Judaism in Armenia

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Logo of the Jewish community of Armenia

The roots of Judaism in Armenia go back almost 2000 years. Especially as a result of emigration after the collapse of the Soviet Union , the Jewish population of Armenia is now only small. An organized Jewish community can only be found in the center of the Armenian capital Yerevan . The Chief Rabbi of Armenia, Rabbi Gershon Meir Burshtein, also works from there .

history

Antiquity

A large number of historians date the emergence of the first Jewish settlements in Armenia to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 587 BC. The oral Torah ( Midrash Rabba, Chapter 1) states that the New Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II is said to have driven some of the Jews to Armenia after the devastation of the temple. During his conquests, Tigranes II (95-55 BC) brought up to 10,000 Jewish prisoners to Armenia on his way back from Palestine when his country was in 69 BC. Was attacked by the Romans . Around AD 360–370 there was a massive increase in Hellenistic Jewish immigration to Armenia. As a result, many Armenian cities became predominantly Jewish. After the invasion of present-day Armenia by the Persian- Sassanid ruler Shapur II , he began to deport thousands of Jews who had settled in Armenia to Iran. According to the late antique historian Faustus of Byzantium, the number of expelled Jews was 83,000.

middle Ages

Medieval Jewish cemetery in the village of Jeghegis

After the fall of the Kingdom of Lesser Armenia in 1375, the gradual dissolution of entire Jewish communities in Armenia began. Many Jews converted to Christianity . During the South Caucasus campaign of Abbas I (Persia) in 1603 almost all Jews of Armenia, including Christians, were deported to Iran. In 1996, the remains of a medieval Jewish cemetery were discovered in the village of Yeghegis in the southern Armenian province of Vajoz Dzor . Exactly from which Jewish community this grave field originates remains largely unclear. Four years later, a team led by Michael E. Stone from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem excavated a Jewish cemetery of 40 tombstones with Hebrew inscriptions on the south side of the Yeghegis River . The time of its origin is assigned to the 13th - 15th centuries.

Modern times and modernity

With the incorporation of the South Caucasus into the Russian Tsarist Empire in accordance with the Treaty of Turkmanchai in 1828, many Georgian and Ashkenazi (European) Jews and the Sabbatars (Russian Subbotniki ) exiled to the periphery of the empire, who professed Judaism, poured into Armenia.

According to the first and only census of the Russian Empire from 1897, a total of 850 Jews lived in the Yerevan Governorate , the majority of whom were urban. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, the proportion of the Jewish population gradually declined and, according to official figures, was only 335 people in 1926, with the number of men doubling that of women. Most of the Jews living in Armenia today are mostly from different republics of the former Soviet Union that settled here in the mid-1930s.

During and after the end of the Second World War (1940-1950s), many Jews displaced by the war immigrated to Soviet Armenia , which in turn increased the country's population of Jewish origin to 10,000 in 1959. Another wave of immigration occurred between 1965 and 1972, when the Soviet leadership had announced a major economic stimulus program for the development of industry and agriculture in the South Caucasian republics. The implementation of these tasks made the involvement of well-trained Jewish specialists (engineers, soldiers, intelligentsia, etc.) from Ukraine , Russia and Belarus necessary.

From the second half of the 1980s, the Jewish population of Armenia began to shrink due to massive emigration. According to the last census in the Soviet Union, around 3,000 Jews lived in Armenia in 1989, 1,000 of them in Yerevan . The emigration process accelerated at the beginning of the 1990s after the outbreak of armed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region and the resulting political isolation and economic mix-up in Armenia.

Jewish life in Armenia today

Jewish Community Center in Yerevan

According to the different data, there are now 500 to 1000 Jews living in Armenia (as of 2017). The Jewish community of Armenia is currently headed by Chief Rabbi Gershon Meir Burshtein of the Jewish Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch Movement. The country's only organized Jewish community is located on Nar Dos Street in central Yerevan. There it has a community center and the only synagogue in Armenia, the Mordechai Navi Synagogue .

A special feature is the small number of so-called subbotniki in the city of Sevan . Your ancestors founded the place in 1842 under the name Jelenowka . Until the fall of the Soviet Union, Sevan is said to have had around 200 to 300 Subbotniki. Since then, the community has continued to shrink. The Subbotniki, who see themselves as Jewish, live according to many Jewish customs and commandments, recognize the Torah and keep the Shabbat , but reject the Talmudic tradition of Judaism. There is no synagogue in Sevan, but there is a historical Subbotniki cemetery, which is still in use and adjoins a Christian cemetery. The oldest graves date from the 19th century. The Subbotniki Sewans are largely remotely looked after by the Yerevan Chief Rabbi.

anti-Semitism

Holocaust memorial in Yerevan with Hebrew and Armenian inscriptions: "To be or to forget"

From the end of the 1990s, nationalist circles in Armenia accused the Jews living in Armenia of supporting the interests of Israel. The reason for this was the close relations of the State of Israel with Azerbaijan and Turkey , which are traditionally regarded as archenemies in Armenia, and the attempt by some Jewish lobby groups in the USA to pass the Freedom Support Act of the US Congress under pressure from the Armenian lobby , which forbade financial aid to Azerbaijan to be lifted. In 1999, the political scientist Igor Muradjan published a large article in the opposition newspaper “Voice of Armenia” about an allegedly historical conflict between the “ Aryan ” Armenians and “ Semitic ” Jews. In this anti-Semitic pamphlet Muradjan accused Jews of instigating interethnic disputes around the world, including the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict .

In February 2002 a book by Romen Jepiskoposjan , based on anti-Semitic resentment, was published in Yerevan and presented in the Union of Writers of Armenia. In it, the author titled the Jews as “destroyers of the nation” and placed them, along with the Turks, in the ranks of the “greatest enemies of Armenia”. He portrayed the Holocaust as "the greatest falsification in human history" and claimed that Jews were not murdered in gas chambers .

In 2004, the pro-government politician and chairman of the “ People's Party of Armenia ” Tigran Karapetjan launched a telephone talk show on his private television channel “ALM” in which he portrayed the Jews as an “unsavory race ”. Their goal is to rule Armenia and the whole world. A short time later, Karapetjan's rhetoric also encouraged Armen Avetisian , the leader of the “ Aryan Union of Armenia ”, to take anti-Semitic appearances. In a newspaper interview he promised to do everything possible to get the 50,000 people in Armenia “disguised” as Jews out of the country.

In October 2004, the prominent ethnologist and department head for religion and minorities of the Armenian government, Hranousch Charatjan , took a drastic anti-Semitic stance in an interview with “Voice of Armenia”: “Why don't we react to the fact that Jews continue to be extremely intolerant of their Friday meetings preach to all non-Jews? These go so far that people of non-Jewish descent are equated with animals and even spat on. ”In addition, Charatjan accused the Jews of having participated in“ anti-Christian activities ”.

In September 2006, Armenia's environment minister, Vartan Ajwasjan, got into a heated argument with the American mining company Global Gold , which had accused him of involvement in a bribery case. In an interview with Armenian journalists, the minister ventured his anger: “Do you know who you are protecting? You protect Jews. Find out who is behind this company. Instead of preventing them from violating the laws of our country, do they want to defend them? ”After protests from Rimma Warschapetjan , the chairman of the Jewish community of Armenia, Ajwasjan distanced himself from his statements.

The Holocaust memorial erected in the center of Yerevan in 1999 was desecrated three times - in 2005, 2007 and 2010. In the last incident, the memorial was smeared with a swastika and the words "Death to the Jews". The city government removed the graffiti the next day and ordered an investigation.

According to a survey by the independent polling institute Pew Research Center , which spanned the period between June 2015 and July 2016, Armenia turned out to be the most intolerant of Jews out of 18 countries in Central and Eastern Europe . More than a third of those questioned stated that they did not want people of Jewish origin as fellow citizens.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Yerevan Jewish Community , at chabad.org , accessed February 17, 2020
  2. ↑ Евреи в Армении. March 17, 2018, Retrieved May 30, 2018 (Russian).
  3. ^ Ariel Scheib: Armenia Virtual Jewish History Tour. Retrieved May 30, 2018 .
  4. ^ Moorad Alexanian: Jewish History of Armenia. June 16, 2000, accessed May 30, 2018 .
  5. ↑ КАК ЕВРЕИ СТАЛИ АРМЯНАМИ. August 19, 2013. Retrieved May 30, 2018 (Russian).
  6. ↑ Аракел Даврижеци: « Книга историй » . Москва 1973, p. 61 .
  7. ↑ Armenians in Holy Land and Jews in Armenia . In: mediamax.am . ( mediamax.am [accessed May 30, 2018]).
  8. ^ Arthur Hagopian: Armenians Renovate Unknown Jewish Cemetery. May 8, 2009, accessed May 30, 2018 .
  9. ↑ conVistaAlMar.com.ar: Jewish Community of Armenia . In: The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation . ( raoulwallenberg.net [accessed May 30, 2018]).
  10. ↑ Первая всеобщая перепись населения Российской Империи 1897 г. Распределение населения по родному языку и уездам Российской Империи кроме губерний Европейской Росропейской Распределение населения по родному языку and Эриванская губерния. Retrieved May 30, 2018 (Russian).
  11. ↑ Илья Карпенко: В СТРАНЕ МНОГОЦВЕТНОГО ТУФА. July 2008, Retrieved May 30, 2018 (Russian).
  12. ↑ Hasmik Hovhannisyan: There Have Always Been Jews in Armenia. March 26, 2007, accessed May 30, 2018 .
  13. ↑ M. Avrum Ehrlich: Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture . tape 1 . ABC-Clio, Santa-Barbara, California, USA, ISBN 978-1-85109-874-3 , pp. 1105-1106 .
  14. ^ Ariel Scheib: Armenia Virtual Jewish History Tour. Retrieved May 30, 2018 .
  15. ↑ Что разделяет и что связывает Армению и Израиль . In: ИА REGNUM . ( regnum.ru [accessed May 30, 2018]).
  16. ^ Jewish Community of Yerevan - Yerevan, Armenia. Retrieved May 30, 2018 .
  17. ↑ a b c d e The Last of Lake Sevan (Ulrike Gruska), Jüdische Allgemeine , June 20, 2011, accessed on February 17, 2020
  18. ↑ ANTISEMITISM IN GEORGIA, AZERBAIJAN AND ARMENIA. An In-Depth UCSJ Special Report. August 25, 1999, accessed May 30, 2018 .
  19. ↑ Antisemitic Book Presented in Armenia; Jewish Leader Heckled. February 20, 2002, accessed May 30, 2018 .
  20. ^ Emil Danielyan: Armenia: Country's Jews Alarmed Over Nascent Anti-Semitism. January 26, 2005, accessed May 30, 2018 .
  21. ^ Armenian Official Says Jews "Anti-Christian" | UCSJ. October 4, 2011, accessed May 30, 2018 .
  22. ^ Armenian Minister Condemned For 'Anti-Semitic' Remark. Retrieved May 31, 2018 (Armenian).
  23. ^ National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry: Republic of Armenia Country Report 2016. 2016, accessed on May 30, 2018 .
  24. ↑ In some countries in Central and Eastern Europe, roughly one-in-five adults or more say they would not accept Jews as fellow citizens . In: Pew Research Center . March 27, 2018 ( pewresearch.org [accessed May 30, 2018]).