“It was a wonderful place, you know? The property had been acquired. It was previously a synagogue and there was a small parking lot. It was a lovely place to grow up and have years of church community there,” Kradjian said. “But we were outgrowing it, certainly, and I think some people also felt that to be able to shape our identity and our campus from the ground up, have our authentic Armenian architecture, have a place where we can have classrooms and a hall and a memorial park.”
Kradjian’s parents and other couples in the community formed the church in the 1970s, wanting to create a place for their children to learn about their Armenian identity.
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In January, I received an email from a frustrated furniture shopper.
“Months ago, my new wife and I ordered a bed frame and headboard for our new top-of-the-line Tempurpedic mattress,” J.B. Harris, a shopper and reader in Florida, lamented. Though they received their mattress within a reasonable time frame, the bed frame and headboard were missing in action. “It’s been an existential nightmare, as confounding as Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot.”
When I reconnected with Harris in April, he had finally received his shipment after many months of waiting. “West Elm has the worst supply chain issues of any retailer I have ever experienced,” he told me. “My advice to West Elm shoppers: If you cannot buy an item from a showroom floor, expect to wait weeks if not months to receive it.” He and his wife slept on a mattress on the floor fo
President Biden on Saturday formally recognized as a genocide
the killing of more than 1 million Armenians starting in 1915, a label long used by historians but resisted by U.S. presidents to avoid angering Turkey, an important ally.
The decision is a victory for Armenian diaspora communities, notably in Southern California, that have spent decades fighting for such recognition only to be repeatedly disappointed by previous presidents.
“Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring,” Biden said.
He added that Armenian Americans “have enriched the United States in countless ways, but they have never forgotten the tragic history that brought so many of their ancestors to our shores.”