To make its operations more efficient, the AGBU maintained permanent liaisons with the Allied military authorities, turning to them for support in organizing rescue missions. In particular, it sought assistance from the French colonel Edouard Brémond, who was attached to the Allied general staff. The Union requested that Brémond ask his officers for detailed information about the Armenian deportees in the occupied areas.114 The result was that it became possible, from mid-November on, to send AGBU aid in the form of food and clothing to the British army in Aqaba for distribution to the surviving genocide victims.115
With the fall of Jerusalem to Allied troops on 9 December 1917, the British discovered some five hundred Armenian deportees thronging the city’s Armenian Monastery of St. James. Few had received help of any sort. The AGBU decided to send them £300 in emergency relief, routing the money through British intelligence services.116 In the following months, its Cairo head office continued to send large sums, on a systematic basis, to all districts in which deportees were found. By April 1918, Jerusalem had become a refuge for six hundred Armenian genocide survivors, twenty-three of them clergymen.117 Read all
Humanitarian Assistance to Genocide Survivors in Palestine, 1917-1918
Young genocide survivors found in the village of Sheikh Said in the Hawran desert in January 1918 (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/ Paris).
Victoria Arsharuni in Jerusalem in June 1918
(Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris).