PARAMUS, N.J.—“The AMAA (Armenian Missionary Association of America) has been in my blood from an early age,” stated Dr. Raffy Hovanessian in a telephone conversation with this writer. The eminent community activist will be the master of ceremonies for the AMAA Centennial Banquet. He will be sharing the honors with AMAA leaders and banquet co-chairs Drs. Nurhan and Celeste Telfeyan Helvacian.
The banquet on the East Coast will take place on Saturday evening, Oct. 21, at the elegant Glenpointe Marriott in Teaneck, N.J. In Oct. 2018, the AMAA will crown its centennial anniversary celebrations with a banquet in California.
Dr. Hovanessian, who has been intimately associated with the AMAA since childhood, was born in Jerusalem to parents who were orphans, and he was baptized in the St. Hreshdagabed Armenian Apostolic church. His mother hailed from Yozgat, and his father’s family was from Arapgir, where they lost more than 30 family members during the Genocide.
His family, forced to leave his birthplace during the Arab-Israeli war, went to Aleppo, Syria, where he received his secondary education and the first two years of his college education in schools run by the Evangelical church. His mother, who was a nurse, took care of the survivors of the Genocide in Aleppo, giving injections, doing home deliveries, and “charging nothing,” Dr. Hovanessian pointed out.
“My father was a shoemaker and made a decent living,” he related, and revealed that his father in the orphanage did not know his family name, but because Dr. Raffy’s paternal grandfather’s name was Hovaness, the family name became Hovanessian. However, he found out later that he was really a Hamalian.