1 – An Incredible Armenian Who Retrieved
Armenian Orphans from the Syrian Desert
By Harut Sassounian
Publisher, The California Courier
www.TheCaliforniaCourier.com
2- COVID-19: Recoveries surpass new cases in Armenia for first
time since April
3 – Dr. Alina Dorian to Advance CA Contact Tracing
to Prevent Spread of COVID-19
4- Roslin Press Presents Armenian Adaptation of Animated
Series, Treasure Island
5- 2020 Arpa International Film Festival Moves Online
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1 – An Incredible Armenian Who Retrieved
Armenian Orphans from the Syrian Desert
By Harut Sassounian
Publisher, The California Courier
www.TheCaliforniaCourier.com
Parnag Shishigyan is a heroic Zeytountsi who retrieved hundreds of
Armenian orphans from Arab families in the Syrian desert after the
Armenian Genocide. His name is not known to most Armenians. Therefore
it is worthwhile to focus attention on his life and his good deeds. He
is buried in the little town of Hovdashad, a few miles outside of
Yerevan.
Last month, Zarmik Sargsyan from Yerevan posted on her Facebook page a
very moving tribute to Parnag Shishigyan after visiting his grave. The
only reference to his unique accomplishment is a booklet published 30
years ago by Hagop Jghlyan whose family he had rescued. The book was
aptly titled, “A Life Left in the Shadows.” Sargsyan attempted to take
Shishigyan’s life out of the shadows and present him to the public at
large.
From April 10 to May 18, 1915, the heroic town of Zeytoun in Cilicia
was depopulated. The men were herded into the infamous Ottoman Turkish
“Labor Battalions.” On the road to Deir Zor, Syria, 14-year-old
Parnag, ignoring the snakes and scorpions around him, spent days
cuddling the corpse of his mother who was killed by the sword of a
Turkish soldier. He was rescued by a Bedouin Arab from the Shammar
tribe, who, after digging a grave in the sand for Parnag’s mother with
his dagger, placed the young boy on his horse and took him to his
home.
Young Parnag who already knew Armenian, German and Turkish, soon also
learned Arabic. Besides herding sheep and camels, Parnag, renamed
Ahmet El Jezza, taught the tribesmen how to write in Arabic. He became
very popular in the region because of his diligence, humility, and
serious demeanor.
Soon, in the course of herding sheep, Parnag came across in the desert
many Armenian children adopted by local Arabs. He reminded them of
their Armenian heritage and began to write down their names and places
of residence in a notebook.
In 1924, 23-year-old “Ahmet”, as a trusted and literate young man, was
asked to deliver a herd of sheep bought by wealthy Arabs from Aleppo.
Once in Aleppo, he was surprised to see Armenian signs on store fronts
and people speaking in Armenian. He was offered a job and a place to
stay by local Armenians, but he turned down the offers, saying he had
a family in the desert and could not abandon them. He then showed to
an Armenian shoemaker his notebook listing the names and places of
Armenian children living in the desert with Arab families. He had
promised himself to gather these Armenian children, help them marry
each other and find their relatives, if still alive. It was a very
difficult task. Most of the children, having lived with Arab families
for several years, did not remember their heritage and did not know
that there were other Armenians still in existence. But Parnag
persisted despite the obstacles.
The shoemaker Panos, President of the Rescue Committee of Armenian
orphans from Arab and Kurdish tribes, was stunned. During the last few
months, the Committee had barely rescued a couple of children, and now
Panos was seeing an entire notebook full of Armenian names.
After returning to his tribe, Parnag kept sending list after list of
Armenian children to Aleppo. The Rescue Committee would then go to the
desert, pay off the tribesmen and take the Armenian children to Aleppo
or Beirut.
Eventually, the Syrian government allocated two villages in the desert
to Armenians. Parnag got married to an Armenian woman by the name of
Wadha who later changed her name to Siranoush. Respecting their
adoptive Arab parents, they agreed to have the marriage ceremony
performed by a Muslim Sheikh. The couple planned to have an Armenian
wedding later on. Parnag’s four Arab “brothers” were not happy that he
was leaving them to go and settle in the new Armenian village of Tel
El-Brak. They divided the family belongings into five. Parnag took
with him 100 sheep, five camels, a horse, a rifle, and household
items.
Parnag brought the hundreds of Arabized Armenians to his village, gave
them Armenian names and arranged their marriages. He organized the
young men of the village to collect the bones of Armenian martyrs from
Deir Zor, Raqqa, around the Euphrates and Khabour rivers and the
tragic cave of Sheddedeh. Parnag held a memorial ceremony for the
souls of the deceased.
The two Armenian villages in the desert soon prospered. They formed a
sports organization and a music band. In 1947, when Parnag became
aware of the mass migration back to Soviet Armenia he decided to
return to the homeland! He left all his possessions behind except for
one thing, his Arabian horse, which he donated to a horse ranch after
arriving in Armenia.
Parnag’s family settled in Hovdashad, a village near Echmiadzin where
he worked as a farmer. His wife, Siranoush, had five more children in
Armenia. Even though Parnag had retrieved hundreds of Armenian
children, he always thought of the hundreds of other children who were
not, including his wife, Siranoush’s sister.
In the Hovdashad cemetery, there is a statue of Parnag in Arabic
attire. The house that Parnag built in 1956 in that village is now
like a museum, where his clothes and his photos are displayed.
Facebook writer Zarmik Sargsyan recalls that Parnag’s great-grandson
Hagop was married in Los Angeles on April 17, 1997, in the presence of
his seven siblings. It is ironic that the descendants of the man, who
had sacrificed so much to rescue Armenians and moved to the homeland,
now live far away from Armenia, in Los Angeles!
Armenians both in Armenia and the Diaspora should visit the village of
Hovdashad and Parnag’s grave to pay tribute to the man who retrieved
hundreds of Armenian orphans and returned them to their heritage.
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2- COVID-19: Recoveries surpass new cases in Armenia for first
time since April
By Raffi Elliott
YEREVAN (The Armenian Weekly)—As of May 25, Armenia has registered a
total of 7,113 cases of COVID-19, 3,842 of which are still active. Of
those, less than a thousand have shown any symptoms. Officials say
3,145 patients have already recovered, while 87 have died.
The Armenian Ministry of Health announced on May 20 that it had
registered 230 new cases of COVID-19 during the previous 24-hour
period. At the same time, 255 recovered patients have been discharged
from hospital.
This announcement marked the first time that the number of daily new
recoveries surpassed the number of newly confirmed cases since
mid-April, when the first rounds of lockdown easing came into force.
Following a three-week period of nearly flat new infection rates
between April 12 and April 25, the numbers steadily began to increase
again in parallel with each new round of lifting restrictions on
freedom of movement and business activity. Most restrictions were
rolled back between May 4 and May 14 with the condition that strict
hygiene and safety protocols be implemented.
On May 14, the Armenian parliament voted to remove remaining
restrictions on public transit and indoor commercial activity, but
also instituted a mandatory mask policy in public with fines of up to
100,000 AMD ($200) for non-compliance. At the same time, the
government also extended the State of Emergency by another month in
order to clear any constitutional constraints on Public Health
Authorities’ ability to quickly react to potential future outbreaks.
The government’s decision to scale down these regulations while the
pandemic is still uncontained has been met with criticism by some.
However, the Prime Minister responded that projections anticipate new
cases continuing into next year or until a vaccine becomes widely
available. “It’s not realistic to keep the entire country locked up
for another year,” he explained in early May.
Health Minister Arsen Torosyan, who earlier had warned that first
responders might soon have to ask patients without symptoms to
self-isolate as emergency wards reach capacity, has already conducted
the first online courses with medical personnel around the country on
how to monitor such asymptomatic patients. Over the course of the
pandemic, the healthcare system has managed to free up resources to
care for up to four thousand patients – up from 350 in February.
However, the steady rise in cases has led the Ministry to adjust its
strategy to focus care on those showing symptoms.
Indeed, new case rates hit a record high of 351 in a single day on May
18, before subsiding again in the following days. The increase in new
registered cases might be attributed in part to vast improvements in
testing and contact-tracing operations. At least 44,000 tests have
been conducted since the outbreak began.
Notably, despite the exponential increase in testing, the percentage
of positive returns has continued to hover at around 10 percent,
suggesting that the total rate of infections has remained constant.
Daily recovery rates have also begun to rise sharply over the last
week.
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3 – Dr. Alina Dorian to Advance CA Contact Tracing
to Prevent Spread of COVID-19
Rose and Alex Pilibos Principal Dr. Alina Dorian is leading a team at
UCLA to advance contact tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic as part
of a partnership launched by Gov. Gavin Newsom that includes UCSF. The
team at UCLA is training thousands of individuals across the state in
public health techniques and strategies, including contact tracing,
case investigation, and administration, in order to mitigate the
spread of COVID-19.
The training program — co-led by the California Department of Public
Health (CADPH); UC San Francisco (UCSF); and UCLA — represents the
next stage in California’s state-wide response to the COVID-19
epidemic: helping prepare residents for an emergence from
shelter-in-place.
The comprehensive pandemic response training program is a campus-wide
effort at UCLA, involving faculty and staff from the UCLA Fielding
School of Public Health and UCLA Extension. The team’s leaders include
Brookmeyer and Bullard; Alina Dorian, UCLA FSPH associate dean for
public health practice, and for equity, diversity, and inclusion; and
Michael Prelip, professor and chair of the Department of Community
Health Sciences at UCLA FSPH.
Dorian, whose expertise includes disaster relief, health education,
and health systems management, said the skills necessary for contact
tracing are well-known and that the techniques have been used
successfully in public health campaigns for decades.
“We regularly use contact tracing to contain communicable diseases,
and we scale it up during outbreaks. So it’s a public health measure
that is tried and true,” said Dorian, who has led emergency response
teams in Kosovo, Haiti, and Peru.
“The threat of COVID-19 remains high. If we want to safely begin
reopening our society, we need to have certain public health measures
in place, including a significant increase in our ability to trace new
infections,” said Ron Brookmeyer, dean of the UCLA Fielding School of
Public Health. “This large scale training program with our colleagues
here at UCLA, and at UCSF and the CADPH, will allow us to begin that
effort to expand and strengthen our public health workforce.”
At UCLA, the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health (UCLA FSPH) and
UCLA Extension are managing the training program, known statewide as
the “COVID-19 Virtual Training Academy” and designed to standup case
investigation and COVID-19 contact tracing training across multiple
counties in California. Statewide, there is an anticipated need to
train from 10,000 to 20,000 new contact tracers in order to
effectively relax California’s stay-at-home orders.
“Public health and well-being is top of mind for all of us, and
assisting with the training and creation of an emerging workforce is
something that UCLA Extension and the Fielding School are well
positioned to undertake,” said Eric A. Bullard, dean of continuing
education and UCLA Extension. The initial training cohort includes
approximately 550 current public employees with applicable skills,
including language abilities and up-to-date background checks. That
will increase to about 1,000 per week as the program ramps up,
organizers said.
Governor Gavin Newsom has laid out six key metrics for modifying the
stay-at-home order in California. For the first, the state must have
“the ability to monitor and protect our communities through testing,
contact tracing, isolation, and supporting those who are positive or
exposed.” Newsom said the following crucial components must be in
place: a workforce sufficient to rapidly identify every case and
contact in the state; a high-quality training program with capacity to
quickly stand up a large, new competent workforce; and a robust,
statewide data management and communications platform to streamline
and support COVID-19 contact tracing work done by local health
jurisdictions and to enable monitoring across the state to swiftly
signal need for any changes in public health response. Prelip, whose
experience also includes disaster and emergency preparedness, has used
similar training techniques in connection with his work in the U.S.
Both said lessons learned from past emergencies are key elements of
the current program, which they expect will continue throughout 2020
and possibly well into 2021.
“This isn’t going to be one round of training — we are going to need
to train large numbers of people over time and adjust as conditions
and factors change,” Prelip said. “There is a tremendous amount of
work that lies ahead, but this is the responsible path forward.”
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4- Roslin Press Presents Armenian Adaptation of Animated
Series, Treasure Island
By Haig Norian
In an initiative the likes of which the Diaspora hasn’t seen in over a
generation, Roslin Press announced the first-ever Armenian production
of Osamu Dezaki’s anime rendition of the classic swashbuckling
adventure, Treasure Island. To capture the spirit of the 21st century
Diaspora and Armenia, the 26-episode series features a mix of
characters speaking Eastern and Western Armenian. Thanks to the
assistance of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, young Armenians from
across the globe can now sail the seven seas with Jim Hawkins in his
search for buried treasure.
Especially during the pandemic with all of us spending an
unprecedented amount of time at home, finding high-quality Armenian
entertainment for children has never been more important.
It was a dark and stormy night… Jim and his mother were tidying up the
Admiral Benbow’ Inn of Black Hill, a remote part of the English
countryside. Just as they were about ready to lock up, a mysterious
old sea captain arrives at their door. This wayward stranger named
Billy Bones warns of a certain one-legged man – a vicious, brutal
pirate who must be avoided at all costs. Fearing that he may not be
around much longer, Billy entrusts Jim with some mysterious papers-one
of them being a map – the map to Treasure Island. And thus begins an
epic saga of high seas adventure, treacherous mutiny, and one boy’s
courage, faith, and good will.
Treasure Island comes at a critical juncture in the Diaspora. There is
no denying that the Diasporan communities of the world are struggling
when it comes to language maintenance. In our opinion, what is needed
to keep the youth engaged with the Armenian language is high quality
entertainment with a strong literary backbone. Children must be
entertained but must also be exposed to complex thoughts, emotions and
themes. The new Armenian production of Treasure Island has all these
combined with a fantastic score and beautiful animation.
Special attention was given to the translation of Treasure Island.
Both Eastern and Western Armenian are shown organically interacting
for the first time in a children’s animated series. From LA to Paris,
the old mono-dialect Diaspora is no more. Communities are more diverse
than they have ever been, and we set out to celebrate this fact in
Treasure Island. Characters are depicted with their unique accents and
linguistic stylings, encouraging our youth to embrace the linguistic
diversity of the Armenian language.
Each and every single member of the Roslin and TechnoLinguistics team
that has contributed to bringing Treasure Island to life has left an
indelible mark of love.
A full list of the Treasure Island family can be seen below during the
credits montage: Pay special attention to the beautifully
orchestrated theme song, brought to you with love from Yerevan.
Treasure Island is available now on VLUME, a new media platform
custom-built for the Armenian speaking communities of the world. VLUME
is already host to hundreds of eBooks, 1000’s of hours of audiobooks,
and now with the introduction of Treasure Island – video content.
Whether you are in Buenos Aires or Nicosia, New Jersey or Paris,
Glendale or Yerevan – VLUME provides an unprecedented sense of
community, now centered around fantastic literature and the best and
brightest video content that the world has to offer.
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5- 2020 Arpa International Film Festival Moves Online
This year marks the 23rd anniversary of Arpa International Film
Festival, the signature event of the Arpa Foundation for Film, Music
and Art (AFFMA), which was slated for October 24 – 26, 2020.
In consideration of the continuing challenges and uncertainty stemming
from the Covid-19 pandemic, and per the extended federal and state
guidelines, the organizers have decided to stream the festival online,
instead of theatrical screenings due to the social distancing measures
in place.
“While it was our hope to screen the films theatrically, streaming the
films online will reach a greater viewership. We are working very hard
to make this transitional process as smooth for our film audiences as
possible. The gifted independent storytellers rely on the festival’s
platform for exposure. We are already receiving wonderful submissions
of shorts, features, documentaries, animation and music videos to our
festival. We are committed to showcasing all the selected films during
our online festival,” said the organization in a statement.
“It is important to stress that our focus is to support independent
cinema which has inspired and sustained our festival globally. Since
its inception, our festival’s future has always depended on the
selfless acts of our community that continue to be our beacons of
light, pushing forward diversity, innovation, creativity and vision to
preserve our Festival,” said the statement.
“Our warmest gratitude once again to you all. We truly appreciate your
love and support in standing with us during this difficult time.
Stories are more important now than ever. We will transition and
overcome the challenges together, celebrating the diverse array of
films by unique voices that we are extremely excited about screening,”
said the statement.
“Arpa International Film Festival supporters have always stood behind
our festival in helping independent filmmakers find their true purpose
in the cinematic arena. Because of you we have discovered and
connected to filmmakers across the globe assisting them in their
creative process. We are fully aware that there are critically
important issues that need support around the world however we are
also reminded that the voices of our independent filmmakers still be
heard and for that reason we are keeping our doors open and supporting
these struggling artists thru online streaming this year,” said the
statement.
“Things seem inevitable and beyond our control at this time, however
only if you are in a position to continue your support and champion
creative independent cinema, we would be deeply grateful for your
donation from the heart,” said the statement.
Donations may be made online, or via mail by sending checks to AFFMA –
Arpa Foundation for Film, Music & Art, 2919 Maxwell St, Los Angeles,
CA 90027.
AFFMA will inform filmmakers and supporters of new developments
through their website, Film Freeway, Facebook and Instagram.
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