Celan, whose lexicon never had
the word “Holocaust” for what he’d been planted in, by the root of
his tongue. The German language “passed through frightful muting,
through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech,” he said,
and it “gave back no words for that which happened,” for das was
geschah. In the ballad-like “Deathfugue” (1945), he writes:
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink.
“Black milk,” Schwarze Milch, which is a way of saying there are “no
words for that which happened.”
Celan’s voice makes us approach this very welcome “Holocaust
Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work” with a measure
of caution. For besides the word’s academic pigeonholing, we’ve
become habituated to a misnomer. From the Greek for “wholly burned,”
“Holocaust” echoes biblical Hebrew olah, meaning a burnt offering
whose smoke “rises” to God. Can this designate the slaughter of a
people emplaced in Him, as Rilke put it? Does the sacred aura of
“Holocaust” fit Celan’s poem “Psalm,” with its cry, “Blessed art
thou, No One”?
What’s more, and worse, for years the word, the fact, the Holocaust
specter, has been exploited by any person or faction with a
grievance, whether trite or momentous. Legal abortion is called a
Holocaust; Jewish victims are perpetrating their own Holocaust in the
Middle East; American Jewish assimilation is a Holocaust. Scare
tacticians crave that absolute alarm.
Against analogy-mongering we need the keen, deep sense that
literature can give, of how the European catastrophe actually
impinged on human bodies, personhood, spirit. To clarify contemporary
as well as historical imagination, we need the sound and texture and
tempo of one life after another after another.
That potency, which makes the now-indispensable misnomer also a prime
slogan, has given rise to a crucial question of definition: Whose
Holocaust? Twenty-one years ago an Israeli conference took the title
“Holocaust and Genocide” to acknowledge as well the Armenian
massacres of 1915. As for the Holocaust years 1933 to 1945, the
catchphrase “6 million” Jews is always in danger of turning glib, and
is anyway deemed inadequate, misleading. Didn’t the Holocaust extend
to Slavs, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, disabled, mentally
ill and various political victims?
Well, yes and no. All these were designated victims, but not with the
same drastic and particular ferocity. Hitler’s “Final Solution” was
actually Endlosung der Judenfrage, “Final Solution to the Jewish
Question.” His “war against the Jews,” as the historian Lucy
Davidowicz called it, was different in kind as well as magnitude: a
“unique event with universal implications,” says survivor Elie
Wiesel.
Although this unique two-volume encyclopedia, complete with an
in-depth introduction, more than 300 entries, nine appendixes,
several bibliographies and a thorough index, emphasizes the Jewish
experience, nowhere does the publisher’s brochure or the
encyclopedia’s preface use the word “Jews.”
We’re told that “from Homer’s ‘Iliad’ to the present day, writers
have striven to comprehend the spectacle of human inhumanity.” This
claim for a universal reach is borne out when “Holocaust Literature”
features many non-Jewish authors — Borges, Brecht, Camus, Delbo,
Grass, Mann, Styron — who wrote about fascism with little or no
focus on Jews. At the same time, other entries on non-Jewish authors
— Boll, Hersey, Hochhuth, Keneally, Milosz, Sartre, Schlink, Sebald,
D.M. Thomas — rightly focus on the Jewish fate. The fraught sense of
“Holocaust” will inevitably ricochet between universal and
particular, as the writer Meyer Levin knew too well in trying for
decades to reclaim from Broadway and Hollywood the Jewish identity of
Anne Frank’s diary.
What is meant by “Holocaust” literature? How wide and deep to cast
the net? As far as Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” (1919), Isaak
Babel’s “Story of My Dovecot” (1927)? To see these as foreshadowings
skews them, though at some deep stratum such visionary stories do
benchmark a continuum of terror.
At its center, “Holocaust” literature would mean writings by victims
and others on the Jewish catastrophe — first, works that somehow
emerged from Nazi-ridden Europe in as many as 20 languages, then what
has come later and from elsewhere. Beyond this core, it’s an open
question.
Slowly over half a century, we’ve come to realize that countless
victims were jolted into creating songs and poems, diaries and
journals, letters and memoirs, eventually stories, novels and plays.
Even before the war, voices of alarm had emerged, notably Mordecai
Gebirtig’s 1938 song that begins, ‘S brennt, “It’s burning, brothers,
our shtetl’s burning!” Primo Levi published “If This Is a Man” in
1947, but only its later paperback version, “Survival in Auschwitz,”
thrust this unique memoir to the center of Holocaust memory. Now we
have a plethora of writings, down to the grandchildren of survivors.
At the heart of actual Holocaust experience, though still virtually
unknown, are graffiti that have been found scratched on the walls of
the Drancy transit camp outside Paris. Jews from Europe and North
Africa who’d found refuge in France beginning in 1938 were rounded up
by the French between 1942 and 1944 and sent from Drancy to
Auschwitz. Take Marcel Chetovy, age 17, who decoratively inscribed,
in French, this biography of himself and his father Moise: “Arrived
the 1st, deported the 31st July, in very very good spirits with hopes
of returning soon.” Elsewhere on the crowded cement wall, boldly
lettered, anonymous and challenging comprehension: Merci Quand Meme a
la France, “Thanks all the same to France.”
What tried-and-true canon, what aesthetic fits this bottomless
strangeness and poignance? Which theory of metaphor explains Celan’s
“Black milk of daybreak,” or a woman telling us summer dawn in
Auschwitz “was always black to me”? These questions hold for
children’s poems and drawings in Theresienstadt, sardonic ghetto
lullabies, Jerzy Kosinski’s brutal grotesque “The Painted Bird” and
Dan Pagis’ six-line ruptured Hebrew verse, “Written in Pencil in a
Sealed Boxcar”:
here in this transport
I Eve
with Abel my son
if you see my older son
Cain son of Adam
tell him that I
In the same vein, Celan spoke of “true-stammered,” “death-rattled,”
“prayer-sharp knives / of my / silence.” “Your singing, what does it
know?” he asked himself, Dein Gesang, was weiss er?
“Holocaust Literature,” bravely and ably edited by S. Lillian Kremer,
reflects various literary, socio-historical and psychological
approaches, especially from the earliest critics in this field:
Irving Halperin, George Steiner, Lawrence Langer, Edward Alexander,
Alvin Rosenfeld and Sidra Ezrahi. By now, so many monographs and
anthologies, courses and conferences abound, it’s hard to imagine a
time when only Anne Frank’s diary and Wiesel’s “Night” were generally
accessible in this country. Kremer’s informative, wide-ranging
introduction sees in Holocaust literature a uniquely compelling body
of testimony. As time wears on brutally, carelessly, the humanist
spirit itself has come under duress and needs attesting more than
ever.
Even a seasoned reader will find these entries on more than 300
souls, a hundred of them women, mind-stretching. They wrote in many
genres and languages: Yitzhak Katznelson, Avraham Sutzkever, Kadya
Molodowsky in Yiddish; Abba Kovner, Haim Gouri, Aharon Appelfeld in
Hebrew; Nelly Sachs, Gertrud Kolmar, Jurek Becker in German; Andre
Schwarz-Bart, Piotr Rawicz in French; Tadeusz Borowski in Polish;
Jiri Weil in Czech; the recent Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz in
Hungarian; and in English, Charles Reznikoff, Philip Roth, Cynthia
Ozick, William Heyen (the nephew and son-in-law of Nazi soldiers),
Irena Klepfisz (born in the Warsaw ghetto) and Bernard Malamud (but
his story “The Last Mohican” deserved mention, with its piercing
comic ironies).
More than a third of these figures are English-speaking, which may
seem overweighted. One also balks at meeting here an author who
“neglected the German genocide of the Jews,” or someone in whose
massive work “the Jewish issue occupies a relatively minor space,” or
another whose Holocaust “material … is only briefly — and rather
chaotically — narrated.”
Such misgivings seem trivial, given the richness of this
encyclopedia. There are omissions, though — most being inevitable,
some unfortunate. Here then are a few writers worth adding, if only
to give them Yad vaShem, “a monument and a name,” and to fill in the
dense landscape “after Auschwitz.” They have a claim on us, like
Felix Nussbaum’s 1942 self-portrait, in which the painter stares out
sidelong, exposing his yellow star and an identity card with his
German “Place of Birth” effaced.
Anne Frank and Moshe Flinker are here, yes, but let us add Yitshok
Rudashevski, who at 13 in 1941 started his Yiddish diary of the Vilna
ghetto: “An old Jew has remained hanging in the narrow passage of the
second story. His feet are dangling over the heads of the people
below.” In April 1943 Yitshok meets an escapee from the killing field
outside Vilna, “pale with wild eyes. His fur coat is completely
covered with lime.” His diary ends: “The rain lashes with anger as
though it wished to flush everything out of the world.” Such a
sentence stretches to breaking our Bildungsroman tradition, the
“portrait of the artist as a young man.”
Let us add Michal Borwicz, a poet in Warsaw’s clandestine 1944
anthology, “From the Abyss,” and Gebirtig as well as Hirsh Glik,
whose 1943 “Zog nit keynmol az du geyst dem letsten veg” (Never say
this is your final road) became the partisans’ anthem; and French
resistant Andre Verdet, for his Auschwitz sequence “the days the
nights and then the dawn”; and Romanian poet Benjamin Fondane, who
fought in the French army but was gassed as a Jew; and Robert Desnos,
whose verses are incised in the underground Holocaust memorial behind
Notre Dame. And Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss.
>From postwar fiction let us add Siegfried Lenz, for his superb novel
on Nazi oppression, “The German Lesson”; Anatoli Kuznetsov, for “Babi
Yar”; Wolfgang Borchert, Leon Uris, Uri Orlev and then Johanna Reiss
and Hans Peter Richter for their children’s books.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, the Tunisian Albert Memmi are
here, but by all means let us add Edmond Jabes, an Egyptian Jewish
emigrant to Paris, whose “Book of Questions” the catastrophe
undermines on every page. By that gauge, too, weren’t “Waiting for
Godot,” “Endgame” and Samuel Beckett’s novel “The Unnamable” all
composed under the sign of the Holocaust? Let us also recall
Charlotte Salomon, in hiding on the French Riviera, who longingly
painted sentences in her German mother tongue onto her 1,200
autobiographical watercolors before Adolf Eichmann’s henchman Alois
Brunner sent her to Auschwitz.
Recalling his fellow prisoners’ “hundreds of thousands of stories,
all different and full of a tragic, disturbing necessity,” Levi asks,
“But are they not themselves stories of a new Bible?” In this
daunting light, “Holocaust Literature” bears ample witness. We must
never stop disproving Theodor Adorno’s “After Auschwitz, to write a
poem is barbaric.” Language did indeed “pass through frightful
muting,” as Celan knew well enough. For 25 years, until drowning in
the Seine, he wrote his own way “through the thousand darknesses of
deathbringing speech.” *
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: HAUNTING: Felix Nussbaum in his “Self-Portrait With
Jewish Identity Card,” probably painted in 1942, still speaks to us.
PHOTOGRAPHER: VG Bild Kunst

Providence Journal , RI
March 27 2004
Jesus is the message of God
by Stephen Lynch:
Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code, on The New York Times’
hardcover fiction bestseller list for months, points up our culture’s
continuing fascination with Jesus Christ. Brown’s novel challenges
Christianity’s roots in terms of Christ’s divinity. I would like to
look at the faith of Christians from the first to the fourth
centuries from the Roman Catholic perspective. What we believe about
Jesus Christ is one thing; what we know about Jesus is something
else. St. Hilary, a fourth-century doctor of the Church, writes that
while God’s existence can be known by reason, God’s nature can never
be comprehended.
Some early Christians questioned Christ’s divinity, but the majority
accepted Jesus as the Word of God in human form, because they
believed in the mystery of Christ’s resurrection. Brown never really
faces up to the most critical theological issue of all, which is the
validity of the Resurrection.
In her book Beyond Belief, Elaine Pagels, a historian of religion at
Princeton University, writes that around the end of the second
century, Christian leaders like Polycarp and Irenaeus developed a set
of instructional summaries of belief, termed the Rule of Faith, which
clearly affirmed the Christian belief in the divinity of Jesus
Christ.
The fourth-century Council of Nicaea did not invent faith in Christ’s
divinity, because the New Testament already attested to that fact.
The integration of the Jesus of history with the Christ of faith
means that Jesus is not only the messenger of the kingdom, but he
himself is the message of God. Jesuit Karl Ralmer summed up Christ’s
identity this way: “Christ not only redeems humanity from sin, but
brings to perfection the divine plan of creation.” Israel plays a
pivotal role in God’s plan. The Roman centurion standing at the foot
of the cross publicly proclaimed his own faith-transformation when he
testified, “Clearly, this was the Son of God.”
Besides the historical evidence for Christ’s divinity, there is very
moving liturgical evidence. Professor Pagels points out that in the
second century, Pliny, a Roman governor in Asia Minor, said that two
female Christian slaves confessed under torture that Christians met
before dawn on a certain day of the week to sing a hymn to Christ as
to a god. Pliny had the slaves executed, because he said their
worship of Jesus Christ was an insult to the Roman gods.
The following century, Origen writes that John’s Gospel insists that
Jesus is not merely God’s servant, but God’s own light in human form.
The most ancient vesper evening prayer of Christianity is called the
Office of Light, or the Lucernarium. Christians sang it as a
liturgical witness to their belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ.
>From the late fourth century, this Vesper hymn was celebrated in the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher. All the lamps and torches of the church
were lighted, and the Lucernarium hymn was chanted. An even earlier
tradition says that at the end of the third century, in the Armenian
town of Sebaste, St. Athenogenes and 10 disciples were burned at the
stake for confessing Jesus Christ as Son of God in human flesh. As
the fires were ignited, the martyrs sang this Lucernarium canticle
Phos Hilarion: “O gracious Light, pure brightness of the ever living
Father in heaven, holy and blessed Jesus Christ.”
Jesus calls all to go back to the beginning, to that luminous state
of creation before the fall, where, as Messiah and Light of the World
revealed in human form, the Incarnate Word of God is divinely
appointed to rule the kingdom of God forever and forever.
The Rev. Stephen Lynch is the director of evangelization at St.
Francis Chapel and City Ministry Center in Providence.

PRESS RELEASE
Eastern Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America
138 East 39th Street
New York, NY 10016
Tel: 212-689-7810
Fax: 212-689-7168
e-mail: [email protected]
Website:
Contact: Iris Papazian
CROSSROADS E-NEWSLETTER: March 25, 2004
ARCHBISHOP OSHAGAN RETURNS
FROM MEETINGS IN LEBANON
Archbishop Oshagan Choloyan returned from Antelias, Lebanon after
attending a conference bringing together representatives of the Eastern,
Western, and Canadian Prelacies. Joining Oshagan Srpazan as representatives
of the Eastern Prelacy were two members of the Executive Council, Richard
Sarajian, Esq., (chairman) and Noubar Megerian. The Prelacy representatives
met with His Holiness Catholicos Aram I, and members of the Religious and
Executive Councils of the Catholicosate.
The discussions centered on the need for advancement in Christian
education; Armenian language and culture education; recruitment and training
of clergy as well as deacons, choirmasters, teachers, Ecumenical Relations,
Charitable work in Armenia, and various other issues of mutual concern.
CILICIAN CATHOLICATE PARTICIPATES
IN ECUMENICAL SEMINAR
Rev. Fr. Magar Ashkarian, Assistant to the Dean of the Cilician
Theological Seminary, Antelias, Lebanon, participated in a seminar on the
nature and purpose of the Church in the Orthodox and Evangelical tradition.
The seminar is a follow-up to two earlier seminars, which brought together
Orthodox and Evangelicals in Bossey, Switzerland, to strengthen the World
Council of Churches initiatives to build meaningful relationships between
the two traditions.
The seminar focused on the nature and the mission of the church. The
theme of the seminar was the understanding of salvation and the role and
place of the Bible in the two traditions. The participants sought ways of
reconciliation, better common understanding and mutual support. The findings
of the seminar will contribute towards the conference on World Mission and
Evangelism in 2005.
FIFTH LENTEN LECTURE GIVEN
BY PROFESSOR VIGEN GUROIAN
The fifth Lenten Lecture, delivered by Dr.Vigen Guroian, professor of
theology and ethics at Loyola College, in Baltimore, Maryland, took place
last night. Professor Guroian spoke about the Christian Family Under Fire.
Professor Guroian began by speaking about Aldous Huxley’s book Brave New
World, written in 1932. What seemed totally impossible and far-fetched 72
years ago is becoming real. He described the forces of society that are
nearly destroying marriage and the family as we know it. We are not far from
Huxley’s world, he said, where human beings are manufactured in laboratories
rather than through the physical union of a man and a woman. Professor
Guroian spoke about the role that the Church must play in challenging these
forces. The Christian Church is under fire, he said. Recognizing the
difficulties of challenging these forces, nevertheless, he said, the Church
will be abdicating her duty if she does not stay true to her beliefs.
A lively question and answer period followed the lecture well beyond the
time allotted. The conversation continued during the fellowship hour while
sharing a Lenten meal prepared by the Prelacy Ladies Guild and the Ladies
Guild of St. Illuminators Cathedral. The Lenten Lectures are sponsored by
the Armenian Religious Education Council and the Prelacy Ladies Guild.
DEACON SHANT KAZANJIAN WILL DELIVER
FINAL LENTEN LECTURE ON MARCH 31
Deacon Shant Kazanjian, the Executive Director of the Armenian Religious
Education Council will be the featured speaker on March 31 at the sixth and
final Lenten lecture. Deacon Shant will explore The Family as the Household
of Faith.
The year 2004 has been proclaimed the Year of the Family by His Holiness
Catholicos Aram I, and the Lenten lectures have all focused on an aspect of
the family.
The lectures take place at St. Illuminator’s Cathedral, 221 E. 27th
Street, New York City. Lenten service begins at 7:30 p.m., in the Sanctuary,
followed by the lecture and fellowship in Pashalian Hall. All are welcome.
JEOPARDY TOURNAMENT THIS SATURDAY
The Mid-Atlantic Jeopardy Tournament will take place on Saturday, March
27, at Sts. Vartanantz Church, 461 Bergen Blvd., Ridgefield, NJ. Armenian
school students from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Washington DC,
will compete in the tournament organized by the Armenian National Education
Committee (ANEC).
For information contact Gilda B. Kupelian, Director of ANEC,
212-689-7810. ANEC is co-sponsored by the Eastern Prelacy and the Armenian
Relief Society, Eastern Region.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC FEATURES
ARMENIA IN MARCH ISSUE
The March issue of the National Geographic magazine has a feature
article on Armenia. Titled The Rebirth of Armenia, the 22-page article is
written by Frank Viviano with photographs by Alexandra Avakian.
We have learned that the magazine has received criticism from Turkish
sources. We urge you to purchase the issue, if you haven’t already done so,
and contact the editor and congratulate him on the article. You may write
to:
William A. Allen, Editor-in-Chief
National Geographic Society
P.O. Box 98199
Washington, D.C. 20090-8199
E-mail: [email protected]
Fax: 202-828-5460
SIXTH SUNDAY OF LENT:
ADVENT SUNDAY
This Sunday, March 28, is called Advent Sunday (Galstyan Kiraki). During
Lent the faithful are encouraged to meditate on the mystery of salvation.
Christ came to this world for the Salvation of Humankind, and particularly
on Advent Sunday the faithful are asked to think about Christ’s second
coming. Advent Sunday has its own special hymn, in which it is said that the
mystery of Christ’s advent was known to the apostles, who were filled with
awe and anxiously awaited Christ’s arrival to save humankind. In the hymn,
the story of the expulsion from paradise is repeated, and an appeal made to
Christ to ask the Heavenly Father to establish peace on earth.
Saturdays during Great Lent are dedicated to the saints of the Church.
This Saturday, March 27th, is in remembrance of St. Gregory the Illuminator
and his descent into the deep pit (Khor Virab).
MUSICAL ARMENIA CONCERT IS NEARLY SOLD OUT
At this date there are only a few tickets remaining for the 21st Musical
Armenia concert this Sunday, March 28, 2 p.m.
The concert, which will take place at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital
Hall, is sponsored by the Prelacy Ladies Guild each year and features young
Armenian talent. The featured artists this year are Ani Kalyjian, cello and
Karine Poghosyan, piano. Barbara Podgurski will accompany Ms. Kalayjian on
the piano.
Call the Prelacy office, 212-689-7810, immediately if you wish to
purchase tickets.
Visit our website at

Glendale News Press
LATimes.com
March 24 2004
District puts fact versus fiction

Local parents have criticized the district’s English Language
Development program. Coordinator Joanna Junge helps make the
distinction.
By Gary Moskowitz, News-Press
NORTHEAST GLENDALE – Since the district’s English Language
Development program came under criticism last summer from parents,
Joanna Junge has been busy correcting what she calls simple
misconceptions about how the program works.
Junge is the coordinator of curriculum and intercultural education
and instructional services for the Glendale Unified School District.
She works closely with the district’s Welcome Center staff and
language translators, who determine students’ language skills when
they enter the district.
Last summer, members of an Armenian parent group criticized the
district’s English Language Development program during several school
board meetings and on local Armenian television talk shows.
Some parents thought the district discriminated against students of
Armenian and other ethnic backgrounds who were born in America but
whose families speak languages other than English at home.
Others said students are kept in English-language learner classes
longer than they should be so that the district can collect extra
state money. Some parents were concerned that taking too many
English-language learner classes would prevent their children from
getting into top-notch universities.
Other parents said they did not want their children enrolled in the
language classes because they thought they were for special
education. Some thought the language classes had a stigma attached to
them that they did not want their children to be a part of. Others
said the translation provided by the district was inadequate.
“I think there were a lot of misconceptions from some parents that we
have worked at resolving ever since,” Junge said.
The News-Press interviewed Junge recently about the Welcome Center
and parents’ criticisms of the English Language Development program.
NEWS-PRESS: Parents’ criticisms of the district’s English Language
Development program started [last] summer, and resurfaced on several
local Armenian-language television programs. What was one direct
result of that criticism?
JOANNA JUNGE: There was a lot of debate, and we decided, if it will
help communication between parents and us, why fight it? The whole
point is what’s best for the children, and we’ve taken steps to
resolve the debate.
NP: What is the district doing differently now as a result of the
parents’ speaking out?
JJ: We’ve worked to improve our Armenian translation efforts, by
translating in both Eastern and Western dialects of Armenian and
having translators of both dialects available for many meetings.
We’ve also recorded three “Half-Time Live” shows on [Charter
Communications] Channel 15 that feature panel discussions on our
English-language learners program. We plan to re-record those shows
with district officials who are fluent in our primary languages –
Armenian, Korean and Spanish.
NP: Does the district earn more money by keeping students in the
English-language learners program?
JJ: We do collect about $300 per student per year in state and
federal funds. However, our programs cost thousands more per year
than the funds we receive. There is no financial advantage to keeping
students in the program longer than they need to be.
NP: Does taking English-learner classes make it more difficult for
students to get into four-year universities?
JJ: No. The majority of our Advanced Placement students are either
current or former ESL kids. If English is not the primary language,
they need to learn English skills to do college-level work.
NP: Are English learner classes the same thing as special education?
JJ: Absolutely not. Special education is for kids with learning
disabilities. It is possible for an English learner to also have
learning disabilities, but we are careful not to assume that just
because they lack English skills, they have disabilities. There is no
automatic connection between the two.

A1 Plus | 20:02:39 | 23-03-2004 | Social |
“A1+” FACING A LEGAL BAR
Which are the privileges of the TV Companies that won at TV and Radio
National Committee’ tenders and now broadcast? Which are the shortcomings of
“A1+” that TV and Radio National Committee has deprived it of the chance to
return to broadcasting area for 7 times and didn’t allow the reasons for
license refusal?
“Meltex” LTD representatives have been applying to the Economic Court for 7
months to get them in written. That trial, hearing of “Meltex” LTD claim
demanding TV and Radio National Committee to let the reasons for not
granting “A1+” the broadcasting license in the tenders for 25th, 31st, 39th,
51st frequencies, has ended today.
At today’s session “Meltex” LTD representative Ara Zohrabyan introduced an
application also demanding TV and Radio National Committee to make public
the bases for refusing the license to “A1+” in the tenders for 3rd, 63rd and
56th frequency ranges.
“The decision on granting a license to a tender winner can’t be commented
otherwise but the decision on refusing a license to other participants of
the tender”, TV and Radio National Committee representative Varser
Karapetyan said, neglecting the requirements of the 51st article of the Law
on “Television and Radio” and the 63rd article of “Regulations of TV and
Radio National Committee”. The 51st article clearly states: An applicant is
informed in written about the bases of refusing the license within 10 days
after the decision is made.
However, as it was expected from the last phase of the legal proceedings
(baseless dragging out of the trial, challenge of TV and Radio National
Committee to the Judge) Judge Robert Sargssyan rejected “A1+” claim against
TV and Radio National Committee.
The Court decision can be appealed against in the Appeal Court within 15
days.
—

Chess tournament ends in Karabakh
Artsakh State TV, Stepanakert
18 Mar 04
March
[Presenter over video of ceremony] On 17 March the closing ceremony of
the international chess tournament in memory of Tigran Petrosyan took
place in Stepanakert. NKR Prime Minister Anushavan Daniyelyan
presented prizes and souvenirs to the participants and thanked them
and the organizers of the tournament. The NKR prime minister
announced that the tournament would become a regular event. Upon the
order of the NKR president, the 10th world chess champion, Boris
Spasskiy was awarded the Gratitude medal for his substantial
contribution to the development of chess in Nagornyy Karabakh. Boris
Spasskiy said the following:
[Spasskiy] The chess tournament was politicized. I am not a specialist
in politics. I cannot say who is right and who is wrong. My function
is chess. I hope that next time when I come here there will be no
politics involved and the situation will be calmer.

Pravda Ru
Something to remember: 13 years ago we said “yes” to USSR
03/18/2004 18:05
A referendum regarding the issue of USSR took place on March 17th 1991.
Members of the referendum tried to decide whether the country should be kept
as a union of republics. Despite the fact that majority of the members had
answered positively on the posed question, several months later the union
has crumbled.
13 years ago, Soviet citizens were addressed the following question: “Do you
consider preserving the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics in a form of
renewed federation of equal sovereign republics, with guaranteed human
rights and personal freedom of people of various nationalities?”
Some republics and regions have also included some of their own questions.
Based on the official soviet data, 147 million people (80%) voted. Among
them, 112 million (76,4%) voted for preserving the USSR. Armenia, Georgia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, and Estonia ignored voting altogether. In 1996,
Russian State Duma passed a specific resolution thus admitting legal power
of those results of the referendum of March 17th, 1991.
Interestingly, Russians already started to forget those results of the
referendum. When asked who they voted for, 40% turned out to vote “For”,
another 40% could not remember, 13% had troubles answering the question.
At the same time, amount of those who do not regret the USSR”s collapse has
reduced almost in half. While in 1992 32% of Russians did not wish for the
collapse, today there remain only 15%. 80% of people think that USSR should
have been preserved. 58% of Russians however consider it impossible to
reconstruct former Union. Only 30% still believe in the possibility.
Here is a reminder for those who do not remember:
An agreement entitled “Belovezhskoe Soglashenie” was signed on December 8th
1991 between Belarus and Ukraine. The agreement ascertained the fact that
the Union of Soviet Republics had ceased to exist and a new Commonwealth of
Independent States (CIS) has been formed. The agreement was signed by the
following parties: Boris Yeltsin, Stanislav Shushkevish and Leonid Kravchuk.
“Belavezhskoe soglashenie” has later been referred to as the conspiracy of
the traitors and the three men were called names to their faces. All three
of them are still alive; none of them is at power; all of them have a rather
controversial reputation in their now-independent countries.
In conclusion, one’s role in the history has been acknowledged even by the
Bolsheviks, even though according to their theory, even the most gifted
individual is nothing without the support of the masses. Based on numerous
examples from the history of our nation, our geniuses were capable of doing
pretty much anything.They could easily make a mess and have future
generations clean up after them, or they could simply give away a
significant portion of the country’s vast territory to a neighbor.for free.
Yegor Belous