"A few weeks ago I warned that staying in Armenia is dangerous for Jews."
Rabbi Zamir Isayev
Isayev's plea, via a video and tweet on X (formerly Twitter), resonates with urgency and fear, a sentiment that has been building over the past few weeks. As the director of the Baku Jewish school and of the Georgian-Sephardic Jewish community in Azerbaijan, Isayev urged Armenian Jews to leave their country, in order for them to stay safe.
In the tweet, Isayev added: "A few weeks ago I warned that staying in Armenia is dangerous for Jews. Israel's Diaspora Affairs Ministry raised the possibility of violence against Jews twice during the last month. The reason is Israel's close relations with Azerbaijan, and also the fact that we, rabbis, oppose the usage of the Holocaust topic for propaganda purposes."
Earlier this week, the World Jewish Center in Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, was vandalized in an act thought to be directly related to Israel’s growing relations with neighboring adversary Azerbaijan.
According to the estimates of the local Jewish community and the World Jewish Congress, Armenia is home to around 500-1000 Jews, mostly of Ashkenazi origin with some Mizrahi and Georgian Jews, localized in the capital, Yerevan.
The European Union on Thursday invited the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan for talks to try to revive a peace process thrown into crisis by an Azerbaijani military operation that prompted more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee Nagorno-Karabakh.
Charles Michel, the president of the European Council of EU leaders, said he had invited Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to meet in Brussels by the end of October.
"We believe in diplomacy. We believe in political dialog," Michel told reporters as he announced the meeting at a summit in the Spanish city of Granada of the European Political Community, a forum of more than 40 countries.
Aliyev snubbed a proposed meeting with Pashinyan, Michel, and the leaders of France and Germany at the summit. But Michel said he expected both sides to attend the Brussels talks, noting Baku had said it would take part in future EU-mediated meetings.
At the summit, leaders also pledged support for Armenia as it grapples with the fallout of the Azerbaijani military operation last month to seize control of the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, mainly populated by ethnic Armenians.