Quad-Cities Online, IL
March 21 2015
Recalling another reason to ‘never forget’
By Jonathan Turner, [email protected] qconline.com
DAVENPORT — Raelene Ohanesian-Pullen is proud to be Armenian and will
share her family’s history with the area in several events marking a
somber anniversary.
The Davenport native, who is development director for the Figge Art
Museum, will play a key role in a documentary showing today at the
Figge, an interfaith prayer service Tuesday at St. Ambrose University,
and a talk Wednesday at Augustana College, all to mark the 100th
anniversary of the start of the Armenian genocide during World War I.
“The genocide defines Armenian people. Because we have such a rich
culture and rich history, it would be a shame to say a people are
defined by something that historically happened,” Ms. Pullen said. “By
the same token, there is some definition, there is some strength,
there is some thing that causes us to have something different in our
hearts. I think it’s a gratefulness.
The Armenian genocide began April 24, 1915, carried out by the Turkish
government against the entire Armenian Christian population of the
Ottoman Empire and killed more than 1.5 million Armenians from 1915 to
1923, according to armenian-genocide.org. Armenians were subjected to
deportation, abduction, torture, massacre and starvation.
Two victims were Ms. Pullen’s maternal great-grandparents. Her
maternal grandparents came to this country as orphans, settling
separately in Chicago. She didn’t know her father’s parents (also
Armenians) well, partly since her paternal grandfather died before she
was born, and her parents divorced.
“We have suffered a lot, as a Christian nation in a heavily Muslim
part of the world,” Ms. Pullen said. “Things that have happened to our
people happened because of our faith. It’s really a miracle for us to
be here today.”
Through the help of an older Armenian woman at Ellis Island, her
grandmother and another Armenian girl were brought to Chicago, and
raised as sisters. Ms. Pullen still is close to that other family.
“One of the things about Armenian people, once you find another
Armenian, they become a member of your family,” she said. “The reason
for that is because we’ve lost so much of our family, and we feel
close to other people.”
Her grandparents had an arranged marriage in 1920 and her mother was
born in 1930. Ms. Pullen’s grandparents were married for 77 years. She
visited them often in Chicago.
“My grandmother was the most amazing woman I have ever known,” she
said. “She took such pleasure in having events that were fun for
everyone and meaningful. Every Sunday at her house. She was an amazing
cook.”
After church, they had big dinners, and people would perform music and
recite poetry. “One of the things I learned most from her as a child,
they really believed in celebrating life,” Ms. Pullen said.
“They felt very fortunate to be alive. They felt a lot of guilt
because they had seen a lot of people die around them. They had so
much tragedy in their life. For my grandmother, it made her such a
strong Christian, because she felt our faith is what gets us through.”
An Armenian priest from the Chicago she attended is speaking at the
Tuesday and Wednesday events. Because there’s no Armenian church in
the Quad-Cities, Ms. Pullen and her husband, Scott, attend Trinity
Episcopal Church in Davenport.
For a social hour before the interfaith prayer service (including
representatives of Islam and Judaism), she’s preparing Armenian food
such as pahklava, a sweet pastry, and cheese boereg, a kind of pie.
There also will be Armenian music.
Armenia was a Soviet republic from 1920 until it became independent in
1991. There are 11 million Armenians worldwide, including about
483,000 in the U.S. Los Angeles has the biggest Armenian-American
population.
Ms. Pullen, who has visited Armenia several times, hopes the public
will learn about its rich culture and history, and need to prevent
further genocide around the world.
“It’s embarrassing we have genocide to this day, in Darfur,” she said.
“To think that what happened to the Armenian people had to happen, and
as a world we’re not any smarter for it. The Holocaust happened after
that, and it continues to happen.”
Ms. Pullen serves on a 12-member Armenian Genocide Remembrance
Committee of the Quad Cities, which formed last fall as an offshoot of
the area’s Holocaust Education Committee.
Group chairman Maxine Russman said Adolf Hitler used the Armenian
genocide as partial justification for his planned extermination of
Jews in Europe.
She said Hitler was quoted as saying, “Who still talks nowadays about
the extermination of the Armenians? The world didn’t do anything, and
he was right,” she said of the Armenian genocide.