Israel finally recognizes the Armenian Genocide. I wanted to hear what one grandson of a survivor thought.

One of the most haunting quotations ever attributed to Adolf Hitler had nothing, at least on its face, to do with the Jews.

As Nazi Germany prepared to invade Poland in 1939, some of Hitler’s generals reportedly expressed concern that the world would not tolerate the planned extermination of Europe’s Jews. Hitler dismissed those fears with a straightforward question: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

The Armenian Genocide had already begun fading from the world’s collective memory barely two decades after it occurred. If one of history’s first indisputable genocides could disappear from the world’s consciousness so quickly, Hitler believed, why should anyone expect history to remember another?

The message is all too clear. Recognizing genocide cannot change history, erase the trauma, or bring the victims back to life. What it can do is tell future generations that entire peoples cannot simply be erased from history and then forgotten.

That was the first thought that crossed my mind when I saw this headline last week:

ISRAEL RECOGNIZES ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AMID FROSTY TIES WITH TURKEY

My next thought was shame. How could it be that we were only doing this now?

As Jews, we understand better than anyone what it means to ask the world to remember. We have spent generations insisting that the Holocaust be documented, studied, acknowledged, and, most of all, never denied. It always seemed natural to me that the Jewish state would be among the first to recognize another nation’s historic tragedy.

I wasn’t quite sure how to process the news. Rather than reading some analysis or listening to yet another podcast discussing it, I decided to go somewhere far more interesting.

A few hours later I was walking through Jaffa Gate toward Elia Photo Shop, where I knew I would find the person who could help me make sense of it all.

Many of you have met my friend Elia through these pages before. His family’s photography gallery is one of my favorite places in the Old City, its walls covered with extraordinary images of Jerusalem stretching back more than a century. Every visit begins with a cup of espresso rather than Turkish coffee, breaking from local custom here. I never asked why, but I have my suspicions. Ordering Turkish coffee in an Armenian shop feels a bit like asking a Jew to drive a German car.

The espresso and small talk inevitably give way to a history lesson as Elia pulls another remarkable photograph from a drawer and somehow makes the Jerusalem of a hundred years ago come vividly back to life.

Long before his family became known for preserving........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)