feature
Armenia Has Had
Few Jews and a
Poor Relationship
With Israel.

That Could Be
Changing. YEREVAN, ARMENIA — Just outside a remote village
two hours’ drive east of Yerevan, in a clearing reach-
able only by hiking down a steep embankment and
crossing a rickety wooden bridge, looms a remarkable
sight: a blue metal gate decorated with a Star of David
that guards the entrance to one of the world’s most
unusual Jewish cemeteries.

Here, in a pastoral setting disturbed only by the
chirping of birds and the rushing waters of the Yeghegis
River, lie 64 complete tombstones and fragments of
others dating from 1266 to 1346. Their inscriptions,
written in both Hebrew and Aramaic, have been studied
by scholars for years. Among them is the epitaph of a
young Jewish boy that refl ects the profound grief of his
parents: “Your dead [shall live], corpses shall rise, awake
and sing for joy, O dwellers in the dust! For [your dew] is
a radiant dew.”
The medieval cemetery, rarely visited these days and
in an obvious state of neglect, is nevertheless proof
that a Jewish community has long existed and even
fl ourished in Armenia — the world’s fi rst Christian nation
and, according to tradition, home of the mountain upon
which the biblical Noah’s Ark came to rest.

That community is today among the smallest of
the 15 republics that until 1991 formed the Soviet
Union, although it has swelled in recent months, if
only temporarily, with Jews fl eeing Russia. In addition,
even as Israel is home to the oldest Armenian diaspora
community and Jerusalem’s Old City boasts an
Armenian quarter, Armenia’s relationship with Jews and
Israel is diffi cult, both for historical reasons and because
Israel is a key ally of Armenia’s archenemy, Azerbaijan.

Rimma Varzhapetyan, 74, chairs the Yerevan-based
Jewish Community of Armenia. Her organization, which
16 JANUARY 5, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
has been around for 25 years, occupies a small offi ce on
the ground fl oor of an institute for deaf and mute people.

Varzhapetyan took issue with a 2019 poll by the
Pew Research Center, in which 32% of Armenian
respondents said they wouldn’t accept Jews as fellow
citizens — the highest percentage of any of the 18
European countries included in the survey.

“There is no antisemitism in Armenia,” said the
Russian-speaking Varzhapetyan, who was born in
Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region but has lived in
Armenia for the last 52 years. “It’s true that our economy
isn’t that developed, so many Jews — scientists,
doctors, journalists and others — made aliyah. Today,
there isn’t much religious life, but we do try to celebrate
all the Jewish holidays.”
After the Soviet collapse, about 15,000 Armenian
Jewish families emigrated to Israel, she said, and these
days, the Maryland-size country of about 3 million is home
to around 280 Jewish families, though it’s hard to say for
sure since the country’s few Jews are mostly intermarried.

Varzhapetyan’s numbers are far more optimistic
than those of Rabbi Gershon Burshteyn, the spiritual
leader of Yerevan’s Mordechay Navi Jewish Religious
Center of Armenia since 1996. Burshteyn, a locally born
Orthodox Jew with a striking resemblance to “Tevye
the Dairyman” (he even speaks with a Yiddish accent)
said most Jews here are from families that arrived
after World War II from Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova,
Uzbekistan and, to a lesser extent, Azerbaijan.

“Before the 1920s, there were two Jewish
communities here: one from Poland and one from
Iran. At the time, they made up 17% of the population
of Yerevan,” said the 60-year-old. “But during the
Armenian genocide of 1915, there were rumors that
the Russian Army would hand Yerevan to the Turks, so
Persian Jews went back to Iran.”
Today, he said, no more than 100 to 200 of Armenia’s
2.9 million inhabitants are Jews; nearly all of them live
in Yerevan, except for a handful in Vanadzor, Armenia’s
third-largest city. But those numbers are confusing,
since at least 500 Armenians would qualify for aliyah
under Israel’s 1953 Law of Return, meaning they have
at least one Jewish grandparent. On the other hand,
because intermarriage is so prevalent here, only 20 or
so Armenians are the off spring of Jewish mothers and
fathers, according to Burshteyn.

No more than 25 people attend Shabbat services, and
the worshippers are almost all 45 years of age or older.

Kosher meat is available thanks to a schochet, or kosher
ritual slaughterer, who visits once or twice a month from
Tbilisi, the capital of neighboring Georgia. The High
Holidays tend to attract more, about 100 people.

‘I feel comfortable here’
Ida Zilman, 71, is a painter and designer who teaches
arts and crafts at a local primary school. Her father, a
Ukrainian Jew from Odessa, was seriously wounded
while fi ghting for the Soviet Red Army, and in 1944,
he was demobilized and sent to the Caucasus to
work as a geologist. “He helped establish the metal-
lurgy industry in Armenia, and it was here that he met
my mom,” said Zilman, a grandmother who attends
synagogue services on Jewish holidays. With her late
husband, she also visited Israel, where she has a step-
sister in Ashdod.

“I adore Israel, but I feel comfortable here in Armenia,”
she said. “There are rumors that it’s antisemitic, but
that’s not true. When I tell people I’m Jewish, they smile.”
Six years ago, Israel issued a stamp commemorating
the famed French-Armenian crooner Charles Aznavour,
his parents and his sister Aida, all of whom had
sheltered Jews at their home during World War II. In
Photos by Larry Luxner
By Larry Luxner | JTA
Entrance to the
ancient Jewish
cemetery in
Yeghegis, Armenia, which
contains nearly
40 medieval
tombstones from
the 13th and
14th centuries
C.E., inscribed
in Hebrew and
Aramaic



addition, dozens of other Armenians across Europe
who protected or saved Jewish lives are honored at
Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

However, those warm feelings are not universal,
cautioned Ilya Dorfman, a software entrepreneur
in his early 50s who lived in Moscow, Toronto, San
Francisco and New York before deciding to return to
his native Armenia. “Sometimes, I speak with young
people here, and they have the idea that Jews are
always against Armenians. But it never translates into
hatred against the Jews,” he said. “It’s certainly not
anything like the antisemitism I felt when I lived in
Russia or even Ukraine after independence.”
Much of the ill will that exists between Armenia
and Israel stems from Israel’s extensive military
support of oil-rich Azerbaijan, with which Armenia has
fought numerous wars over the Nagorno Karabakh
region claimed by both former Soviet states. Fighting
raged from 1988 to 1994, claiming the lives of 16,000
Azerbaijanis and 4,000 Armenians.

The long-simmering confl ict exploded into war again
in late 2020. Azerbaijan — led by President Ilham Aliyev
and heavily aided by Turkey and Israel — eventually
recaptured the 20% of its territory it had lost to Armenia
in 1994. (Azerbaijan’s forces included soldiers from that
country’s Jewish population of about 8,000.) Last fall,
renewed border skirmishes between the two countries
left nearly 300 people dead on both sides, with
predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan and largely Christian
Armenia trading accusations of genocide and human-
rights atrocities.

“The fact is that Israel supplied weapons to this
criminal gangster Aliyev and his brainwashed elite.

He gave medals to soldiers who cut off the heads of
Armenian and Yazidi soldiers,” said Dorfman. “You
wouldn’t believe how many letters we wrote from the
Jewish community here exposing what really happened.

But in Israel, this is not a very popular subject.”
(Azerbaijan “categorically denies” it has committed
human rights abuses against Armenian soldiers or civilians
and says that Armenia has committed war crimes, including
during its recent shelling of Ganja, a border town.)
Rabbi Gershon Burshteyn, spiritual leader of
the Mordechay Navi Jewish Religious Center of
Armenia, seen outside the center he leads
Artiom Chernamorian, the founder of a nonprofi t
group called Nairi Union of Armenians in Petach Tikvah,
Israel, said he’s disgusted with offi cial Israeli policy
towards the country of his birth, as well as Israel’s
alliance with Azerbaijan. “Israel has so much money for
NGOs around the world, but not even one shekel to
support the Jewish community of Armenia. It’s a shame,”
said Chernamorian, who made aliyah 20 years ago.

Armenians also deeply resent the fact that Israel
refuses to offi cially recognize the Ottoman slaughter
of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 as a genocide, for
fear of off ending Turkey, with which it re-established
diplomatic relations last year after a long hiatus. At the
entrance to Yerevan’s Armenian Genocide Memorial
Complex, visitors are greeted with a quote from Adolf
Hitler, who, one week before his 1939 invasion of
Poland, said: “Who, after all, speaks today of the
annihilation of the Armenians?”
‘That was not the right decision’
One man working hard to improve Israeli-Armenian
relations is Achot Chakhmouradian. Since 2013, he
has been Israel’s honorary consul in Yerevan. His
offi ce, on the second fl oor of his family-owned auto
dealership, is decorated with framed certifi cates in
Hebrew and Armenian, along with his pet python,
which he keeps in an enormous glass tank.

“Our two countries have so much in common,” said
Chakhmouradian, who’s not Jewish. “Both are landlocked
and surrounded by Muslim countries. And we are both
ancient people with modern tragedies: the Armenian
genocide of 1915 and the Holocaust. As a consequence,
we have large communities abroad, but the Armenian
diaspora is even bigger than the Jewish one.”
Chakhmouradian said that in 2018, following a change
of government in Armenia, his country fi nally decided to
open an embassy in Tel Aviv, and relations fl ourished,
with high-level visits and an active interparliamentary
friendship group. But two years later, when war broke
out between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the ambassador
was recalled in protest over Israel’s weapons sales to
the Baku government.

People walk past the Holocaust memorial in
Yerevan, which is inscribed in Hebrew and
Armenian: “To be or to forget: Remember the
victims of the Shoah.”
“In my opinion, that was not the right decision,” he
said. “Israel is not the only country selling weapons. For
example, Russia is a much bigger ally of Armenia, and
they were also selling weapons to both sides.”
Chakhmouradian said nearly 180,000 Israelis visited
Georgia in 2019 before the pandemic hit; that same
year, Armenia received barely 5,000 tourists. While
there are more Israelis with ties to Georgia than
Armenia, Chakhmouradian said he was optimistic that
the number of tourists to Armenia could increase
dramatically with direct fl ights from Tel Aviv to Yerevan
— a fl ying time of less than two-and-a-half hours.

Things may be looking up. In April, Israeli President
Isaac Herzog met Arman Akopian, Armenia’s new
ambassador to Israel, who presented his credentials
and signed the offi cial guest book in unusually fl uent
Hebrew. The two men discussed the 1,700-year-old
history of the Armenian community in Israel and
affi nities between their people.

In addition, Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent mobilization
of reserves to fi ght that war has led tens of thousands
of Russian citizens to immigrate to Armenia, one of
the only places where they can still travel easily.

That includes at least 450 Jews who have taken up
residence in Yerevan, according to Rabbi Burshteyn
— dramatically boosting the size of the local Jewish
community, even if only temporarily.

And on Oct. 6, Azerbaijan’s Aliyev met informally
with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, marking the
fi rst top-level talks between the Turkish and Armenian
leaders in decades. That followed Erdoğan’s recent
rapprochement with Israel and the resumption of
diplomatic ties between them.

“There’s a huge Armenian presence in the Old City
of Jerusalem, and many Armenians want to visit Israel
on pilgrimage. But nobody wants to lose a whole
day traveling,” said Chakhmouradian. “If there were
direct fl ights, I’m sure some of these tourists could
also become businessmen or potential investors. The
potential is enormous.” ■
Rimma Varzhapetyan, chair of the Armenian
Jewish community, at her offi ce in Yerevan,
Armenia JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
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