Armenia's tiny Jewish community is growing concerned by what
it says is mounting antisemitism in the South Caucasus
country. Recent incidents of Jewish youths spitting at
Armenian priests in the Old City of Jerusalem have been cited
by those who are trying to stir up hatred of Jews in
Armenia.
Virtually nonexistent in the past, antisemitism has emerged
over the past year amid a rise in anti-Jewish propaganda and
the desecration of a Holocaust memorial in Yerevan. The
government has so far done little to address the Jewish
community's concerns.
Rimma Varzhapetian says she always felt proud of Armenia when
she met fellow Jews from other parts of the former Soviet
Union.
"We always declare everywhere that there has never been
antisemitism in Armenia, that Armenia is a good place for
Jews to live and, more importantly, that Armenia is quite a
stable country in political and social respects,"
Varzhapetian says.
That is why the secular leader of Armenia's Jewish community
has had trouble coming to terms with what she says is a
recent rise in antisemitic propaganda.
In 2004 ALM, a private pro-government television channel,
began broadcasting a phone-in talk show hosted by the
station's owner, Tigran Karapetian. For months, Karapetian
used the platform to air views that portrayed Jews as an
unsavory race bent on dominating Armenia and the wider
world.
Varzhapetian says her office in Yerevan received threatening
phone calls after the first series of ALM broadcasts.
Karapetian's rhetoric appeared to embolden Armen Avetisian,
the openly antisemitic leader of the Armenian Aryan Union, a
small ultranationalist party.
Avetisian in a recent newspaper interview alleged that there
are as many as 50,000 "disguised" Jews in Armenia, and
promised he would work to have them expelled from the
country. He was arrested on 24 January on charges of inciting
ethnic hatred.
A Holocaust memorial in a public park in the center of
Yerevan also came under attack in September, when vandals
desecrated the memorial on Rosh Hashonoh.
Yet what shocked the Jewish community most was an interview
with Hranush Kharatian, a prominent ethnologist who heads the
Armenian government's department on religious and minority
affairs. Speaking to the Golos Armenii (Voice of
Armenia) Russian-language newspaper a month after the
memorial's desecration, Kharatian accused Jewish leaders of
preaching extreme intolerance toward all non-Jews.
In a recent interview with RFE/RL, Kharatian cited what she
called the "aggressive ideology" contained in the Talmud. "I
see in the Talmud numerous points which clearly state that
non-Jews, or infidels that are not Jews, are not human beings
and are animals," she said.
Varzhapetian and other community leaders, including Chief
Rabbi Gersh Meir Burshtein, met last month with Armenian
Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian to ask for help in
addressing the problem. A ministry spokesperson, however,
said that the issue is not sufficiently serious to warrant
government attention.
Mikael Danielian heads the Armenian Helsinki Association, a
human rights group that closely monitors antisemitic activity
in the country. He criticized the government's failure to
address the issue.
Armenia's Jewish community is estimated to number less than
1,000. It is largely made up of professionals who moved to
Armenia from Russia and the Ukraine in the 1960s and 1970s to
escape persecution in their homelands. Most integrated
quickly into society, marrying ethnic Armenians and adopting
Armenian surnames.
Until recently, antisemitic sentiment in Armenia was limited
to occasional allegations by nationalist scholars that Jews
had aided the 1915 genocide of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey.
The theory — which is not supported by historical
evidence — was first aired during the presentation of
an antisemitic book at a 2003 meeting of the Armenian Writers
Union. No one in the audience condemned the text.
A global report on antisemitism issued this month by the U.S.
State Department dedicates just three paragraphs to Armenia.
But that was sufficient to unleash a fresh wave of anti-
Jewish criticism. ALM's Karapetian, who was cited by name in
the U.S. study, responded with a two-hour televised monologue
lambasting the United States and the contents of the
report.
Several days later, Karapetian received an unexpected phone
call during an ALM broadcast. An Armenian woman living in
Israel criticized his sweeping bias against Jews, but was
quickly cut off by the broadcaster.
Karpetian said, "Shut up and listen to me. You say it's
inadmissible to say `Jewish tricks.' But is it permissible to
spit at a priest?"
Karapetian was referring to two recent incidents in Jerusalem
in which Jewish youths spat at Armenian priests in the Old
City of Jerusalem. The Armenian Apostolic Church has had a
presence in Jersualem's Old City for centuries. Jewish
religious and secular leaders all condemned the actions and
said that the youths had acted on their own. The youths also
apologized later for their actions.
Nonetheless, the incidents have been cited repeatedly in
Armenia as supporting claims of antisemitism.
The Israeli press reported falsely that the perpretators were
"chareidim" and "yeshiva students." Rabbi Yonoson Rosenblum
said that a staff member of the newspaper that had reported
the story admitted to him, after investigating, that "the
description was a pure assumption on the part of the
reporters, unsupported by any evidence." All that was known
about them was that they were not from Jerusalem.
