Jewish Community of Armenia

The Jewish Community of Armenia (Armenian: Հայաստանի հրեական համայնք) is Armenia's oldest and largest Jewish non-governmental organization. It serves as a community center for Jewish holidays and cultural events and owns Armenia's only Jewish newspaper, Magen David.

History

The Jewish Community of Armenia was founded in 1991 by a group of activists including Gershon Burstein and William Weiner. Since 1996, it has been headed by Rima Varzhapetyan-Feller. It is affiliated with the World Jewish Congress and the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress and represents the communal interests of Armenia's Jewish citizens and residents in the Council for National Minorities.^[1]^[2]^[3]

In the 2000s, the community installed a monument commemorating the victims of both the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide in Yerevan.^[4]

Armenia's only medieval Jewish cemetery in Yeghegis, previously abandoned for centuries, was cleaned up by the community and has since then become a tourist destination.^[5]

Publications

The Jewish Community of Armenia owns and operates the only Jewish newspaper in Armenia, Magen David. It is published monthly and contains articles in three languages: Russian, Armenian and Hebrew. Paper copies are distributed free of charge at the community's Yerevan office, and online copies can be accessed on the organization's website.^[6]

Members of the community have also coauthored and published several multilingual books on the history of Armenian Jewry, including Jews in Armenia: The Middle Ages (2009) and The Jews of Noah's Land (2020).^[7]