Armenian Christians in Jerusalem’s Old City Feel the Walls Closing | Jerusalem News
As Israel’s war on Gaza rages and Israeli attacks on people in the occupied West Bank continue, the Armenian residents of Jerusalem’s Old City are fighting a different battle – quieter, they say, but no less existential.
The Armenians are one of Jerusalem’s oldest communities and have lived in the Old City, around the Armenian Monastery, for more than 1,500 years.
Now the small Christian community is beginning to crack under pressure from forces they say threaten them and the Old City’s multifaith character – from Jewish settlers taunting clergy on the way to prayer to a land deal that threatens to give away a quarter of her property and you end up in a luxury hotel.
Rifts have emerged between the Armenian patriarchate and the predominantly secular community, whose members fear the church is unable to protect its shrinking population and embattled monastery.
The Armenian Quarter is home to Save the Arq’s headquarters, a structure with reinforced plywood walls adorned with old maps. It is inhabited by Armenians who are there protesting what they see as an illegal land grab by a real estate developer.
The threatened land is where the community holds events and also includes parts of the patriarchy itself.
After years of the Patriarchate refusing to sell any land, Armenian priest Baret Yeretsian secretly “leased” the property in 2021 for up to 98 years to Xana Capital, a company registered shortly before the agreement was signed.
Xana gave more than half of the shares to a local businessman, George Warwar, who was involved in various crimes.
Community members were outraged.
The priest fled the country and the Patriarchate canceled the deal in October, but Xana objected and the contract is currently in mediation.
Xana sent armed men into the parking lot, the activists say, who attacked people, including clergy, with pepper spray and batons.
The activists say Warwar is backed by a prominent settler organization that wants to expand the Jewish presence in Jerusalem’s Old City.
The Ateret Cohanim organization is behind several controversial land purchases in the Old City and its leaders were photographed in December 2023 with Warwar and Xana Capital owner Danny Rothman, also known as Danny Rubinstein. Ateret Cohanim denied any connection to the land deal.
Activists filed a lawsuit against the patriarchy in February, demanding that the deal be annulled and the land belong to the community in perpetuity.
The patriarchy refused on the grounds that the land belonged to them.
Armenians came to the old town as early as the fourth century, and at the beginning of the 20th century there was a large wave of refugees from the Ottoman Empire. They have the same status as the Palestinians in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem – residents but not citizens, effectively stateless.
Today, the new arrivals are mostly boys who come from Armenia to live and study at the monastery, although many are leaving the monastery. Clerics say that’s partly because attacks on Christians have increased and Armenians – whose monastery is closest to the Jewish quarter and on a popular route to the Western Wall – are vulnerable.
Father Aghan Gogchyan, the chancellor of the Patriarchate, said he was regularly attacked by groups of Jewish nationalists.
The Rossing Center, which tracks anti-Christian attacks in the Holy Land, documented about 20 attacks on Armenian people, property and church property in 2023, many of which involved ultranationalist Jewish settlers spitting on Armenian clergy or graffiti reading ” Death to Christians” scrawled on quarter walls.
