Category: 2023

Ultra-Orthodox Jews, including children, were filmed on Monday spitting toward Christian worshippers in the Old City of Jerusalem, amid a rise in incidents targeting priests and pilgrims in the capital.

The attack was met with wide condemnation by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, including politicians from the Haredi community, who rejected the idea that spitting was a Jewish tradition or religious imperative.

In a video posted online by a reporter for the Haaretz daily, a group of Christians exiting a church carrying a wooden cross are seen walking by a group of religious Jews heading the other direction. Several of the Jews then spit on the ground in the direction of the Christians as they pass.

Some of the people in the clip appear to be ultra-Orthodox minors who spit at the Christians after seeing an adult man do so.

A border police officer walking behind the Jewish worshippers does not take any action in response to the spitting. It was unclear if he could have viewed the spitting from his vantage point.

The Latin Patriarchate did not respond to requests for comment.

Jerusalem’s Old City is especially crowded this week during the Sukkot holiday. Tens of thousands of Jewish worshippers attended the priestly blessing at the Western Wall on Monday morning.

Netanyahu tweeted that “Israel is totally committed to safeguard the sacred right of worship and pilgrimage to the holy sites of all faiths. I strongly condemn any attempt to intimidate worshippers, and I am committed to taking immediate and decisive action against it.”

He added: “Derogatory conduct towards worshipers is sacrilege and is simply unacceptable. Any form of hostility towards individuals engaged in worship will not be tolerated.”

Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi David Lau spoke out against the incident, saying “such phenomena are unwarranted and certainly should not be attributed to Jewish law.”

Religion Minister Michael Malkieli from the ultra-Orthodox Shas party also condemned the incident, saying “this is not the way of the Torah, and there is no rabbi that supports or gives legitimacy to this reprehensible behavior.”

Housing Minister Yitzchak Goldknopf, head of the Ashkenazi Haredi United Torah Judaism alliance, said that “our Holy Torah commands us to act respectfully toward every person, no matter his belief, religion, or origin.”

Several officials expressed worries that the spitting attacks were harming Israel’s standing among pilgrims, a major source of incoming tourism.

Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said the spitting “does not represent Jewish values.”

Tourism Minister Haim Katz called the idea that spitting on Christians is a Jewish custom “pathetic.”

“Instead of being a light to the nations, the actions of a handful of extremists are bringing hatred on Judaism and on the Jewish people, and are harming Israel’s image and tourism. Zero tolerance must be shown toward any religious symbols,” he said in a statement.

Elisha Yered, a former adviser to Otzma Yehudit MK Limor Son Har-Melech, drew pushback after he appeared to back the harassment, claiming that spitting at priests or churches was an “ancient Jewish custom.”

Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, who has led efforts in the city council to combat harassment of Christians, said police were beginning to take the issue seriously.

“We should have zero tolerance for these hooligans who are driven by miseducation and hatred, attacking peaceful worshipers anywhere in the city,” she told The Times of Israel. “After months of lobbying, we are pleased the police is taking action and arresting those responsible.”

According to police in August, 16 investigations were opened this year, and 21 arrests and detentions had been carried out in connection with attacks on Christians.

Spokespeople for the Jerusalem Police did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Catholic clergy told The Times of Israel last month that officers have been dressing as priests and monks in the Old City to catch those harassing Christians.

In August, President Isaac Herzog visited Haifa’s Stella Maris Monastery along with Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai to meet with Christian leaders, as part of his recent efforts to bring public awareness to the issue of the safety of Israel’s Christian community.

Seated next to Herzog at the discussion in the monastery with the heads of Christian communities in Israel, Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai said that the police “are undertaking creative operations to eradicate all these small phenomena, these phenomena that affect how everyone feels. We are here to give you a feeling of security.”

“In recent months, we have witnessed extremely serious phenomena in the treatment of members of Christian communities in the Holy Land, our brothers and sisters, Christian citizens, who feel attacked in their places of prayer and their cemeteries, on the street,” said Herzog in front of the 19th-century Carmelite monastery.

Israel’s official spokespeople and social media accounts go out of their way to emphasize Israel’s freedom of worship and to portray the Jewish state as the only safe home for Christians in a hostile Middle East.

The picture of safe coexistence usually painted by Israeli officials is starkly at odds with the experiences Jerusalem’s Christian leaders themselves describe. While they readily acknowledge that there is no organized or governmental effort against them, Christian clergy in the Old City tell of a deteriorating atmosphere of harassment, apathy from authorities, and a growing fear that incidents of spitting and vandalism could turn into violence against their persons.

In an interview in April with The Associated Press, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, an Italian prelate who is the top Catholic churchman in the Holy Land, said that the region’s 2,000-year-old Christian community has come under increasing attack, with Israel’s right-wing government emboldening extremists who have harassed clergy and vandalized religious property at a quickening pace.

In November 2022, two soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces’ Givati Brigade were detained on suspicion of spitting at the Armenian archbishop and other pilgrims during a procession in the Old City. In early January, two Jewish teens were arrested for damaging graves at the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion.

The next week, the Maronite community center in the northern city of Ma’alot-Tarshiha was vandalized by unknown assailants over the Christmas holiday.

Jerusalem’s Armenian community buildings were also targeted by vandals, with multiple discriminatory phrases graffitied on the exterior of structures in the Armenian Quarter. On a Thursday night in late January, a gang of religious Jewish teens threw chairs at an Armenian restaurant inside the city’s New Gate. Vandalism at the Church of the Flagellation occurred the very next week.

And in March, a resident of southern Israel was arrested after attacking priests with an iron bar at the Tomb of the Virgin Mary in Gethsemane.

The Prime Minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, met with Armenian Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, in Granada on Thursday to discuss humanitarian cooperation between both countries.

During the meeting, Pashinyan emphasised the situation resulting from the forced deportation of over 100,000 Armenians due to Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing policy in Nagorno Karabakh.

For his part, Mitsotakis expressed willingness to provide humanitarian assistance to the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The Greek Prime Minister also emphasised the need for international steps to strengthen peace and stability in the South Caucasus region.

THE swift fall of the Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijani troops at the end of last month and the exodus of much of its population has stunned the large Armenian diaspora around the world.

Traumatised by a widely acknowledged genocide a century ago, they fear the erasure of what they consider a central and beloved part of their historic homeland.

The separatist ethnic Armenian government in Nagorno-Karabakh announced on Sept 28 that it was dissolving and that the unrecognised republic will cease to exist by year’s end – a seeming death knell for its 30-year de facto independence.

Azerbaijan, which routed the region’s Armenian forces in a lightning offensive, has pledged to respect the rights of the territory’s Armenian community. Tens of thousands of people – more than 70% of the region’s population – had fled to Armenia by Sept 30, and the influx continues, according to Armenian officials.

Many in Armenia and the diaspora fear a centuries-long community in the territory they call Artsakh will disappear.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has termed it “a direct act of an ethnic cleansing”. Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry strongly rejected the accusation, saying the departures are a “personal and individual decision and has nothing to do with forced relocation”.

Armenians abroad also accuse European countries, Russia and the United States – and the government of Armenia itself – of failing to protect the population during months of a blockade of the territory by Azerbaijan’s military and the swift offensive that defeated separatist forces.

Armenians say the loss is a historic blow. Outside the modern country of Armenia itself, the mountainous land was one of the only surviving parts of a heartland that centuries ago stretched across what is now eastern Turkey, into the Caucasus region and western Iran.

Many in the diaspora had pinned dreams on it gaining independence or being joined to Armenia.

Nagorno-Karabakh was “a page of hope in Armenian history”, said Narod Seroujian, a Lebanese-Armenian university instructor in Beirut.

“It showed us that there is hope to gain back a land that is rightfully ours. For the diaspora, Nagorno-Karabakh was already part of Armenia.”

Hundreds of Lebanese Armenians protested outside the Azerbajani embassy in Beirut, waving flags of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh and burning pictures of the Azerbaijani and Turkish presidents. Riot police lobbed tear gas when they threw firecrackers at the embassy.

Ethnic Armenians who fled Nagorno-Karabakh lining up to receive humanitarian aid at a temporary camp in Goris, in Armenia’s Syunik region. — AP

Ethnic Armenians have communities around Europe and the Middle East and in the United States. Lebanon is home to one of the largest, with an estimated 120,000 of Armenian origin, 4% of the population.

Most are descendants of those who fled the 1915 campaign by Ottoman Turks in which some 1.5 million Armenians died in massacres, deportations and forced marches. The atrocities, which emptied many ethnic Armenian areas in eastern Turkey, are widely viewed by historians as genocide. Turkey rejects the description of genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest during World War I.

In Bourj Hammoud, the main Armenian district in Beirut, memories are still raw, with anti-Turkey graffiti common. The red-blue-and-orange Armenian flag flies from many buildings.

“This is the last migration for Armenians,” said Harout Bshidikian, 55, sitting in front of an Armenian flag in a Bourj Hamoud cafe.

“There is no other place left for us to migrate from.”

Azerbaijan says it is reuniting its territory, pointing out that even Armenia’s prime minister recognised that Nagorno-Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan. Though its population has been predominantly ethnic Armenian Christians, Turkish Muslim Azeris also have communities and cultural ties to the territory, particularly the city of Shusha, famed as a cradle of Azerbaijani poetry.

Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Nagorno-Karabakh came under control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by the Armenian military in separatist fighting that ended in 1994. Azerbaijan took parts of the area in a 2020 war. Now after last month’s defeat, separatist authorities surrendered their weapons and are holding talks with Azerbaijan on reintegration of the territory.

Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Europe think tank, said Nagorno-Karabakh had become “a kind of new cause” for an Armenian diaspora whose forebearers had suffered the genocide.

“It was a kind of new Armenian state, new Armenian land being born, which they projected lots of hopes on. Very unrealistic hopes, I would say,” he added, noting it encouraged Karabakh Armenians to hold out against Azerbaijan despite the lack of international recognition for their separatist government.

Armenians see the territory as a cradle of their culture, with monasteries dating back more than a millennium.

“Artsakh or Nagorno-Karabakh has been a land for Armenians for hundreds of years,” said Lebanese legislator Hagop Pakradounian, head of Lebanon’s largest Armenian group, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation.

“The people of Artsakh are being subjected to a new genocide, the first genocide in the 21st century.”

The fall of Nagorno-Karabakh is not just a reminder of the genocide, “it’s reliving it,” said Diran Guiliguian, a Madrid-based activist who holds Armenian, Lebanese and French citizenship.

He said his grandmother used to tell him stories of how she fled in 1915. The genocide “is actually not a thing of the past. It’s not a thing that is a century old. It’s actually still the case,” he said.

Seroujian, the instructor in Beirut, said her great-grandparents were genocide survivors, and that stories of the atrocities and dispersal were talked about at home, school and in the community as she grew up, as was the cause of Nagorno-Karabakh.

She visited the territory several times, most recently in 2017.

“We’ve grown with these ideas, whether they were romantic or not, of the country. We’ve grown to love it even when we didn’t see it,” she said. “I never thought about it as something separate” from Armenia the country.

In the United States, the Armenian community in the Los Angeles area – one of the world’s largest – has staged protests to draw attention to the situation. On Sept 19, they used a trailer truck to block a freeway for several hours, causing major traffic jams.

Kim Kardashian, perhaps the most well known Armenian-American today, went on social media to urge US President Joe Biden “to Stop Another Armenian Genocide”.

Several groups are collecting money for Karabakh Armenians fleeing their home. But Seroujian said many feel helpless.

“There are moments where personally, the family, or among friends we just feel hopeless,” she said.

“And when we talk to each other we sort of lose our minds.” — AP

https://www.thestar.com.my/news/focus/2023/10/07/death-of-a-dream-for-armenian-diaspora 

Their goal is to urge the Biden Administration, specifically Secretary Antony Blinken, to take meaningful action in response to the Armenian community's impassioned pleas.

The students are marching 27 miles from Encino to the Armenian Genocide Martyrs Monument in Montebello. The long walk is expected to take around 15 hours. 

"When they came to me looking for something to do, I thought, okay, we've done all the little things. We need something extreme, an extreme measure to bring extreme awareness," said one of the organizers.

RELATED:

• Inside the rush to help thousands of Armenian refugees
• Artsakh gas station blast: At least 20 killed, 300 hurt as Nagorno-Karabakh residents flee to Armenia

Demonstrators are about five hours into their march, and they are expected to arrive at the Montebello Armenian Genocide Monument around 6:30 to 7 p.m. Friday. A short program is organized for the community following the walk.

The March for Artsakh is not just a protest; it's a testament to the enduring strength of the Armenian people and a reminder that the world must not ignore Artsakh's suffering.

As the sun sets on this remarkable day of advocacy, one message stands out: the demand for justice and the restoration of dignity for the Armenian community will persist. The March for Artsakh is a symbol of hope, showcasing that even in challenging times, unity and determination can achieve remarkable results.

https://www.foxla.com/news/march-for-artsakh-students-march-27-miles-to-raise-awareness-for-armenia.amp 

ENCINO, Calif. (KABC) – Students and staff at Holy Martyrs Ferrahian Armenian High School marched nearly 30 miles Friday to raise awareness to the humanitarian crisis at the Armenian border with Azerbaijan.

The group marched from Encino to the Armenian Genocide Martyrs Monument in Montebello, spreading the message and saying people are in desperate need of help.

Thousands of refugees are fleeing the Armenian enclave of Artsakh.

For some of the students, this all hits close to home.

"Our hearts are broken," said 10th grade student Vaughn Melkonian. "Some of us have sleepless nights. It's our brothers and sisters. We even have family members there that have been killed. One of my cousins died there. He was a soldier and the rest are trying to escape to Armenia and other parts of the world."

The students, who marched side by side, holding hands and locking arms, said they want action, especially from President Joe Biden.

"Innocent Armenians, innocent families … their villages are getting bombed and people are just coming in an killing them," said student Joey Titizian. "It's a horrible situation, and I just want the world to open their eyes and see the situation for what it really is."

Despite Thursday's heat, the students didn't back down from their mission.

"I knew it was going to be a lot, but I'm like, "Man, they're doing it over there, they're doing it in cold winter. It's October now, it's going to start getting cold, and we're here with 95-, 100-degree heat. We're fine. They have nothing. They're walking barefooted, I have perfectly comfy shoes. This is easy compared to what they're doing there."

Why renewed fighting in Artsakh region may herald new war with Armenia

Bulgaria is helping three people injured in the explosion of a fuel warehouse in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The incident happened on September 25 and the signal for help from the European Commission's Emergency Response Coordination Center (ERCC) to member states came a day later.

The transport of the victims was provided by the Air Force at the request of the Ministry of Health with a "Spartan" plane. The task was carried out by a crew from the 16 "Vrazhdebna" airbase. The military transport aircraft departed yesterday, October 6, 2023, at 1:12 p.m. for Yerevan, Armenia. On board was a 6-member medical team from the Military Medical Academy (MMA), headed by Col. Dr. Maria Georgieva.

Last night, at 00:35, the patients were transported from the Sofia airport with ambulances of the Medical Academy to the "Pirogov" hospital.

The three foreign nationals have been admitted to the Clinic for Burns and Plastic Surgery, and highly specialized medical care has been provided for them.