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ISBN 978-1-4632-4037-0 ISSN 1935-6838

Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kiraz, George Anton, author.

Title: The Syriac Orthodox in North
America (1895-1995) : a short history /
George Anton Kiraz.
Description: Piscataway, NJ : Gorgias
Press, 2019. | Series: Gorgias
handbooks, ISSN 1935-6838 | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019009610 | ISBN
9781463240370
Subjects: LCSH: Syrian Orthodox
Church--North America--History.
Classification: LCC BX174.N7 K573 2019 |
DDC 281/.63097--dc23
LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009610
Printed in the United States of America
In Memory of
The early KHARPUT immigrants who settled in Worces-
ter…
The early DİYARBAKIR immigrants who settled in NJ…
The early MIDYAT immigrants who settled in RI…
The early MARDIN immigrants who settled in Sher-
brooke…
The early HOMS immigrants who settled in Detroit…

And in Memory of My Great Uncle

BARSOUM DAUDOĞLU KIRAZ of Ivos-Kharput

You arrived on the East Coast in the 1910s…

Your family lost touch with you…
Your nephew searched all over for you, but to no
avail…
You and he are now buried together 130 miles from
each other…
My father would have loved to have visited your grave.
Contents
Foreword ............................................................................................ xiii
By Mor Dionysius Jean Kawak
Preface .................................................................................................. xv
Acknowledgements ............................................................................ xx
Nomenclature .................................................................................. xxiii
Prologue ................................................................................................. 1
1. Sayfo I… Immigrants I .................................................... 7
1840s Shammas Micha, the First Immigrant ............................ 10
1884 Ḥaji Yakob, the English Speaker of Diyarbakır ........... 12
1887 Ḥaji Thomas of Kharput .................................................. 14
Aharon and Charlie’s Journey from Kharput ........................... 16
Bringing Brides .............................................................................. 18
1888 George who Married the Prime Minister’s Cousin ...... 19
1889 The Doctor and the Merchant ........................................ 20
1892 A Syriac Orthodox Bishop without a Syriac Flock ...... 23
1893 George Jarjur, the First in Canada .................................. 26
1899 Mary Basmajy and Her Daughters.................................. 28
1906 San Francisco Fires and Kharput Immigrants .............. 30
From Families to Communities .................................................. 34

vii
viii Contents

2. Building a Society ......................................................... 35

1897 First Association in New England: A.B.A. ................... 36
1899 First Association in New Jersey: T.M.S. ........................ 46
1907 The First Priest ................................................................... 50
1908 The Intibāh Association ................................................... 53
1909 The First Newspaper ........................................................ 58
1909 Women and First Associations ....................................... 66
1910 Picnics and Community Life ........................................... 71
1913 First Directory .................................................................... 72
1914 The First Malphono .......................................................... 74
On the Eve of the Great War ..................................................... 76
3. Sayfo II… Immigrants II .............................................. 77
The Three Men from Kharput.................................................... 80
The Girl who Survived Sayfo ...................................................... 82
1915 The American Committee for Armenian and Syrian
Relief ............................................................................... 86
1916 US Census ........................................................................... 87
1916 A Visit to New England ................................................... 89
1916 With Church of the East Assyrians ................................ 90
1917 Conflicts within the Community .................................... 96
1917 Convention in Worcester ................................................. 98
 Contents ix

1918 Bishop of Jerusalem Seeks Help ................................... 102

1919 The Paris Peace Conference .......................................... 103
1920 Patriarch Elias III Intends to Visit America ............... 105
1921 More Priests ...................................................................... 109
1921 The Need for a Homeland ............................................. 112
1922 From Unskilled Laborers to Professionals.................. 115
1926 US Census ......................................................................... 116
1927 The Intended General Synod of Jerusalem ................. 117
A New Decade Approaching .................................................... 125
4. Bishops Visit… Churches Consecrated ....................... 129
1927 First Apostolic Delegate ................................................. 130
Archbishop Barsoum’s Scholarly Activities ............................ 135
With Gibran Khalil Gibran ....................................................... 137
1928 First Priest Ordained in America .................................. 138
1929 Second Bishop Visits ...................................................... 140
1930 The General Synod at Deir Mar Matta ........................ 141
1932 Archbishop Barsoum, Now the Locum Tenens ............ 143
1933 The New Beth-Nahreen ................................................. 145
1934 First Choir ......................................................................... 151
1934 Successful Boys… Successful Girls .............................. 153
1936 US Census ......................................................................... 156
x Contents

1937 A New Priest for Detroit ............................................... 157

1938 Third Bishop Visits ......................................................... 159
1939 Boys in the Army ............................................................. 162
1940 Patriarch Appeals for the Seminary .............................. 163
1941 St. Ephrem Association in Sherbrooke ....................... 164
1948 War in Palestine: More Immigrants .............................. 165
1949 Archbishop Samuel as an Apostolic Delegate ............ 166
Bedouins and Scrolls ................................................................... 168
Towards a Parish-like Society.................................................... 170
5. Formation of an Archdiocese ....................................... 173
1949 Arrival in New Jersey ...................................................... 174
Conflict with the Patriarchate ................................................... 176
1950 The Priests and the Conflict .......................................... 178
Parish Councils and the Conflict .............................................. 180
1952 Patriarchal Vicarate.......................................................... 181
Conflict over the Name: Assyrian vs. Syrian .......................... 185
Name Under the Ottomans ........................................................ 187
Name and the First Immigrants ................................................. 190
Archbishop Barsoum Objects to “Assyrian” ............................... 193
Arrival of Mor Athanasius ........................................................ 197
Patriarch Barsoum Sets the Record ............................................. 199
 Contents xi

The Clash ................................................................................... 201

1954 Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibits… Sold ................................. 205
1955 The Fourth Homs Synod and the American Issue .... 206
1957 A New Patriarch… A New Archdiocese .................... 209
1958 First Cathedral .................................................................. 211
1959 More Bishops Visiting .................................................... 212
1960 First Patriarch on American Soil ................................... 213
Recording the Beth Gazo .......................................................... 219
1960 Archdiocese Consolidated.............................................. 221
6. Growth of the Archdiocese ........................................... 224
1961 Conventions...................................................................... 225
1963 Los Angeles ...................................................................... 227
1966 Chicago .............................................................................. 228
1967 Liturgy Books ................................................................... 229
1968 From Detroit to Southfield ............................................ 232
1968 From West New York to Paramus ............................... 234
1970s New Parishes in Canada ................................................. 236
1971 Patriarch Jacob’s Second Visit ....................................... 237
1974 New Organizations.......................................................... 238
1975 Malankara Parishes .......................................................... 240
1980s More New Parishes ......................................................... 242
xii Contents

1982 Knanaya Parishes ............................................................. 244

1986 Some Statistics .................................................................. 246
1990s Disappearance of the “Old-Timers” ............................ 249
1995 Palm Sunday and the End of an Era ............................ 252
Epilogue ........................................................................... 256
Archdiocese for the Eastern United States ............................. 257
Archdiocese for the Western United States............................ 260
Archdiocese of Canada............................................................... 262
2014 A Syriac-American Patriarch.......................................... 263
Works Cited ..................................................................... 265
Archives Consulted ..................................................................... 265
Interviews ..................................................................................... 265
Periodicals ..................................................................................... 266
Secondary Sources....................................................................... 267
Index ................................................................................ 272
Foreword

By Mor Dionysius Jean Kawak

What binds a community together is their history. Being an
immigrant community constantly under the stress of assim-
ilation versus preservation of one’s culture, it is our
common ancestry and their struggles that will bind us to-
gether. The immigration to the US came in various phases
of oppression our faithful faced in their homelands. Starting
in 1895, and again in 1915, Sayfo survivors went in search
of lands with religious freedom. The waves of immigration
continued with subsequent wars in the Middle East (Arab-
Israeli wars, the Lebanese civil war, and the recent wars in
Iraq and Syria). As the children of survivors of Sayfo, it is
important for the current generation and the generations to
come to read this book. It will give them an insight into the
challenges a community faced as it struggled to establish it-
self and build a society. The community had their Syriac
Orthodox faith in common and it is still the glue that holds
us together.
Sadly, many communities that were established no
longer exist. We hope that this book will shed light onto the
issues immigrant communities face with our ongoing strug-
gle of preserving our culture and heritage and yet be a

xiii
xiv Foreword

productive member of the American society in general. In

addition, we hope that this book will help those who have
lost touch with the church to reconnect and our faithful to
understand where we came from in order to decide where
we should go. It is for this reason that I asked Malphono
George Kiraz to write a book on the history of the Suryoye
in America. I would like to take this opportunity to thank
him. It is hoped that future scholars will build upon this
work, expand upon it by writing about the Suryoye immi-
grants in the current millennium.
Preface
During the summer of 1983, a few weeks after I completed
high school in Bethlehem, our family received a letter from
the American Consulate in Jerusalem: if we wanted to im-
migrate to the United States, our green cards were ready!
This was unexpected. Although my maternal aunt Ma-
riam Khamis Hazou, who then lived in NJ, had begun the
process of immigration paperwork for my mother many
years earlier, immigration was not something on our radar.
The news was very welcome, though: I had just finished
high school, and my only opportunity for higher education
there was to attend the local Bethlehem University. But the
matter carried some urgency: I was well into my seventeenth
year—in other words, a minor. If I hit my next birthday and
became an adult, I would not be able to immigrate with my
mother. We had to immigrate within a few months; this in-
cluded finding funds for travel.
At the time, I had just finished writing a history of the
Syriac Orthodox in the Holy Land in Arabic. I immediately
began to gather information about the church in America,
wanting to know as much as possible about the Syriac Or-
thodox community there before leaving Bethlehem. I
gathered in a folder what I could from the news sections of
church journals such as al-Ḥikmat, the Patriarchal Magazine
of Jerusalem, and the Patriarchal Magazine of Damascus.

xv
xvi Preface

Once in the United States, I began to contact the various

priests and parishes, sending them questionnaires. By
1986—I was then 21—I had written a rough draft of the
book in Arabic. But then school and other projects arose
and got in the way. However, I kept adding notes to my
folder whenever I found new information with the intention
that one day, I would write a history of the Syriac Orthodox
in America. The one folder grew into four larger folders.
The project remained on the back burner for more than
thirty years.
Last year, Mor Dionysius John Kawak, Archbishop of
the Eastern Archdiocese, approached me about writing a
brief history of the Syriac community in North America to
be published for the 2019 Sayfo memorial. I took the op-
portunity to resurrect my notes. The rediscovery of the
Arabic draft from 1986, which I had forgotten about, was a
pleasant surprise. But in order for the project to come to
fruition within the short time allocated (I could only allocate
January 2019 due to other research and teaching commit-
ments), I had to take a pragmatic approach.
First, I would limit the discussion mostly to what I had
written in Arabic in the 1980s, adding only new material
here and there to present a coherent story (the 1980s mate-
rial forms 50% of the final product). Second, I would
confine the discussion to the 100-year period between 1895
and 1995. Both dates have historical significance. The year
1895 was the year of the First Sayfo that triggered the first
 Preface xvii

wave of immigration to North America. And 1995 marked

the passing away of Metropolitan Mor Athanasius Yeshue
Samuel, the first and only Archbishop of the Syrian Ortho-
dox Archdiocese of the United States and Canada. The
following church synod, held in 1995, dismantled the Arch-
diocese and replaced it with three Patriarchal Vicarates: one
for the Eastern United States, another for the Western
United States, and a third for Canada. Each would have its
own archbishop and diocesan structure. Doing justice to the
post-Samuel period—and to all the hard work that his suc-
cessors accomplished—requires extensive research and
another book, hopefully to be written by someone else. As
such, the current book is not a definitive history. Rather, it
is a brief historical account with many shortcomings.
It is worth pausing here to point out some of these
shortcomings. None of the parish archives, except that of
Worcester, have been consulted as they are—if they exist in
the first place—dispersed all over the continent. (The Arch-
diocesan archive, however, was consulted.) While I
managed to interview a few elderly people in the 1980s and
1990s, the opportunity to interview the “old-timers” is now
almost gone. Only a handful survive.
Between 1909 and the 1940s, community writers and
journalists produced a huge body of journalistic literature
that surpasses, by many folds, anything that was produced
in the subsequent period. Only the issues that survive were
consulted. A large portion of this corpus is written in
xviii Preface

Ottoman Turkish, a language in which I am not able to do

research. Understanding this corpus is essential for our un-
derstanding of the social and cultural aspects of the
community and the mindset of its authors during the early
period. This requires careful research by a scholar with the
right linguistic skills. This, too, is for someone else.
While for most of the period, the Syriac Orthodox in
North America were from the Middle East, the second half
of the twentieth century witnessed the formation of Malan-
kara and Knanaya parishes. These were first under Mor
Athanasius; but by the end of the century, they had their
own diocesan structures. That story, while extremely im-
portant, only receives a brief mention in this work.
Another shortcoming is the shift in style from micro-
history for the early period to macro-history for the later
one. The pre-Archdiocesan period up to the end of the
1940s (Chapters 1–4) is more of a “people history.” This
was possible because of the journalistic literature mentioned
above that was produced through the 1940s, as well as the
interviews that were conducted with the elderly members of
the community. The journalistic literature disappeared dur-
ing the Archdiocesan period, and with that we lose historical
contact with the people who made up the community. As a
result, the Archdiocesan period, starting from the 1950s
(Chapters 5–6), is a history of the Archdiocese, top-down.
A better coverage of the Archdiocesan period requires oral
history research; and this is the ripe time to do such
 Preface xix

research, before the immigrants of the 1950s and 1960s

leave this world. Hopefully someone will take up this task.
Given these shortcomings, this book remains mostly
the work of an enthusiastic twenty-one-year-old reworked
by a fifty-three-year-old to make it sound just a bit smarter!
George A. Kiraz
January 27, 2019, Memorial of Fr. Eli Shabo
Acknowledgements
His Holiness Mor Ignatius Aphrem II entrusted me, along
with two other priests, with running the Archdiocese when
it became vacant after his election to the Patriarchate. This
gave me first-hand experience in the difficult task and
helped me appreciate the complexities of operating such a
vast organization. Mor Dionysius John Kawak, who asked
me to write this book, gave me the opportunity to resurrect
my 1980s research which I may never have returned to oth-
erwise.
Fr. John Meno, who was the Archdiocesan Secretary
during the tenure of Mor Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, kindly
answered many questions. Special thanks is due to the vari-
ous priests who answered my questionnaire and my various
letters during the 1980s and to the current priests who gave
a report on their parishes.
Today, there are many resources online that make life
easier for the researcher. Many of the periodicals cited here
are known to me only from MARA, the Modern Assyrian
Research Archive portal at the University of Cambridge.
The New York Public Library kindly provided a microfilm
of Intibāh and Beth Nahrin back in 1985. The journals of the
Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate (al-Ḥikmat and the Patriarchal
Magazine of Jerusalem and Damascus) are now available on
the web site of the Patriarchate’s Department of Syriac
xx
 Acknowledgements xxi

Studies thanks to the efforts of Dayroyo Roger Akhrass and

his team.
Mor Dionysius John Kawak kindly gave me access to
the Archdiocesan archive (i.e., the Mor Athanasius Yeshue
Samuel archive, denoted in the footnotes as “AYS archive”).
Dayroyo Saliba Kassis was very generous with his time in
this regard. Dayroyo Augeen Alkhouri Nimat kindly took
me with him to Worcester in March 2019 to examine the
church archive.
Reading Ottoman Garshuni is a challenge for me. Dur-
ing the 1980s, I used to read, and my father Anton Kiraz
used to translate for me. Recently, Murat Bozluolcay, a grad-
uate student at Princeton University, has been immensely
helpful. I am also grateful to Dr. Nilüfer Hatemi of Prince-
ton University, who graciously allowed me to audit her
Turkish and Ottoman courses during the fall of 2015.
Fr. John Meno and Dr. Khalid Dinno kindly offered to
read the penultimate draft. Their feedback was extremely
valuable. Fr. Joseph Shabo was always helpful with pictures
and documents. Sargon Donabed kindly answered ques-
tions on the Worcester community. Darius and Barbara
Baba hosted me back in 1988 during the youth convention
and again just before this book went to print in March 2019,
which allowed me to add a few anecdotes. Hannah Stork of
the University of Chicago did an amazing job copy editing
the manuscripts. Sebastian Kenoro Kiraz kindly proofed the
index. The professionalism with which Melonie Schmierer-
xxii Acknowledgements

Lee of Gorgias handles book acquisition and production is

superb.
While writing the book, Fr. Eli Shabo, a long-time
friend, passed away. I remember when I visited the East
Coast in 1995 and wanted to interview some of the “old-
timers”; he would spend the entire day taking me from one
house to the next. His funeral in January 2019 brought most
of the priests together and was an opportunity to gather the
most recent statistics about the community. Fr. Eli has been
a help during life and death.
My wife Christine and the kids—Tabetha, Sebastian
Kenoro, and Lucian Nurono—have always been a constant
support. I virtually disappear from their lives every time I
begin work on an intense project, shubqono ! I do hope that
the kids will continue to be part of this beautiful community
and become the “old-timers” long after we go.
Nomenclature
It is not possible to write an account of the “Syriac Ortho-
dox” in North America that avoids nomenclature. While the
self-identification of the early immigrants in their respective
native languages—Turoyo Aramaic, Turkish, Armenian,
and Arabic—was straightforward for the most part, the no-
menclature in English proved more problematic. Standard
designations changed over time, starting with “Assyrian” in
the early 1900s, moving to “Syrian” in the 1950s, and shift-
ing to “Syriac” at the turn of the third millennium, with all
three terms coexisting until the present day.
The term “Syriac” in the Syriac language itself is Suryoyo.
But by the end of the nineteenth century, when our history
of the community in North America begins, the members
of this church only used Syriac liturgically. While those from
the Tur Abdin region of today’s southeast Turkey—who
would end up in Central Falls—spoke Aramaic natively,
others who lived in Kharput and would end in the Worces-
ter, Massachusetts, area spoke Turkish and Armenian.
Residents of Diyarbakır, who immigrated to the New Jersey
and New York areas, spoke Turkish. Immigrants from Mar-
din, who settled in Canada and some parts of New England,
as well as those from Homs, who settled in Detroit, were
Arabic speakers. They all self-identified with the Ara-
bic/Turkish form Suryānī.
xxiii
xxiv Nomenclature

Western scholars who wrote in English about this com-

munity called them “Syrians” and called their language and
culture “Syriac.” Being a branch of Orthodoxy, their church
was designated in English as the “Syrian Orthodox” church.
When Patriarch Peter III/IV visited London in 1874, “Syr-
ian” was the term that was employed in English.
We have no record of what the early immigrants called
themselves in English, or in their native languages for that
matter, when they arrived in North America during the
1880s and 1890s. Our earliest written records are from after
1900; in these, the English gloss used to designate the Syriac
term Suryoyo or the Arabic/Turkish term Suryānī was invari-
ably “Assyrian.” When they wrote in Syriac, they used the
Syriac term Suryoyo; and when they wrote in Turkish or Ar-
abic, they mostly used the term Suryānī.
During the 1950s and after the arrival of Mor Athana-
sius Yeshue Samuel, conflict over the name broke out
between the early immigrants on the one hand and the new
immigrants and the church hierarchy on the other. The new
immigrants of the 1950s were more accustomed to the term
“Syrian” for Suryoyo or Suryānī, as this was the common Eng-
lish usage in the Middle East (although some areas, like
Palestine, used both “Syrian” and “Assyrian” interchangea-
bly). Archbishop Samuel and Patriarch Afram Barsoum also
pushed for the term “Syrian.” All parishes established dur-
ing the 1950s and after were named “Syrian,” while the three
pre-1950 parishes—West New York, Worcester, and
 Nomenclature xxv

Central Falls—continued to use “Assyrian,” along with their

various organizations. Today, only the parish of St. Mary in
Paramus, NJ, despite its move to a new location in 1968,
maintains the term “Assyrian” in its title as well as in the
titles of its older organizations; the parish’s new organiza-
tions, though, do not use the term (e.g. the Aramaic
American Association, founded in 1974, and the Suryani
American Association, founded in 1980).
At the turn of the new millennium, the English-speak-
ing dioceses of the church, especially those in the United
States, asked the Holy Synod if they could use “Syriac Or-
thodox” instead of “Syrian Orthodox.” (The Catholics and
the Maronites had already begun using “Syriac.”) The Synod
approved, and this has been the term used for parishes es-
tablished during the third millennium. As such, today all
three terms—“Assyrian,” “Syrian,” and “Syriac”—are used
concurrently, but mostly in mutual exclusivity.
In what follows, I shall adopt the generic term “Syriac
Orthodox” when speaking generally of the church and its
members. When citing names of churches and organiza-
tions and quoting material from English sources, the term
“Assyrian” is used for the earlier period, “Syrian” for the
middle period, and “Syriac” for the latest period, denoting
the proper names used by adherents in their own historical
contexts. Turkish and Arabic sources usually use the term
Suryānī, and this has been translated as “Syriac” when I was
unable to find an English name for the entity.
xxvi Nomenclature

While authors writings in Arabic and Turkish generally

used the term Suryānī as mentioned earlier, writers such as
Naum Faik and others evoked the names of ancient cul-
tures—such as “Aramaean” and “Assyrian”—interchange-
ably, sometimes in the same paragraph. Whenever these
terms occur in quotes, I have given the original in square
brackets in order to avoid any confusion. Unlike the modern
divisive usage of these terms, the early usage was more har-
monious. These terms were treated as if they were
synonyms. This is best exemplified with the following edi-
torial written in Arabic by Naum Faik in 1917:1
For about twenty-five centuries, our Assyrian home-
land [waṭanunā al-ʾĀthūrī ] was under the control of
many nations… Its Aramaean inhabitants [sukkānuhu
al-ʾĀrāmiyīn] were under the yoke of slavery… We and
our homeland, O Syriac people [maʿšar al-Suryān], are
like a ball in the hand of sports players… We the
Aramaeans [al-ʾĀrāmiyūn] have been suffering for
2,500 years… What shall we, the Syriac [al-Suryān]
people, do? … Which nation is more oppressed than
our Syriac [al-Suryān] nation? And which people were
subdued for such a long time more than our
Aramaean people [šaʿbuna al-ʾĀrāmī ]? And which

1 Beth Nahrin 2 (no. 5 & 6, 1917) p. 1–3.

 Nomenclature xxvii

people was suppressed with much persecution as

much as our Assyrian people [qawmunā al-ʾĀthūrī ]?
The early immigrants did not experience conflict over
the name. The conflict only began in the 1950s with the for-
mation of an Archdiocesan entity. This conflict is discussed
in Chapter 5.
Prologue
This is a history of the Syriac Orthodox in North America
spanning about 100 years from 1895 to 1995. As such, it is
not a history of a cohesive community; rather, it is a history
of diverse communities speaking different languages, arriv-
ing in the United States at different points of history, and
overlapping with each other.
Apart from being Syriac Orthodox, the first wave of
immigrants of the late nineteenth century did not have
much in common with those who began to arrive in the
mid-twentieth century and beyond. The world of those
from Kharput, Diyarbakır, and Mardin who were victims of
the 1895 massacres—the First Sayfo—even differed from
the world of those who immigrated as a result of the 1915
Sayfo. Twenty years spanning two centuries is not a short
time. Social, cultural, and political attitudes toward the out-
side world and toward the internal community itself were
not immune to changes and shifts.
The early immigrants had no church and no priest for
almost thirty years. They knew that, in the homeland, they
belonged to the Suryānī Qadīm or “Old Syrian” Millet within
the Ottoman system (a system that provided non-Muslim
confessional communities a way to manage themselves in
terms of “personal law”). This was not simply a spiritual be-
longing, but rather an “ethnic” or “quasi-national”

1
2 Prologue

belonging that, within a few decades in the diaspora, would

translate for some active members into full-fledged nation-
alism. Imagine someone born in the diaspora in the mid-
1880s. That child would be almost twenty or twenty-five be-
fore the first priest arrived in New Jersey and almost thirty
before a priest would arrive in New England. Until the late
1920s, there was no church to glue these “Syriac Orthodox”
together. What they had were secular associations and—de-
spite the small number of the community—tons of them.
This is not the same social and religious dynamic or
community structure that a new arrival in the 1950s or 1960s
encountered. An immigrant in this later period—especially
in the New Jersey and New England areas—was welcomed
into a structured church organization with churches and
parish priests and an Archdiocese and a resident archbishop
that gave the community a sense of cohesion: that is, into a
Syriac Orthodox Church in North America. The world of
the 1910s through the 1920s would have been an alien world
to these newcomers.
The linguistic diversity of the immigrants also contrib-
uted to the fact that this is a history of communities, plural.
The early immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth century came from environments in which Turkish,
Armenian, Arabic, and Aramaic were spoken—probably in
this order of usage. Though some would have spoken more
than one language (Fr. Favlos Samuel knew Syriac, Turkish,
 Prologue 3

Armenian, Arabic, and Kurdish),1 forming a small, united

community could not have been easy for them. Each had
their own customs and varieties of social norms.
After World War I, the dismantling of the Ottoman
Empire into nation states created Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis,
Palestinians, and Turks in the Middle East. This added to
the diversity of the spring from which later immigrants
would gush. Arrivals in the 1950s and beyond were citizens
of these new nation states and associated with them socially,
linguistically, and culturally. What connected them to the
early immigrants among whom they would live was Syriac
Orthodoxy, but only Syriac Orthodoxy. The early immi-
grants became “the Americans,” or the “old-timers.” Their
number shrank as the number of new immigrants grew.
This dynamic makeup of parishes is a characteristic of
the diaspora. My family immigrated first in 1983 to Los An-
geles, where my older sister Guita lived. By 1990, when I
moved to England for my higher education, I was a very
active member of St. Ephrem’s parish in Los Angeles. I
knew almost everyone, and almost anyone who was a regu-
lar churchgoer knew me: I was the only deacon to hold the
censer on every church occasion between 1983 and 1990.

1 Interview of Fr. Abdulnur (Albert) Samuel, the son of Fr.

Favlos on June 19, 1995. His obituary in the Worcester Telegram and
Gazette mentions seven languages, presumably including English;
the seventh language may have been French.
4 Prologue

Even if you did not want to see me, you were out of luck!
But now, when I visit Los Angeles, I hardly recognize any-
one. The vast majority are newer immigrants.
In 1996, I moved to New Jersey, where my aunt Mariam
lived, and my wife Christine joined me from Los Angeles
after we got married in 1998. We became active members
of St. Mark’s Cathedral, and it took us some time to get to
know people. Within a few years, we got to know my aunt’s
“gang” and met new friends of our own, and faces became
more familiar. But today, twenty years later, we do not rec-
ognize the majority of the parishioners. New immigrants
keep arriving due to the constant wars of the Middle East,
and we cannot keep up with them. We are becoming
strangers in our own parish and are on our way to becoming
the “old-timers.” Our children, if they persist in attending
church activities after we go, will become “the Americans.”
The sad part of the story is that the new immigrants are
not increasing the numbers of the North American commu-
nities but, in a way, replacing the children of earlier
immigrants. It seems that only two or three generations can
exist distinctly before the melting pot of American society
takes over. There are very few cases of fourth- or fifth-gen-
eration Syriac Americans who are still active. The rest no
longer identify as Syriac-Americans (or Assyrian Americans,
as did the early immigrants) and may not even known their
family history.
 Prologue 5

Writing this book, I felt that I was jumping between

worlds: the world of the survivors of the 1895 Sayfo, the
world of the survivors of the 1915 Sayfo, the world of the
refugees of the Palestinian-Israeli conflicts of 1948 and
1967, and the world of the refugees of the modern conflicts
of the Middle East. I was jumping from “Assyrian,” to “Syr-
ian,” to “Syriac.” If the book seems disconnected, then
perhaps I have accomplished my task.
1. Sayfo I… Immigrants I
(1880s–1900)

The Syriac Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire

had shrunk to a small minority of less than half a million by
the second half of the nineteenth century. One English mis-
sionary named Oswald Parry, who visited them in 1892,
even estimated their population at no more than 200,000.1
The Patriarchs lived at Deir al-Zaʿfarān in Mardin, and most

as Jerusalem, as far west as Aleppo and as far east as Mosul.

of the faithful resided as far north as Kharput, as far south

While Syriac remained the liturgical language, Aramaic was

only spoken in Tur Abdin. The Syriacs of Kharput and
Edessa (Urfa) spoke Turkish and Armenian, those of Diyar-
bakır spoke Turkish, and inhabitants of the region around
Mardin and further south spoke Arabic. Kurdish was the
language in many villages. Many people spoke more than
one language. Despite this geographic and linguistic diver-
sity, they all knew that they belonged to a ṭāʾifa, or
community. By the end of the nineteenth century, the com-
munity would evolve into a millet, or a nation. We see the

1 O. Parry, Six Months in a Syrian Monastery (1895) p. vii.

7
8 1. Sayfo I… Immigrants I

shift from a ṭāʾifa to a millet in many letters that were sent to

the Patriarchs.1
Safety was always an issue, and Syriac villages were
raided now and then. We know of raids and massacres that
occurred, for example, in 1835 in Beth Zabdai, 1839 in
Arbo, and 1855 in Kfarzeh,2 all situated in today’s southeast
Turkey. In August 1888, Kurdish Aghas led attacks on Syr-
iac villages in Tur Abdin. The Syriac Orthodox Patriarch
Peter requested that the central government investigate, but
to no avail. Further Kurdish raids targeted several Syriac vil-
lages in October 1889. About 40 villagers, including women
and children, were killed. These were the first signs of unrest
in the areas where the Syriac Orthodox lived.3
The greatest of all massacres occurred in 1895, some-
times called the First Sayfo. (The Syriac term sayfo, meaning
“sword,” has become a synonym for “genocide.”) On Oc-
tober 1, 1895, two thousand Armenians assembled in the
capital, Istanbul, to petition for reform. But the rally was
broken up violently by the police. This triggered massacres

1 These letters are kept at Deir al-Zaʿfarān in Mardin. For this

period, see Khalid Dinno’s The Syrian Orthodox Christians in the Late
Ottoman Period and Beyond (2017).
2 J. Çiçek, Mimre d-ʿal Sayfo (1981) p. 8–15; A. Barsoum, His-

tory of Tur Abdin (2008) p. 313–314, 364.

3 de Courtois, The Forgotten Genocide: Eastern Christians, the Last

Arameans (2004) p. 93–95.

 (1880s–1900) 9

of Armenians in Istanbul, and soon these massacres took an

anti-Christian tone and moved to the interior of the country.
The Syriac Orthodox became victims of this violence.
The Syriac perspective of these events is described by
Isaac Armalet.1 In November 1895, Kurds began attacking
Christians within the city of Diyarbakır, burning shops and
killing people. The Patriarch of the Church, Abdulmasih,
who by then had succeeded Patriarch Peter in 1895, went
immediately from his Patriarchal residence in Mardin to Di-
yarbakır. The governor promised the Patriarch that the
Syriacs would not be harmed. The Patriarch gathered as
many people as he could in the Church of the Virgin Mary
for their own protection. Oral history reports that in order
to get to the church, the Patriarch had to walk on the
corpses of women and children.
Attacks began on Syriac towns and villages within the
governate of Diyarbakır and even as far as Edessa and Nis-
ibin. Mardin was about to face the same fate, but the local
Muslims of Mardin stood against the attackers and saved the
Christians.
This was but one of the reasons that some Syriac people
began to immigrate to the United States. Some had done so
before the massacres, looking for a better life, and had
stayed in the United States for good. Others came for a
short period to work and then traveled back to the old

1 I. Armalet, al-Quṣārā fī Nakabāt al-Naṣārā, (1919) p. 34–66.

 10 1. Sayfo I… Immigrants I

country. We have been able to gather the personal stories of

a few early immigrants.

1840s Shammas Micha, the First Immigrant

During the nineteenth century, American missionaries from
the Boston area were active in Mesopotamia and Persia
among the Eastern Christians. When they were in Mosul,
they met a shammas, or deacon, named Micha al-Naqqār.
Micha belonged to the Syriac Orthodox Church and was a
skilled scribe.
Micha had somehow learned English, allowing him to
serve as a translator and interpreter for American and Brit-
ish missionaries: at some point in the 1840s, he was at the
service of an Indian priest named Joseph Matthew, who was
on his way to Mardin to be consecrated as bishop Athana-
sius for the Syriac Orthodox in India. Matthew spoke
English, and Micha was his guide.
Micha was subsequently hired by American and British
missionaries and accompanied them on several missions
and expeditions. One missionary described him as an “in-
telligent and valuable assistant.”1 During one of these
expeditions, the missionaries wanted to record a Jew reading
the scriptures in Jewish Aramaic. They turned to Micha,

1Thomas Laurie, Dr. Grant and the Mountain Nestorians (1853)

p. 214.
 (1880s–1900) 11

who listened carefully to the reader and produced a tran-

scription in the Syriac Serto script in two manuscripts.
Today, the two manuscripts are at Harvard University con-
taining biblical texts in the Jewish Aramaic dialect of
Zakho.1
It seems that when the American missionaries returned
to the United States, Micha went with them and settled in
Boston. He worked for the American Board of Commis-
sioners for Foreign Missions, the entity that was sending
missionaries to the Middle East. We do not know much
about Micha after his arrival in Boston. He is mentioned in
some of the records of the American Board, but it is unlikely
that there was a Syriac Orthodox community to speak of at
the time. Much later, we have record of a Hanna Johnson
from Mosul who was active in Boston in 1918. Hanna’s last
name indicates that his father must have been an American;
it is possible that Hanna was a descendant of Micha, as we
do not know of any other immigrants from Mosul in the
Boston area at that time.2

1 Joshua Burns, “A Jewish Neo-Aramaic Translation of Gen-

esis recorded in Mosul, Iraq, ca. 1841…” in Aramaic Studies 5 (no.

1, 2007) p. 47–74.
2 Hanna Johnson is mentioned in The New Assyria 2 (no. 24,

1918) p. 9.
 12 1. Sayfo I… Immigrants I

It might be the case that other Syriac Orthodox arrived

here and there during the early and mid-1800s, but we do
not have any records of immigrants until the first major
wave began to arrive in the 1880s. An article in The New Beth-
Nahreen confirms that some of the early immigrants arrived
after encounters with American missionaries in the Middle
East. These immigrants began to arrive around 1883.1

1884 Ḥaji Yakob, the English Speaker of Diyarbakır

The English missionary Oswald Parry visited Diyarbakır in
1892. At the time, the bishop of the town was Bishop Ab-
dullah, who would later become Patriarch. “In the
morning,” Parry wrote later, “the Bishop sent his ‘peace’ to
me by the mouth of a man called Yakob.”2 Yakob spoke
English because he had previously spent nearly six years in
New York. If Parry met Yakob immediately after his return
from New York, then Yakob must have reached New York
no later than 1886. If one is to allow travel time and a period
during which Yakob resided in Diyarbakır before meeting
Parry, then Yakob could have reached the United States be-
fore 1885 or even before 1884.
Yakob became Parry’s guide for most of his journey in
the Middle East, apart from a portion of the trip when Parry

1 The New Beth-Nahreen 3 [2nd series] (no. 4, 1941) p. 2.

2 Parry 42.
 (1880s–1900) 13

went to Mosul. If Parry chatted with Yakob about his expe-

rience in the United States during their long days of travel,
he did not record their conversations in his book. All that
Parry reports is that Yakob
was a tall, fair complexioned Syrian, with thick hair,
and a beard of five days’ growth. Having been in New
York for nearly six years, earning money as a ribbon-
weaver, he spoke English fluently, but with the most
unusual grammar.
We know from later accounts that many of the immi-
grants worked as unskilled laborers, especially in mills. We
also have a hint that immigrants learned English and were
able to become fluent within five or six years.
Having visited Jerusalem before and “been tattooed
with the sign of the cross at the Syrian church,” Yakob was
a Ḥaji. This gave him status within the Syriac community.
When he accompanied Parry to visit Patriarch Peter, Parry
took a seat next to the Patriarch; and Yakob was seated di-
rectly next to Parry because he was treated “with a Ḥaji’s
honour.”1 We also know that Yakob was multi-talented: he
played the kanun well.2

1 Ibid., 63.
2 Ibid., 88.
 14 1. Sayfo I… Immigrants I

Unlike Shammas Micha, who was probably on his own,

Yakob was most likely part of the Diyarbakır immigrant
community that lived in the New York or New Jersey area.

1887 Ḥaji Thomas of Kharput

Ḥaji Thomas Ovanis, or Quoyoon, came from Kharput to
Worcester, MA, in 1887 at the age of seventeen.1 Quoyoon
was his real last name; but as it was illegal to immigrate dur-
ing those times, many took Armenian names to be able to
leave Ottoman territories. Ovanis was Thomas’s fake Arme-
nian last name.
Thomas began to work in Worcester to support him-
self; and when it was time to get married, he went back to
Kharput in 1895 and married a girl named Sophia from the
Dasho family, who were merchants. Thomas and his wife
remained in Kharput until 1912. Then Thomas came back
to Worcester through Antep (now Gaziantep), bringing
along two of his children, both of whom were born in An-
tep—indicating how long these journeys took; he left
Sophia and his other children behind.
George was one of Thomas’s children whom I inter-
viewed back in 1988. Just before sending this book to press,

1 Interview with George Quoyoon, Thomas’s son, at the

house of Darius and Barbara Baba in April 1988. Thomas is Bar-
bara’s paternal grandfather.
 (1880s–1900) 15

George’s daughter Barbara told me that George was

“marched” (i.e. taken by the authorities in groups that
marched either to their death or to labor camps). He never
mentioned this to me in 1988; and apparently, he never
mentioned it even to his own children until he grew quite
old. George was seven when he was marched. His mother
Sophia, fearing that he might be taken away, always made
sure that his pockets were full of bulgur (cracked wheat). “If
they take you,” she told little George, “you can spit into the
bulgur and eat it.” George never told his children how he
managed to escape and survive the march.
Sophia followed the family to America in 1921. Bring-
ing little George with her safe and sound, she wanted him
to become the Sahwshbino of Jesus—the person holding the
baptismal water, head covered, during procession—for
Epiphany (the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus in the Syriac
rite). As churches needed funding, the custom was to bid
for the position, the highest bidder getting to hold the water.
But Sophia had no money. She told the priest how George
had survived Sayfo, and the priest allowed George to hold
the water during the procession without bidding. Many
years later, when George was an elderly man, he made a me-
morial for his mother at the church and gave a donation in
16 1. Sayfo I… Immigrants I

the amount that she would have bid, adding to it inflation

and interest.1

Aharon and Charlie’s Journey from Kharput

Ḥaji Thomas was not the only one to arrive in 1887.
Thomas’s son George tells us that two other individuals
known as Mr. Aslan and Mr. Safar had also arrived that same
year from Kharput. Living conditions were harsh, and the
new immigrants were poor. About 20 boys lived in one
house with only five beds or so; they had to take shifts sleep-
ing. All were unskilled laborers and worked in wire mills
making fencing material and other wire products. Whenever
an individual was able, he brought more relatives over from
the old country. This is how the community grew.
The trip from the old country was difficult, sometimes
taking a year or more. The Safars had a difficult experience.
We know only of the first leg of the journey from Kharput
to Istanbul.2 Mr. Safar left Kharput on foot with his two
children, Aharon and Charlie, passing through rigorous
mountain terrain. They had to pack as much food as

1 Just before going to press, I discovered that the Ellis Island

Oral History Project has a number of interviews with the Worces-

ter Kharput immigrants: Maljan Chavoor (DP-10), Farida Ohan
Chavoor (EI-403), Pauline Perch (EI-789), and Charles Perch (EI-
790).
2 S. Donabed, Remnants of Heroes (2003) p. 57–58, 61–62.
 (1880s–1900) 17

possible, for the journey would take two months. What they
could not pack, the group had to supplement with whatever
wild fruits and berries they could find. Others may have
taken a different route to Istanbul. Those who could afford
it would have travelled north by land to Trabzon and then
taken a ship on the Black Sea heading to Istanbul.
There were other practical difficulties along the way.
Once in Istanbul, travelers needed passports and other pa-
perwork to continue their journey; acquiring the necessary
documents sometimes took months.
We do not have the details of their journey from Istan-
bul to Massachusetts, but they likely would have boarded a
boat and stopped first somewhere in Europe, such as Mar-
seille. Sometimes there would be another wait in Marseille
or a stop at another European destination, at times due to
US immigration quota requirements. Finally, they would
board another ship from Europe to the eastern shores of
the United States.
Some immigrants came through Cuba.1 We have a later
account from the Saraffian family of Diyarbakır, indicating
that Thomas Saraffian’s family remained in Cuba for eight
years, from 1920 to 1928, waiting for an opportunity to

1 Interview with Thomas Saraffian and Gloria Palak-Saraf-

fian, January 26, 2009. (Gloria is the daughter of Elias Palak who
is the nephew of Naum Palak (Faik).
18 1. Sayfo I… Immigrants I

enter the United States. While in Cuba, the immigrants

worked in beading and sewing to support themselves.

Bringing Brides
Thomas’s decision to return from Worcester to Kharput to
get married was not uncommon; there were not that many
girls among the immigrants. George Mardinly lived in New
Jersey as a single man. One day, he received a letter from his
family that his young sister would soon be traveling to visit
him. He immediately wrote back: “Bring me a bride.” The
family found a thirteen-year-old bride in Diyarbakır and dis-
patched her with the sister.1
Arranged marriages were the norm, but sometimes
there were complications. My paternal great uncle Barsoum
David Kiraz left Ivos, a village in the mountains between
Kharput and Malatia, and immigrated to the United States
at the beginning of the twentieth century. He settled in New
Jersey and was supposed to stay only temporarily, for he’d
left behind an Armenian girl named Lousazine who was
promised to him. It seems that Barsoum was not in a hurry
to go back and claim his bride. The parents of the girl in-
quired, and Barsoum agreed to marry the girl only if her
parents sent her to America. The parents refused, but

1 Interview with Dorothy Boyajy (George’s daughter) on June

21, 1995.
 (1880s–1900) 19

breaking an engagement would be scandalous. The Kiraz

family offered to take Lousazine for their younger son
Arush (also known as Artin), who stayed in the Middle East.
Sometimes, young men who had already obtained citi-
zenship would travel to Cuba, where a community of
immigrants was waiting, and marry a Syriac girl looking for
an opportunity to move to the United States. The couple
would return to the US, and the family would follow later.
Such marriages would have taken place at churches of other
denominations.

1888 George who Married the Prime Minister’s Cousin

George Barsoom’s story is an interesting one. He was born
in Kharput in 1872 and studied at Euphrates College. At the
age of sixteen, in 1888, his father Agabab Barsoom was al-
ready living in Worcester, MA. Agabab sent for his son, and
George crossed the seas to be with his father.
It seems that the family, after saving some money in the
US, decided to go back to Kharput. Upon their return,
George found that life in Kharput no longer appealed to
him, so he decided to return to the United States. We do not
know when he traveled back, but he settled once more in
Worcester.
Later, George attended a theological seminary in Chi-
cago and then entered Baltimore Medical College to study
medicine. But he did not have sufficient funds to complete
 20 1. Sayfo I… Immigrants I

his medical studies. He moved to Philadelphia and met a girl

at the church he attended.
It seems that George’s family may have had contacts
with American missionaries in Kharput and may have be-
come Protestant. Attending the seminary in Chicago and
planning for ministry must have taken place outside of the
Syriac Orthodox Church. Nevertheless, George kept in
touch with his people.
George did well. He met and fell in love with a girl in
Philadelphia, Clara Campbell, who was of Scottish descent.
Her father was a first cousin of the English Premier, Sir
Henry Campbell-Bannerman who later served as prime
minister from 1905–1908. George and Clara had two chil-
dren. After some misfortunes, George moved to California;
later, he went back to Worcester, where he opened a busi-
ness. He moved again to California in 1932 and spent the
rest of his days there, dying in 1936. His cousin Yacoob Aga
Elbag, who lived in Fresno at the time, died two days after
George.1

1889 The Doctor and the Merchant

While many of the early immigrants were unskilled laborers,
others arrived with established careers under their belts.

1 Assyrian Progress (Jan 1937) p. 24–25, 30.

 (1880s–1900) 21

Such was the case of Abraham Yoosuf and Balshasar Alex-

ander.
Abraham was born in Kharput on December 12, 1866.1
He was a gifted child, and his parents sent him to study at
Central Turkey College in Antep around 1886. After gradu-
ation, he taught at the College until 1889 when he decided
to immigrate to the United State to further his education.
He arrived in the United States on November 30, 1889, and
attended Baltimore Medical School. His father died while he
was still in medical school, meaning he had to care for his
family in addition to his studies. After obtaining his medical
degree, he opened a practice in Worcester in 1897. Many of
the community members would have him as their physician.
Later, he went to London for postgraduate studies and then
to Vienna to specialize. He returned to Turkey, where he
served as a volunteer surgeon during the Balkan Wars dur-
ing 1912 and 1913 and was decorated by the Sultan for his
services.
Dr. Yoosuf moved back to the United States and en-
listed in World War I, serving as a Major. He wore his
military uniform during many community events, as can be
seen in many pictures. He was one of the attendees of the

1 Shlomo 11 (no. 10, 1989); The New Assyrian 3 (no. 32, 1919)

p. 8; a brief biography is also provided by Tomas Beth-Avdallah

(ed.) in Abraham K. Yoosuf, Assyria and the Paris Peace Conference
(2017) p. 13.
22 1. Sayfo I… Immigrants I

Paris Peace Conference that took place after World War I,

advocating for Assyrian national interests. Back in Worces-
ter after the war, Dr. Yoosef helped in building St. Mary’s
Church and became its first president in 1923. He was active
helping immigrants and travelled to Washington DC at the
end of 1921 to appear in front of the Immigration Commit-
tee to advocate that they provide entry to many community
members who were detained in Istanbul by the Turkish gov-
ernment.1 Dr. Yoosef passed away on December 26, 1924,
shortly after the Church of St. Mary was consecrated.
Balshasar Alexander (also known as B. Iskandar) was
born in Kharput on March 9, 1854, to a family whose busi-
ness was cloth dyeing. He left Kharput in 1890 to look for
modern dyeing methods and settled in New England. After
working for ten years, he saved enough money to bring the
rest of his family after the 1895 massacres and started a busi-
ness of his own in Providence, RI. He was responsible for
the establishment of the Assyrian Charity Association in
Providence in 1906.
During 1913, he migrated to Fresno, California, and be-
came active among the community. Balshasar is the earliest
person that we know of who moved from the East Coast to
California, though a community existed there, at least in
Fresno, before Balshasar’s arrival. Later, he returned to the

1 The Union (no. 28, 1921) p. [4].

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