Armenian Genocide service set
By DEENA YELLIN, STAFF WRITER

NorthJersey.com, NJ
April 21 2005

EMERSON – The Armenian Nursing and Rehabilitation Center will hold a
ceremony Friday to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Armenian
Genocide.

The one-hour service will recall the nearly 2 million Armenians who
were killed by the Ottoman Turks over a five-year period.

Two genocide survivors – Anahit Boghosian and George Berberian –
are among the center’s 80 residents. They will be recognized during
the service.

The massacre is believed to have started on April 24, 1915, when nearly
300 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders were rounded up and
killed. By the early 1920s, nearly 1.5 million Armenians were dead.

Armenians say the genocide was undertaken because Muslim Turks sought
to purge Christian Armenians from the Ottoman empire.

“The Turkish government made a policy decision to remove Armenians
from Turkish lands,” said Tom Miller, administrator of the center.
“We have housed numerous survivors of the genocide over the years.”
Now, as time has gone on, the number of survivors are dwindling.

The Turkish government has repeatedly rejected the genocide claims.
Turkey has admitted that up to 300,000 Armenians and a higher number
of Muslims died during the Ottoman’s efforts to relocate populations
away from the war zone in eastern Turkey during World War I.

But the memories of those who lost loved ones are still strong.

Berberian, now 99, was a young boy when the genocide began, but he
still recalls that the “Turks would invade our home at all hours of
the day and night and take people away.”

They killed one of his sisters and her unborn child along with her
husband. Berberian’s father bribed a Turkish official to obtain the
necessary paperwork for Berberian and his siblings to flee. He and
his sisters were hidden in a straw-covered wagon in the middle of
the night and they left home. They never saw their parents again.
Berberian believes the Turks murdered them.

The only reason he is alive today, he said, is that his father used
to take care of wounded Turkish soldiers and they were grateful to
him. “Killing was nothing for those people. If a Turk didn’t like you,
they’d just kill you,” he said. He came to the United States in 1930.

Boghosian, 97, said the genocide robbed her of her father, relatives
and home and all of her belongings. She and her mother were the sole
survivors of their family. Two Armenian men, who disguised themselves
as Kurds, helped them escape to the home of a Kurdish mayor and his
family. Boghosian’s mother earned their board by baking bread for the
family and for local shepherds. She came to the United States in 1925.

There will be a commemoration in Hackensack on Saturday and in various
churches around New Jersey on Sunday. A larger commemoration will be
held Sunday at Times Square in Manhattan, where thousands of Armenians
will gather for a memorial service.

The center is a non-profit nursing home that provides long-term care
and short-term rehabilitation for Armenians and non-Armenians. The
Center is 67 years old and has 80 full-time residents. The home is
operated by a board of directors composed of Armenians from northern
New Jersey.