Presbyterians and the Armenian genocide, continued
Presbyterian Historical Society archivist illustrates relationship between Presbyterians and Armenian refugees in preparation for GA overtures on genocide
With the 227th General Assembly preparing to act on two overtures on genocide, we consider that the Church has in the past acted to support survivors of genocide, well before the term was coined. In our earlier article we found a General Assembly arriving late to the genocide, while missionaries on the ground labored on behalf of survivors.
Presbyterian work among Armenian refugees would continue for the better part of a decade after the First World War. The Board of Foreign Missions report to General Assembly in 1923 decries the "failure of the Lausanne Conference to reach conclusions based upon justice" thereby encouraging "the Turkish Nationalist Government in their plan for the extermination of religious minorities." Armenian claims to much of Eastern Anatolia, including access to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, had been presented to the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the First World War.
Those maximalist claims were not ratified by the parties at Paris, and a smaller state, that would become Soviet Armenia, emerged. The Lausanne treaty, which ended the Turkish war of independence from the Allied powers, underscored Turkish control of all of Anatolia. The Lausanne treaty also provided for population transfers among Turks living in Greece and Greeks living in Turkey.
The Turkish government’s edict "permitting" movement was, however, widely understood to be an order for ethnic cleansing, and waves of Anatolian Greeks and Armenians fled away from the center. Refugees moved toward the PCUSA mission station at Aleppo, Syria, which in 1923 took on 60,000 Armenians and 12,000 Greeks.
"Roads from the interior villages of Turkey leading to the coast cities have been filled with fleeing men, women, and children, their way marked by their bleeding feet and by the bodies of those who had fallen and died on the roadside," wrote the Syria Mission that year.
In 1924, a second mass group came to Syria from the "swamps about Alexandretta," many suffering from malaria. The American mission compound in Beirut was host to hundreds of Armenian refugees still, though they reported transferring families to permanent housing, and training orphans in trades.
In February of that year, both the Board of Foreign Missions and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, with which the Presbyterians had split responsibility, moved to "withdraw" from relief work for Armenians. By 1929, Armenians are only referred to in actions of the BFM as evangelists in Hamadan, Iran. The people’s status as a class of refugees, in the eyes of the Board, had ended.
Many Armenians settled in Palestine. Among them were Levon Yenovkian, a pharmacist, and his wife Josephine. Their daughter Arpiné would be born in Acre in 1924. Educated at the Ramallah Friends School, she taught in Haifa before enrolling at the American Junior College for Women in Beirut (today’s Lebanese American University) in 1944. She graduated in 1947 and started work at the Presbyterian school for girls in Sidon the next year. There she met the Presbyterian mission worker Ed Hanna; the couple were soon married and would raise three boys and serve more than 30 years in mission in Lebanon.
Arpiné’s own parents remained in Acre during the early years of the Nakba and the establishment of the State of Israel. Forced out of their home in 1950 to make room for new Jewish immigrants, they would eventually join the Hannas in Lebanon. Sidon in the early post-1948 period was a shelter for refugees as it was in the 1920s — this time Palestinians, and the Hannas and other Presbyterian mission coworkers again served in relief. Arpiné and Ed moved to Beirut in 1972 and would remain there through the Lebanese civil war and Israeli invasion.
Their "dear friends" letters recount Arpiné staunchly protecting her Arab neighbors from an Armenian militia. They recount a mortar dropping through the apartment above them, mortar fire on the hospitals of West Beirut where Arpiné volunteered, and Ed going into semi-seclusion after the kidnapping of Ben Weir in 1984. From relief of ethnically cleansed people, to civil war and internecine violence, to family separation, it’s as if the shadow of the Armenian genocide lingered over Arpiné and her family.
By official accounts it was only later in life that the Armenian genocide unfurled in the life of Vartan Jinishian. Born in Marash (the same city as the Yenovkians) on May 25, 1870, Vartan was the child of a minister in the Armenian Evangelical Church and attended Robert College in Istanbul. He eventually emigrated to New York, entered the rug business of the Mihran Karagheusian family, and became dramatically wealthy. Described in an official biography as "humorous, cynical, stingy, stubborn" and only occasionally church-going, Jinishian maintained a distance from Armenians as a cause: “He had his secretary keep Armenian solicitors waiting for hours, day after day, until they eventually gave up and went away.”
In 1963, Presbyterian mission worker Dan Pattison asked Jinishian for help supporting impoverished Armenians in Lebanon and Syria. In 1966, Jinishian allocated $110,000 to the UPCUSA Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations for Armenians in Aleppo and Beirut, funding child care centers, schoolchildren’s lunches, and direct cash transfers to the neediest cases.
Jinishian gradually came to entrust Presbyterians as neutral arbiters, and the early directors of what would become the Jinishian Memorial Program were all Presbyterian missionaries to the Middle East: Ben Weir (Syria and Lebanon), Rodney Sundberg (Iran), Willis McGill (Egypt), and Morton S. Taylor (Iraq). By the 1970s the region of support provided by JMP would span all those countries, funding summer camps, aid to children and families, and, once again, relief of refugees — this time Armenians displaced from Iran during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.
Presbyterians’ concern for Armenians in the 19th century chiefly amounted to evangelistic care for an "ancient" community of Christians in the Muslim Orient. In some places, American Presbyterians suffered alongside the victims of a genocidal power; elsewhere, they accommodated it. In the long aftermath of the genocide, Presbyterian mission workers continued to shelter the homeless and comfort the widow, even leading some few survivors into returning the gift, they in turn serving in relief of new waves of refugees. Acts of genocide may be abrupt, care for the survivors may come late, but their unfolding, like an embroidered apron, takes lifetimes.
Further reading and resources
- Armenian American Museum and Cultural Center of California
- Davies, Gordon (2016) "The Ramallah Friends School: 150 Years of Endurance, Understanding, and Good Teaching," Quaker Religious Thought: Vol. 127, Article 4, https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/qrt/vol127/iss1/4
- Gorman, Henry. (2019). "American Ottomans: Protestant Missionaries in an Islamic Empire’s Service, 1820–1919." Diplomatic History, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhz005; https://www.tesble.com/10.1093/dh/dhz005
- Jinishian Memorial Program
- Phil Hanna oral history interview, 2017. Learn about Arpiné and Ed Hanna from their son.
- Ramallah Friends School. Learn about the history of Ramallah Friends School.
- R. E. Magill photograph albums, 1918, https://digital.history.pcusa.org/islandora/282879. Browse the photograph albums of R. E. Magill, available on Pearl
- RG 492, Syria Lebanon Mission Records, 1822-1984, https://pcusa.org/historical-society/collections/research-tools/guides-archival-collections/rg-492
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