AGBU Chapters in the United States of America
We have already had occasion to describe the conditions that allowed the AGBU to put down roots in the United States as early as 1907, under the guidance of a member of the Central Board of Directors, Vahan Kurkjian, who re-mained the soul of the American organization until 1940. In the short space of a few years, several dozen chapters of the Union were founded in the United States. On the eve of World War I, there were no fewer than fifty-five active AGBU chapters in the country, forty-five of them on the East Coast and in the Midwest, and ten on the West Coast, mainly in California. The presence, in 1914, of an Armenian community of more than 120,000 souls, almost all of them from the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, goes a long way toward explaining the AGBU’s expansion in America. With strong ties to the land of their birth, these Armenians constituted the only major group outside Egypt capable, at war’s end, of providing financial support to the genocide survivors massed in the Near East, Armenia, and Greece. Moreover, as we have already noted, the Union’s archives show that much of the financial support for its humanitarian operations came from the United States, ... Read all
The AGBU’s Local Chapters