Armenian Christian Community Caught Between Israelis & Palestinians
(RNS) — Jerusalem’s Armenian Christian quarter dates back to the fourth century, when a small band of pilgrims and monks from the newly Christianized Armenia — 800 miles away on the far side of Turkey — settled in the neighborhood around the Upper Room, the building thought to be the site of the Last Supper. Today, Armenians still occupy a large part of the Old City where the Armenian Apostolic Church, under the independent Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem, maintain its own chapels and a school.
Simon Azazian, a communications director at the Palestinian Bible Society whose father is Armenian and mother Palestinian Arab, says that positive relations between Armenians and their Palestinian neighbors, like much in Jerusalem, have a long history.