Aрмяне в Израиле. Армянский Холокост.
Not known to many, but forever remembered by its former residents - the story of the Armenian village Sheikh Brak is one of Israeli ambivalence toward the Armenian Holocaust
Haaretz, May 17, 2003
Привожу текст, потому что в по ссылке он наверняка скоро станет недоступен.
Проблема с упоминанием армянского Холокоста в Израиле вовсе не в "охране" исключительности еврейского Холокоста, а в современных политических отношениях между Израилем и Турцией. Отношения хорошие. Турция не признает факт армянского геноцида 1915 г. Дальше все идет криво.

The unseen village
By Sara Leibovich-Dar
Not known to many, but forever remembered by its former residents - the story of the Armenian village Sheikh Brak is one of Israeli ambivalence toward the Armenian Holocaust.
Every few weeks, Naomi Nalbandian travels to the abandoned Armenian village of Sheikh Brak, near Atlit. As a child, she lived there for just one year, but she still misses it. "As the years go by, the abandonment of the village saddens me more and more," she says. "If I'd have been older then, I would have fought with all my might against the abandonment and tried to get other Armenians to join the struggle."

Last week, on the eve of Indepen-dence Day, Nalbandian, a nurse in the rehabilitation department of Hadassah University Hospital on Mount Scopus, lit one of the ceremonial torches on Mount Herzl. She wanted to mention the Armenian holocaust during the ceremony. In 1915-16, about 1.5 million people were killed in the Armenian genocide carried out during ther time of the Ottoman Empire. The organizer of the ceremony - the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport's "Merkaz Hahasbara" (Center of Information) - pressured Nalbandian to do no more than allude to the genocide.

Turkey continues to deny responsibility for the annihilation of the Armenians and contends that the number killed was much smaller. And, apparently, the diplomatic, economic and defense-related ties between Israel and Turkey are too important to endanger with even an indirect reference to another people's holocaust. Nalbandian gave in, and the process also sapped her energy to fight for permission to mention the other ethnic trauma: that of the abandonment of Sheikh Brak.

In 1920, a few dozen Armenians who had fled Turkey to escape the massacres settled near Atlit. A Christian Arab landowner leased them the village lands. When he fled to Lebanon in 1948, the lands were appropriated and distributed to the kibbutzim in the area.

"Your state and mine deceived them and took all the land from them," says former agriculture minister Pesach Grupper, an Atlit resident who once employed the Armenians in his fields. Not only was the land taken away from them, their village was not connected to the electricity grid and did not have proper sewage. "But they were content. That's their way," says Grupper.

One after the other, the young people married and left the village. The last Armenians left Sheikh Brak in 1981, after receiving compensation from the Israel Lands Administration (ILA). Each family was given what amounts to about $40,000 in today's terms. "But to whom does the state pay big sums?" asks Grupper.

"It was their fate," explains Aryeh Simhoni, head of the Hof Hacarmel regional council. "It was from heaven. If I were religious, I'd say it was with God's help. What was the name of that village again? Mubarak?"

Nalbandian's grandparents arrived in Sheikh Brak in 1948. They had fled the slaughter in Turkey in 1915 and wandered through Syria and Lebanon before settling in Kafr Yasif in the early 1920s. In 1948, they moved to Sheikh Brak. Nalbandian's mother was 16 at the time and taught the village children Armenian, English and Arabic. "There were 15 children learning in one room that was divided into six classes," her mother recalls. At age 25, she married and moved to Haifa, where her daughter Naomi was born. Naomi was sent to school in the village for one year. "I gave her to my parents for a little while so I could work at a factory in Acre," says her mother.

Naomi Nalbandian became very attached to the village: "It was a wonderful place for kids, a whole world unto itself. To this day, it pains me to think about the village. Whenever I go to visit my mother in Haifa, I pass by and get all emotional remembering how we celebrated the Armenian holidays there. Even after I returned to Haifa, I went there every weekend and during every summer vacation. It's a shame that it ended the way it did. We gave up too easily. We didn't realize that we were losing the only Armenian village in Israel."

"No one forced us to leave," says Salfi Morjalian of Haifa, who was born in Sheikh Brak and lived there until she was 12. "But, politically, they tried to make it hard on us so we wouldn't be able to stay there. We didn't have electricity or running water or a sewage system. We did our business outside - each family found a far-off, hidden spot to do it in."

Walking around the remains of the abandoned village, she points out a space surrounded by cacti: "That was our bathroom. We bathed in basins with water that was heated on coal ovens. If they'd provided us with the basic things, we never would have left."

"If we still lived there today, we'd be staging demonstrations and going to the press," says Eli (Yeriya) Lafajian of Jaffa, who was born and raised in Sheikh Brak and left in the 1960s after he married.

"I don't know who was supposed to have seen to it that we got electricity. The electric company wanted a lot of money and our parents didn't have the money to pay them to get attached to the grid. Our parents were timid. They were afraid to cause trouble. They also asked us, the younger ones, not to speak out. They thought that it was forbidden to make a fuss against the authorities."

Lafajian says that the younger generation had to adapt to the lifestyle whether they liked it or not: "In Haifa, I attended a Christian school where my classmates were the children of French diplomats. I never invited them to visit me at home because I didn't want them to see how I lived."

Without electricity, they couldn't keep food refrigerated. "When we bought meat in Haifa, we had to cook it that same day so it wouldn't go bad," says Lafajian. "After many years without running water, we were hooked up to the water system of Kibbutz Neveh Yam, but the water we received was salty. We got used to drinking this water, but whenever guests came, they couldn't drink it. When I got engaged and my wife, who was from Jaffa, came to visit me in the village, she brought bottles of water along with her in the car."

Yosef Katrian of Haifa, who was born in the village in 1943 and lived there until he married and moved away in the 1960s, recalls troubled ties with the surrounding kibbutzim.

"We worked just for bread," he says. "We never managed to make money. We had an arrangement with the neighboring Neveh Yam. We grew melons and watermelons on their land, but all we got from it in the end was food for the cows. They said it didn't bring in any money."

These things happen

At Kibbutz Neveh Yam, they're not pleased to hear such criticism. "We had a lot of sympathy and compassion for the Armenians," says Nurit Bruner, a kibbutz native who is also the kibbutz secretary. "As kids, we would walk over to visit there, but we couldn't get too close because the dogs were always barking."

Were the kibbutzniks comfortable with the fact that they worked for you and then returned home to their village where they had no electricity?

Bruner: "Think what kind of electricity they had then on the kibbutz. Everyone was unfortunate then. Am I supposed to be responsible for who has electricity in this country? What does that have to do with us? Really - are we the state authorities? Why do you think we ought to have been bothered about whether they had electricity? Those were the rugged, early days of building the state."

In the 1970s?

"We couldn't worry about the surroundings. Maybe some kibbutzim could, but not Neveh Yam. If the people that helped them in Neveh Yam could rise up from their graves, they would slap you. If there was anything there at all, it was thanks to us."

Shlomo Kahal of Neveh Yam is familiar with the water problems the Armenians faced: "In the Zionist Archives, I found a document in which the village mukhtar asked the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association [PICA] for permission to be hooked up to the water pipes. From us, they got water from the same place that we drank from. We also had salty water. They worked here in our cannery, but we didn't know about their living conditions. They were quite distant."

The short access road to the village, off of the old Tel Aviv-Haifa road, passed through a part of Kibbutz Ein Carmel, but the kibbutzniks there weren't pleased by this bit of traffic to and from the village, so they blocked the way. The villagers and their visitors then had no choice but to travel by way of Atlit, over a rough dirt road. When the highway was later paved right by their houses, a bridge was built over it so they could continue to use the dirt road from Atlit.

"Personally, as the kibbutz coordinator, I helped them," says Aryeh Simhoni. "I let them come onto our lands. We gave them hay and straw. They didn't have anything. We just gave them ma'aser [the 10th of the crop yield left as a tithe for the poor], and we did so generously. We connected them to a water line. They didn't need any more. They lived in poverty like an 18th-century village in the remote reaches of Armenia."

Maybe their life could have been different with a little more help from you.

Simhoni: "Why should we have done more than we did? Do you know the State of Israel or did you just land here yesterday? How was I supposed to give them an electricity line?"

"Was our situation any better?" Pesach Grupper asks rhetorically. "Electricity only came to Atlit in 1924."

The Armenians had no electricity until 1981.

Grupper: "The effendi brought them so they would work the land. They were content with their lives. That's their way. They didn't have rights because they were tenant farmers."

Freer than the kibbutzniks

On the outskirts of the village lies the grave of Sheikh Brak, for whom the village was originally named; the Armenians refer to it as "the Armenian village" or Atlit. The first settlers arrived in the early 1920s. After fleeing Turkey, the survivors of the genocide passed through Lebanon, where they met a Lebanese effendi, Anton Hamouda, who proposed that they work his lands as tenant farmers.

Osna Katrian of Haifa is from one of the first families who came to the village. She was born in Sheikh Brak in 1931 and remembers a very hard life there. "We drew water from the well. There was no road. We went everywhere with carts and donkeys. We only studied for a few years in a little school in the village with teachers who came from Cyprus to teach us Armenian. At 15, I was doing cleaning work for farmers at Atlit and at 17, I went to work in the cannery on Kibbutz Neveh Yam. I didn't have a choice."

The hardships of daily life were compounded by the grief over all those lost in Turkey. During World War I, the Ottoman rulers ordered that the Armenians be cleared away from the regions where battles were being fought with Russia, because they were supposedly collaborating with the Russians. The Ottomans paved the way for the expulsion with a mass arrest of Armenian leaders. Six hundred were killed in one day - April 24, 1915, which has been designated as the anniversary of the Armenian genocide.

The mass expulsion of the Armenians was accompanied by methodical massacres. The authorities gave the exiles no protection and allowed the Kurds, through whose territory their convoys passed, to attack them. The Armenian men who survived were conscripted into labor brigades while their families were imprisoned in concentration camps. The Turkish government denies all this: It says that the Armenians were not murdered in an organized and methodical fashion, but transferred out of war zones for the purpose of resettlement.

"My mother talked about it all the time," says Osna Katrian. "She was seven when her family escaped. She told horror stories about a relative whose hands were cut off by the Turks. They put his hand on a plate and told him to eat it."

In Salfi Morjalian's family, the mourning was less overt. "My grandfather lost his entire family," she says. "He didn't have any brothers or sisters left, not a single one, and he didn't know anything about them - what happened to them and how they died. It was very hard for him to talk about them. He wanted to start a new chapter in his life and we didn't want to disturb him. They didn't talk about it. When I hesitantly asked him to tell me what happened - I saw a tear in his eye and dropped it and went outside. They didn't want to pass the pain onto us, but it's hereditary. It hurts just to think that they went through such things. You sometimes hear their stories and then you say to yourself, my God, how could this have happened."

Their childhood was special because of what happened to their people, says Morjalian. "Our parents were very caring and protective of us, maybe too much. They worked very hard but they wouldn't let us do anything, except collect eggs from the chicken coops. We didn't feel that it was hard here. They tried to provide us with everything we needed and they didn't complain, despite all the hardships. They made do with what there was and always said that having been through the worst, what they had now was enough for them. For someone who has lost his entire family, when he gets a plot of land with a garden - he thinks it's paradise. It's enough that they're still alive. For them, that's everything. Here they felt that they could finally live in peace without anyone bothering them."

Miriam Lafajian is still afraid of the Turks. She refused to have her picture taken lest the Turks identify her and harm her if she passes through Turkey on the way to a visit in Armenia. Lafajian came to Sheikh Brak with her parents in 1940, after years in which the family wandered from place to place.

"Many people from my parents' village in Turkey were slaughtered," she says, sitting in her small apartment in Haifa. "My parents talked a lot about the holocaust. They described how the Turks came into the Armenians' homes, dissected their bodies and took out their hearts. They saw Turks pour gasoline on Armenians and then clap their hands while the Armenians burned. In many villages, the Turks killed all the Armenians, and even their cats and dogs, too. In the village, at night, when they finished their work, the older people would sit around in a circle and talk about the holocaust."

In 1947, Lafajian's parents and about half of the village's residents immigrated to Armenia, then a Soviet republic. "They said that they were Armenians and that Armenia was the only place where they could feel Armenian," says the daughter, who remained behind in Sheikh Brak, married and had three children. "Despite the hardships, life here was good. We were all one big family. We put on plays in Armenian. Our parents only knew Turkish, because in Turkey they were forbidden to speak in Armenian. Here, the children learned Armenian freely. There were no thefts. Doors were always left open. We were freer than the kibbutzniks, who had to eat in the dining hall at set hours. To this day, I still dream about Atlit, about the landscape there - with the sea on one side and the Carmel on the other."

Lafajian and her husband spent seven years working Pesach Grupper's fields. "All of the Armenians worked there. The land was his and we grew vegetables," she says.

Grupper has a slightly different recollection. "We didn't have any special connection with them," he says. "They weren't regular workers. They worked and left."
Continuation of The unseen village
They were tenant farmers

The Armenians remained neutral in the 1948 War of Independence. Grupper: "The Haganah [pre-state Jewish militia] asked our elders to talk to the Arab elders to convince them to surrender. There were two meetings between the Arab and Jewish elders in the Armenian village. Nothing came out of it."

In 1948, the 800 dunams (200 acres) of the effendi Hamouda were declared "abandoned property" and divided up between Kibbutz Neveh Yam and Kibbutz Ein Carmel. "They took the lands from them right away," says Grupper. "No, no - there wasn't any reason to let them keep the lands. They lived there because they were tenant farmers. What justice do you want there to be after the war? There were 17 Arab villages around Atlit and they were all evicted. They went to hell and the Arabs had registration certificates from the [land authorities]. The Armenians had nothing."

In January 1956, Haaretz reporter Ze'ev Schiff visited the Armenian village and described the residents' attempts to obtain possession of some of the lands. "The village elders sent tolerant letters of explanation to the heads of the state two years ago and, again, eight months ago," Schiff wrote. "They are still eagerly awaiting an answer that has not come. They have a natural right to demand leased land for their livelihood from the development authority. They tried to do this once, but also never got any answer. `I'd go to your government,' says George Andrikian, the village headman, `but I don't know Hebrew and anyway only important people go to the government offices. With 30 dunams [7.5 acres] for each family, we could live honorably and we'd be deeply and sincerely grateful to the State of Israel.'"

Aryeh Simhoni of Ein Carmel has no problem with the fact that his kibbutz received hundreds of dunams of land that the Armenians had worked for 30 years. "They were tenant farmers. It wasn't theirs," he says.

Dr. Sandy Kedar of the Sephardi Democratic Rainbow Coalition says that even though they were tenant farmers, the state could have given the Armenians a lease on favorable terms, even without a tender: "The situation in the field could have been legalized. This happened in sectors that were close to the centers of power, and the state could have been more egalitarian and done the same for them. Even if their rights to the land were weak, the fact that they spent so many years there should have been considered in a more just allocation. They didn't have to be discriminated against in this way. The land could have been leased to them. People who live on the land for many years can even get it without a tender and with `discounts.' It's still not too late. They could try to do something about it even now."

Dreams of return

Ten years ago, a group of people who were born in Sheikh Brak organized in an attempt to return to the village. "It didn't work out," says Eli Lafajian. "We should have gotten all the permits at the beginning. If they'd let us go back, we all would."

In order to maintain their connection with the village, the Armenians continued to bury their dead in the small, neglected cemetery in the village.

"They came at night and buried their dead in the village and in the morning, they asked me what I thought about it," says Simhoni. "I said that it was their right, though it's not an official cemetery." But someone else did asks the Armenians not to bury their dead in a place that didn't belong to them, and they have since stopped doing it.

Morjalian visits the village every week. She knows every stone in the abandoned place. "The stones speak to me," she says, picking her way among the ruins. A few mounds of stones are all that attest to the village that once stood here. "An ordinary person couldn't understand much from these stones. I look at them and in my mind I see a vivid picture of how our house looked." She caresses one of the stones and says that it was part of the porch, "and here's the stone to which they tied my father's cow," she adds, pointing out another one.

She misses the village very much. "We still feel that it's ours. Here we had a warm family. Here we had a little Armenia. The State of Israel would have benefited too had we remained here. The village would have attracted Armenian tourists from all over the world, who would have come to see the only Armenian village in Israel. When my husband and I and our two kids want to go to the beach, we always find ourselves at the beach that was once that of the village. Someone who doesn't know the place would never find it. We come here to pick sabras and raspberries and every year we bring a priest to the cemetery to perform a memorial service at the grave of our grandfather, who died in 1971 and is buried here."

Six years ago, Morjalian restored her grandfather's grave. The 25 graves in the small cemetery are covered with such high weeds that they are practically impossible to find. "If we hadn't fixed up my grandfather's grave, no one would know that people are buried here," she says. Something keeps pulling her back to the place. "I can't tear myself away from it. Maybe it's the happy childhood memories that keep drawing me here. My sons also know every stone here."

But you didn't make any special effort to come back here to live.

Morjalian: "We learned to keep quiet. It's ingrained in us - to keep quiet and carry on. After we saw the worst that could happen, the slaughter of a million Armenians, we don't complain about anything."

Her brother, Michael Katrian, says that every time he comes back to the village, it gives him chills: "I feel as if there are still people here and someone is saying: Come back, come visit, don't forget. It hurts. It still hurts when I recall my childhood here. I smell the aroma of the bread baking in the village ovens, remember the special breakfasts in the village. In the summer, we always ate figs in a pita. We hunted rabbits and at night we hunted porcupines. I'd run around on the mountains from morning till night. I'm 40 now and I feel like my childhood in the village was the high point of my life. This childhood has been erased. They destroyed my memories when they destroyed the village. I was a young boy when we left. I didn't know that we'd been tricked, that they'd taken advantage of our parents' innocence. If I'd been older, I wouldn't have left. I would have fought to stay here."

A little Armenian autonomy

At the Armenian club in the lower section of Haifa, the young people's eyes light up when the name Sheikh Brak is mentioned. They've all been there. Some had relatives who lived there. Others used to go on club field trips there every summer. Even though decades have passed since it was abandoned, for the young Armenians in Haifa, the village is still the subject of dreams.

"It was like a little Armenia, with the Armenian language, Armenian dances, Armenian weddings and Armenian music," they say.

"If only I could perpetuate what used to be there and was stopped," says Eddy Lafajian, 24, who was born in the village and left with his family when he was just a year old. "It was like a little autonomous Armenia. We were all together. It was something that belonged to us - a positive ghetto that united us and kept us wrapped up together."

The last elderly villagers abandoned the place in 1981. Miriam Lafajian remembers how the kibbutzniks from Ein Carmel came to the village and took their wooden carts. "I don't know what they did with them. Maybe they wanted them for souvenirs."

Ori Raz of Ein Carmel remembers the Armenians' last day in the village. "They took their things and went. There was a fear that people would come to settle in the houses they left behind. The next day, tractors came and flattened the area."

Morjalian says it pained her greatly to learn that the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem gave its consent for the village church to be razed as well. She points to a row of stones not far from the small mound that was once her grandfather's house. "The church was there. The Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem used to send us a priest to baptize the babies and perform weddings. There was a small plaza next to the church where they would set up tables with refreshments for festive events. I think that such places should be preserved."

George Hintlian, a Jerusalem historian who was the secretary of the Armenian Patriarchate in the 1980s: "It was a small church made of tin. What happened with Sheikh Brak is a natural sociological development. We are not a rural population. The Armenians are urban. We live in Jaffa, Jerusalem, Haifa and Nazareth. The village was a refuge for survivors of the holocaust. When they received compensation for their houses, the were drawn to the city."

"They took the money and thought it would solve all their problems," says Michael Katrian, whose relatives were among the last to leave the village. "But it was the biggest mistake of their lives. It didn't bring them any advancement. The money was barely enough for them to get small, crowded apartments in Haifa for key money, and some even had to take a mortgage to buy apartments with key money. They'd been deceived. Instead of leaving, they should have fought to stay."

Had they tried to fight, the battle would have been against agriculture minister Ariel Sharon, who was responsible for the ILA. Sharon's close associate, Yaakov Aknin, was appointed director of the ILA in 1978. "I am absolutely certain that they received adequate compensation," says Aknin. "Who said they had to use the money to buy an apartment in Haifa? They got what they deserved according to a fair and thorough appraiser's estimate. If they'd gone to court, they would have gotten less. We were very generous. We paid cash in full for the land at the market prices of the time."

They say they were not given their due.

Aknin: "That's what the value of their property was. They received the full value. Today it might be a national problem for them, but then it was just about land. Maybe in another 50 years, they'll regret having left even more, but that's really absurd."

Ownership of the hilltop that was once a village is presently shared by the Jewish Agency, which commands the wooded area and the Israel Nature and National Parks Protection Authority, which has turned the rest of the area into a nature reserve. The authority admits that the place doesn't contain much of exceptional interest, "just some plants that are typical of the coastal plain, like the coastal sand-lily."

"One of the problems I have with the place is that people from all around dump garbage on the hill," says Simhoni, the current head of the regional council. "There's no limit to Jewish barbarism."

`I got the message across'
Naomi Nalbandian is the first Armenian ever invited to light a torch on Independence Day eve. "I hesitated at first," she says. "I live in East Jerusalem and I didn’t know if it was safe enough for me to light a torch. I also wasn’t sure if they’d let me maintain my Armenian identity. After consulting with my husband, I agreed, but I told Merkaz Hahasbara that I wanted to say that I’m a third-generation survivor of the Armenian holocaust, just as every Jewish Holocaust survivor would talk about that."

It was agreed that at the ceremony, Nalbandian would say that she is "a third-generation survivor of the Armenian holocaust of 1915." That’s what it said by her name in the original program (of which 2,500 copies were distributed), says Nalbandian.

"But in the afternoon, during the break in rehearsals, when we were eating lunch in the Knesset, some people from the center informed me that this text was causing them problems, that they had been notified of this by the Prime Minister’s Office, the ministerial committee responsible for the ceremony and the Turkish ambassador and that if I insisted on going ahead as planned, it could cause a crisis with Turkey.

"I told them that if the word 'holocaust' causes so many problems, I wouldn't mind saying 'genocide' instead. They didn’t respond to that, but when we returned to the hotel, I saw that there was a different text by my name that did not use the words 'holocaust' or 'genocide,' and said only that my grandparents had come here in 1915. I refused to go along with that. They didn’t come here as tourists. They were holocaust survivors. I insisted that the word 'survivors' and the year 1915 be included in the text, so that even if the word 'holocaust' wasn’t mentioned, everyone would know what was being referred to."

After she made her position clear, a new text was written for Nalbandian. At the ceremony, she said that she is the daughter of the long-suffering Armenian people and that her grandmother and grandfather were "survivors of historical Armenia, 1915, who came and settled in a village near Haifa."

"I managed to get the message across," she says. "But I’m disappointed that they didn’t let me express my identity. I saw that it’s all politics."

"What’s the problem?" asks Doron Shochat, the director of Merkaz Hahasbara. "We proposed something, she proposed something, and we had a polite and civilized discussion about it. It’s a shame that people are focusing on insignificant issues."

The State of Israel caving in to Turkish pressure and becoming a "holocaust denier" is an insignificant issue?

Shochat: "We were approached by Danny Naveh, the chairman of the ministerial committee in charge of ceremonies, and by Knesset Speaker Ruby Rivlin. They asked us and we were glad to accede to their request. Everything was done fairly and through civilized negotiations. She didn’t have to take part in the ceremony if she didn’t want to. She is the one who chose not to give up the honor. In the end, this whole story is for the glory of the State of Israel."

Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin: "Our relations with the Turks are such that we have to weigh carefully whether to challenge them on the Armenian issue right now. We faced a difficult moral dilemma. I consulted with Shimon Peres who told me to tell this woman that it was inappropriate to insert political matters into the Israeli Independence Day ceremony. We didn’t deny the Armenian holocaust, but we didn’t mention it in a clear and unequivocal manner, because this is a subject that is crucial to the Turks. But I know that I’ll be criticized no matter what answer I give."