Author: Ani Tigranian

Ultra-Orthodox Jews, including children, were filmed on Monday spitting toward Christian worshippers in the Old City of Jerusalem, amid a rise in incidents targeting priests and pilgrims in the capital.

The attack was met with wide condemnation by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, including politicians from the Haredi community, who rejected the idea that spitting was a Jewish tradition or religious imperative.

In a video posted online by a reporter for the Haaretz daily, a group of Christians exiting a church carrying a wooden cross are seen walking by a group of religious Jews heading the other direction. Several of the Jews then spit on the ground in the direction of the Christians as they pass.

Some of the people in the clip appear to be ultra-Orthodox minors who spit at the Christians after seeing an adult man do so.

A border police officer walking behind the Jewish worshippers does not take any action in response to the spitting. It was unclear if he could have viewed the spitting from his vantage point.

The Latin Patriarchate did not respond to requests for comment.

Jerusalem’s Old City is especially crowded this week during the Sukkot holiday. Tens of thousands of Jewish worshippers attended the priestly blessing at the Western Wall on Monday morning.

Netanyahu tweeted that “Israel is totally committed to safeguard the sacred right of worship and pilgrimage to the holy sites of all faiths. I strongly condemn any attempt to intimidate worshippers, and I am committed to taking immediate and decisive action against it.”

He added: “Derogatory conduct towards worshipers is sacrilege and is simply unacceptable. Any form of hostility towards individuals engaged in worship will not be tolerated.”

Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi David Lau spoke out against the incident, saying “such phenomena are unwarranted and certainly should not be attributed to Jewish law.”

Religion Minister Michael Malkieli from the ultra-Orthodox Shas party also condemned the incident, saying “this is not the way of the Torah, and there is no rabbi that supports or gives legitimacy to this reprehensible behavior.”

Housing Minister Yitzchak Goldknopf, head of the Ashkenazi Haredi United Torah Judaism alliance, said that “our Holy Torah commands us to act respectfully toward every person, no matter his belief, religion, or origin.”

Several officials expressed worries that the spitting attacks were harming Israel’s standing among pilgrims, a major source of incoming tourism.

Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said the spitting “does not represent Jewish values.”

Tourism Minister Haim Katz called the idea that spitting on Christians is a Jewish custom “pathetic.”

“Instead of being a light to the nations, the actions of a handful of extremists are bringing hatred on Judaism and on the Jewish people, and are harming Israel’s image and tourism. Zero tolerance must be shown toward any religious symbols,” he said in a statement.

Elisha Yered, a former adviser to Otzma Yehudit MK Limor Son Har-Melech, drew pushback after he appeared to back the harassment, claiming that spitting at priests or churches was an “ancient Jewish custom.”

Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, who has led efforts in the city council to combat harassment of Christians, said police were beginning to take the issue seriously.

“We should have zero tolerance for these hooligans who are driven by miseducation and hatred, attacking peaceful worshipers anywhere in the city,” she told The Times of Israel. “After months of lobbying, we are pleased the police is taking action and arresting those responsible.”

According to police in August, 16 investigations were opened this year, and 21 arrests and detentions had been carried out in connection with attacks on Christians.

Spokespeople for the Jerusalem Police did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Catholic clergy told The Times of Israel last month that officers have been dressing as priests and monks in the Old City to catch those harassing Christians.

In August, President Isaac Herzog visited Haifa’s Stella Maris Monastery along with Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai to meet with Christian leaders, as part of his recent efforts to bring public awareness to the issue of the safety of Israel’s Christian community.

Seated next to Herzog at the discussion in the monastery with the heads of Christian communities in Israel, Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai said that the police “are undertaking creative operations to eradicate all these small phenomena, these phenomena that affect how everyone feels. We are here to give you a feeling of security.”

“In recent months, we have witnessed extremely serious phenomena in the treatment of members of Christian communities in the Holy Land, our brothers and sisters, Christian citizens, who feel attacked in their places of prayer and their cemeteries, on the street,” said Herzog in front of the 19th-century Carmelite monastery.

Israel’s official spokespeople and social media accounts go out of their way to emphasize Israel’s freedom of worship and to portray the Jewish state as the only safe home for Christians in a hostile Middle East.

The picture of safe coexistence usually painted by Israeli officials is starkly at odds with the experiences Jerusalem’s Christian leaders themselves describe. While they readily acknowledge that there is no organized or governmental effort against them, Christian clergy in the Old City tell of a deteriorating atmosphere of harassment, apathy from authorities, and a growing fear that incidents of spitting and vandalism could turn into violence against their persons.

In an interview in April with The Associated Press, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, an Italian prelate who is the top Catholic churchman in the Holy Land, said that the region’s 2,000-year-old Christian community has come under increasing attack, with Israel’s right-wing government emboldening extremists who have harassed clergy and vandalized religious property at a quickening pace.

In November 2022, two soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces’ Givati Brigade were detained on suspicion of spitting at the Armenian archbishop and other pilgrims during a procession in the Old City. In early January, two Jewish teens were arrested for damaging graves at the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion.

The next week, the Maronite community center in the northern city of Ma’alot-Tarshiha was vandalized by unknown assailants over the Christmas holiday.

Jerusalem’s Armenian community buildings were also targeted by vandals, with multiple discriminatory phrases graffitied on the exterior of structures in the Armenian Quarter. On a Thursday night in late January, a gang of religious Jewish teens threw chairs at an Armenian restaurant inside the city’s New Gate. Vandalism at the Church of the Flagellation occurred the very next week.

And in March, a resident of southern Israel was arrested after attacking priests with an iron bar at the Tomb of the Virgin Mary in Gethsemane.

ENCINO, Calif. (KABC) – Students and staff at Holy Martyrs Ferrahian Armenian High School marched nearly 30 miles Friday to raise awareness to the humanitarian crisis at the Armenian border with Azerbaijan.

The group marched from Encino to the Armenian Genocide Martyrs Monument in Montebello, spreading the message and saying people are in desperate need of help.

Thousands of refugees are fleeing the Armenian enclave of Artsakh.

For some of the students, this all hits close to home.

"Our hearts are broken," said 10th grade student Vaughn Melkonian. "Some of us have sleepless nights. It's our brothers and sisters. We even have family members there that have been killed. One of my cousins died there. He was a soldier and the rest are trying to escape to Armenia and other parts of the world."

The students, who marched side by side, holding hands and locking arms, said they want action, especially from President Joe Biden.

"Innocent Armenians, innocent families … their villages are getting bombed and people are just coming in an killing them," said student Joey Titizian. "It's a horrible situation, and I just want the world to open their eyes and see the situation for what it really is."

Despite Thursday's heat, the students didn't back down from their mission.

"I knew it was going to be a lot, but I'm like, "Man, they're doing it over there, they're doing it in cold winter. It's October now, it's going to start getting cold, and we're here with 95-, 100-degree heat. We're fine. They have nothing. They're walking barefooted, I have perfectly comfy shoes. This is easy compared to what they're doing there."

Why renewed fighting in Artsakh region may herald new war with Armenia

Director: Michael A. Goorjian
Writers: Michael A. Goorjian
Stars: Michael A. Goorjian, Hovik Keuchkerian, Nelli Uvarova

Synopsis: Charlie escapes the Armenian genocide as a boy by fleeing to the United States, but he returns as an adult and is arrested. He watches an Armenian couple from his prison cell, finally learning about his homeland.

During the lengthy period in which the Cold War raged on, the tensions between the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc figured prominently in a number of Hollywood blockbusters. For most, the slightly jingoistic action films of the 1980s serve as the most obvious example of anti-Soviet propaganda. Top Gun (1986) and Red Heat (1988) heavily emphasized the fact that Soviets were unemotional, robotic killing machines who lacked warmth and psychological depth. In thinking back on this period, we tend to forget about the light, fluffy comedies that attempted to view Soviet politics through a satirical lens. They were often guilty of presenting a somewhat glib analysis of the ideological and cultural differences that separate Americans from their Soviet counterparts but they serve as valuable socio-historical documents. In the modern day, the average American’s perception of post-Soviet states has radically altered, so it’s more than a little surprising to see a contemporary film that echoes the thematic concerns of Moscow on the Hudson (1985). 

In mounting a highly sentimental, feel-good comedy about the clash between American and Soviet Armenian culture, director Michael A. Goorjian must have known that he was out of step with the times. Here, he attempts to construct a delicate fable about a naïve American Charlie Bakchinyan (Michael A. Goorjian), who repatriates to Armenia in the wake of World War II. He has Armenian ancestors but his family was forced to flee Turkey during the Armenian Genocide. While in Armenia, he hopes to gain a deeper understanding of his cultural identity. He is placed in peril after befriending Sona (Nelli Uvarova), the wife of a powerful government official. As a result of this innocent flirtation, he is imprisoned on bogus charges. Initially, he responds to being isolated from the outside world by growing despondent. However, his spirits begin to improve when he realizes that he can observe the day-to-day life of a young couple living in an apartment that is located across the street from the prison. 

The plot of the film is pretty standard Hollywood fare but Goorjian makes an admirable effort to inject the story’s skeleton structure with dashes of Armenian dark humor. He casts himself as an archetypal wide-eyed American but finds room to complicate the binary between freedom-loving Americans and overly censorious Armenians. Most of the Armenian characters in the film are viewed through a sympathetic lens and while the film doesn’t offer up a sophisticated dissection of the political corruption that plagued Armenian society during this period, it thankfully avoids indulging in too many stereotypes. Then again, you can’t blame the viewers who yearn for a more dense, thematically complex picture, that might have included a more intellectually rigorous critique of Stalinist policies. 

Amerikatsi’s virtues really come to the fore during lengthy sequences in which Nerses Sedrakyan and Avet Tonoyants’s production design is allowed to take center stage. They have clearly taken great pains to accurately represent era-appropriate interior design trends and color schemes. One naturally assumes that they weren’t working with a massive budget, so it’s very impressive that they managed to invest every location featured in the film with so much texture and pathos. All of this effort also helps to infuse a relatively conventional plot with a much-needed personal touch. This sort of skilled craftsmanship is often undervalued and there is something appealing about the fact that the imagery in this film has a tactile, visceral quality that is missing from a lot of modern cinema. You can tell when something has been precisely constructed and the ‘little things’ really do play a role in elevating Amerikatsi beyond some of the limitations that typically hold period pieces back. 

There is also something to be said for the small scale that the film operates on, as Goorjian could never be accused of overstuffing the plot. The languid, measured pacing ensures that scenes play out in a naturalistic fashion and largely avoid straining for effect. He finds a delicate balance between mainstream comedy and culturally specific comedic references, without sacrificing the opportunity to jerk tears out of audience members. It’s not going to revolutionize Armenia cinema but it might go a long way in bringing elements of their national cinema to a wider audience.