Faith & Charity: Armenian Evangelicals Remember Their People’s Tragic History

In the Armenian diaspora, April 24 marks the date when 250 Armenian intellectuals were rounded up in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople (now Istanbul) and executed or deported.

Reverend Ron Tovmassian, senior pastor of Studio City’s  said in the video interview that the seizure of the poets, musicians, publicists, editors, lawyers and doctors was the government’s way of “cutting off the head” of the Armenian people in Turkey.

While the Armenians, along with other Christians in the Ottoman Empire, had already been subjected to repression – even violent pogroms – for years, the deportation of Armenian notables, also known as Red Sunday, is regarded as the historic start of a campaign of displacement and murder now known as the Armenian Genocide*.

An estimated 1 to 1.5 million people died as a result of massacres, forced marches, rapes and starvation as the population was forced into the Syrian desert.  A reporter for The New York Times in August 1914 repeated an unattributed report that "the roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles, and those who survive are doomed to certain death. It is a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people."

Assyrians, Syrians, and Anatolian and Pontic Greeks were also among those victimized.

Every year members of Southern California’s Armenian Evangelical Union hold a joint service to commemorate the sad date. This year the program took place in Studio City. Prior to the traditional Protestant Sabbath service, a standing room only crowd watched two historical lectures.

Rev. Vatche Ekmekjian of Downey’s Immanuel Armenian Congregational Church presented, in Armenian, a slide show depicting significant churches and educational institutions in the old country, as well as their leaders, all lost to Armenian evangelicals between 1895 and 1923. 

Zaven Khanjian, a member of the Studio City congregation who describes himself as an activist, showed a DVD narrated in Turkish by Hrant Dink an Armenian journalist and newspaper editor in that country who was decrying the 1980 seizure of an Armenian-owned summer camp by the Turkish government. Shortly after recording the video, and only two months after visiting the Studio City church in 2007, 52-year-old Dink was assassinated on an Instanbul street by a teenaged Turkish nationalist.

Following coffee and traditional honey-soaked pastries, the audience and dozens more took seats in the church sanctuary where they heard hymns from a joint choir, messages in English and Armenian and a recital by students of Merdinian Armenian Evangelical School in Sherman Oaks. Highlights are captured in the video.

*In 1997 the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) passed a resolution unanimously recognizing the Ottoman massacres of Armenians as genocide however United State, Turkey and Israel are among the nations that have not yet accepted the resolution. In a sad irony, Jews of Israel and the diaspora commemorated Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, on April 18.

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