Every April, the walls of the Armenian Quarter, which lead to the Jewish Quarter in the Old City in Jerusalem, are plastered with posters, reminding the people of Israel of the Armenian genocide. Throughout the spring, summer and fall, until the winter rains, no one removes these posters.

Anyone who makes a pilgrimage to the Old City of Jerusalem cannot help but recall the massacre of the Armenian people.

The deep connection between the plight of the Jews and the Armenians is clear; both were targets of a holocaust. The Armenians, however, were the first on the list of genocide in the twentieth century, and their murder at the hands of the Ottoman Empire set a precedent for totalitarian leaders in the modern era.

Senior lecturer at the Open University of Israel and the Kibbutzim College of Education, Professor Yair Auron has dedicated himself to bringing to light the connection between the Armenians and the Jews, their trials and tribulations. In his book The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide (Transaction Books, 2000), he writes: “At the time of the Armenian genocide, the possibility of its extension to include the Ottoman Jews was just barely avoided. One cannot help but be reminded that between the two world wars, when the fate of the Armenians became the forgotten genocide, European Jewry failed to heed the clear early warnings of Hitler’s final solution.”

Auron devotes the major portion of his study to the fate of the Armenians and the Jews under Turkish rule during the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, from the beginning of the twentieth century, to the rebalancing of world power in the Middle East after World War I.

He proves that the Jews of the Yishuv were well aware they were next in line for a Turkish genocide. Indeed, during the spring of 1916, the order for expulsion of the Jews from Jaffa as an alleged fifth column was a distinct possibility. The intervention of the US and German consuls with the Turkish government in Jerusalem proved to be decisive in helping the Jews avoid the fate that befell the Armenians.

Ironically, it was Henry Morgenthau, a Jew and the American ambassador to Turkey during World War I, who became the first whistleblower in what he described as the murder of a nation. In September 1915 Morgenthau requested emergency aid from his government, and in the same year the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief (ACASR) was established. In 1916, assistance efforts, under the auspices of Congress, were reorganized as the ‘Near East Relief (NER), which collected and distributed substantial sums from private and government sources. Through these projects, tens of thousands of Armenians were saved. However, more were murdered than saved; according to Professor M.E. Stone, head of the Hebrew University Armenian Studies Program, the amount of Armenians murdered by the Ottoman Empire totaled more than 1.5 million, virtually wiping out the Turkish-Armenian population.

Ambassador Morgenthau was also effective in rescuing Jews, saving leaders such as David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Tzvi, later prime minister and president of Israel. Both men were avidly pro-Turkish. Indeed Ben Gurion had tried to organize a Jewish corps in support of the Ottomans, but when his name appeared on a Zionist list he was jailed and charged with treason. On arriving in Alexandria he was jailed again by the British, and then evacuated to New York. In both instances, he was saved thanks to the intervention of Ambassador Morgenthau.

Auron argues that Ben Gurion knew of the murder the Turks were capable of. Auron writes, “whatever Ben Gurion’s strategy may have been, he wrote privately to his father in 1919 that `Jamal Pasha [then Turkish military ruler in Palestine] planned from the outset to destroy the entire Hebrew settlement in Eretz Yisrael, exactly as they did the Armenians in Armenia.'”

The murder of the Armenian political, cultural and business leadership in Constantinople in April 1915 marked the beginning of full-scale genocide. One month before, Ambassador Morgenthau made arrangements through his friend Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, to have the USS Tennessee evacuate a number of Jews from Palestine to refugee camps in Alexandria, Egypt. On the eve of World War I, there were some 85,000 Jews out of a population of 700,000 in the area of Palestine west of the Jordan River [modern day Israel]. Half of the Jews were part of the “Old Yishuv” and half were part of the “New Yishuv,” immigrants who had arrived at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. As noted, evidence suggests the Jews knew what was happening to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.

“The Yishuv knew about the fate of the Armenians, and feared a similar fate,” Auron writes.

Interestingly, it was Mordecai Ben-Hillel HaCohen, a Jewish journalist in the Yishuv and the uncle of Yitzhak Rabin, who became the first publicist to report the chain of events affecting the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire as early as 1916.

Likewise, the first book to document the plight of the Armenians, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh: Symbol and Parable, was also written by a Jew, Franz Werfel, and published in Germany in 1933. Translated into Yiddish and Hebrew, Franz Werfel’s novel influenced Zionist youth movements in Palestine in the 1930s and the resistance movements to the Nazis throughout occupied Europe.

When Adolf Hitler came to power, he utilized the successful Turkish oppression and murder of the Armenians as a basis for his plan to annihilate the Jews. Hitler assumed he would face no future retribution, just like the leaders of the Ottoman Empire were never brought to trial after committing their crimes.

Hitler proclaimed in August, 1939 “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” How the Nazis learned from the Armenian genocide is well documented in the book, Hitler and the Armenian Genocide (Zoryan Institute, 1985).

When Hitler’s plans began to come to fruition, it was Morgenthau’s son, Henry Morgenthau II, the treasury secretary under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who became the only member of the American government during World War II to campaign for the creation of a World Refugee Board to save the remnants of European Jewry. He was always quoting the cables sent from his father, which warned of the Armenian genocide during his time. Today, the above facts have not spawned the deep relationship between Jews and Armenians that would be expected. Auron is disappointed by this, and he declares that sensitivity to the plight of the Armenians is essential, in order to “develop a greater sensitivity among our youth to the suffering of others and to strengthen universal, humanistic values which are an integral part of the Jewish tradition.”

Auron even prepared a curriculum on the Armenian genocide for the Israeli schools, “recognizing the Armenian Genocide is of a major historical, moral and educational significance [and essential] for the non-recurrence of similar instances in the future.”

The intervention of Israel’s foreign ministry, however, has prevented the implementation of Auron’s curriculum, a decision based on fears in Israeli diplomatic circles that the special relationship between Israel and Turkey will be damaged by its implementation. Indeed, Turkish interests have influenced nations throughout the world not to institute educational programs that will memorialize the Armenian genocide.

Nevertheless, the lack of recognition by the majority has not stopped the HU Armenian Studies Program from forging ties with the Armenian populace of Jerusalem, and each year hosting an Armenian genocide memorial event. This year, the event was held on 28 April and featured His Beatitude Torkom II, the leading Armenian cleric in Jerusalem, His Excellency Mr. Tsolag Momjian, the honorary Armenian consul in Jerusalem, Professor Gabriel Motzkin, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, and Dr. Sergio La Porta, lecturer in Armenian Studies at the Hebrew University. Dr. La Porta presided over the memorial’s symposium.

It was a moving evening wrought with engaging lectures, poignant readings and personal sentiments by Armenian laymen and leaders.

“No one has a license to deny the genocide of the Armenians,” Professor Stone said, noting that while the memorial event is only a small step in the right direction, when combined with the Armenian Studies Program’s cooperation with community and academic establishments in both Jerusalem and Armenia, and its close ties with the Armenian Patriarchate, Yerevan State University and the Institute of Archeology of the Armenian Academy, a strong relationship has been built between many Jews and Armenians.

As a senior official of the Israel Minister of Education put it best on Armenian memorial day four years ago in April 2000 when he declared that, ” Armenian Memorial Day should be a day of reflection and introspection for all of us, a day of soul-searching. On this day, we as Jews, victims of the Shoah [Holocaust] should examine our relationship to the pain of others.

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