About Magen David

Magen David

Magen David is the only Jewish newspaper in Armenia: a monthly, trilingual community newspaper published in Yerevan by the Jewish Community of Armenia, the country's oldest and largest Jewish non-governmental organisation. Its name is the Hebrew for Shield of David, the Star of David; in Armenian it is rendered Davti Vahan, David's Shield, and in Russian, the language of most of its contents, as Magen David in Cyrillic transliteration. Established in 2002, it serves one of the smallest Jewish communities in the former Soviet Union — a community numbered, in varying estimates over the years, from a few hundred to around two thousand people, concentrated in Yerevan. A monthly newspaper for so small a readership might seem a fragile enterprise, and in 2021 it nearly closed when its state funding was temporarily suspended. That it survives, edited from a small office at 69 Yeznik Koghbatsi Street in Yerevan and distributed free of charge, says much about the role it plays: Magen David is less a commercial newspaper than the printed bulletin, memory book and public face of Armenian Jewry.

Founded by the Jewish Community of Armenia in 2002

Magen David was established by the Jewish Community of Armenia in 2002; advance reporting in September 2002 announced that the first issue of the newspaper for Armenia's Jewish community would be released soon, with support associated with the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress. Its publisher, the Jewish Community of Armenia, had been founded in 1991 by a group of activists including Gershon Burstein and William Weiner, and since 1996 it has been headed by Rima Varzhapetyan-Feller. The community organisation is affiliated with the World Jewish Congress and the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress and represents Armenia's Jewish citizens and residents in the Council for National Minorities, the state consultative body through which Armenia's recognised minorities receive support. The newspaper is likewise affiliated with the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress. That institutional parentage explains both the paper's existence and its funding model: throughout most of its history Magen David has been financed largely by grants from Armenia's state budget allocated through the Council for National Minorities — the same mechanism by which the Armenian state supports the cultural life of its Assyrian, Greek, Kurdish, Yezidi, Russian and other minority communities — supplemented, in its moment of crisis, by private help from within the community.

A Trilingual Newspaper

Magen David is published in three languages: Russian, Armenian and Hebrew. Most articles appear in Russian, reflecting the linguistic reality of Armenia's Jews, many of whom are Russian-speaking by upbringing, with some articles fully translated into Armenian and Hebrew and others summarised in those languages. The trilingual format is a small editorial operation's answer to a three-way audience: Russian for the community's everyday reading, Armenian for integration into the surrounding society and for Armenian-speaking readers and officials, and Hebrew for religious and cultural connection to Israel and to Jewish tradition. The paper's Armenian name, Davti Vahan, is a translation rather than a transliteration of the Hebrew title, while its Russian name transliterates the Hebrew — a tiny masthead lesson in the community's position between cultures. Few newspapers in this directory publish in three languages on a monthly community budget; that Magen David does so is the clearest measure of the bridge-building function its publishers intend for it.

Editors: Livshitz and Hovhannesyan

The newspaper is co-edited by Adelina Livshitz and Karen Hovhannesyan. Livshitz, listed as editor-in-chief, is a Ukraine-born Armenian-Israeli journalist who became the paper's chief editor in August 2009. Hovhannesyan, listed as editor, is an Armenian-Jewish native of Yerevan who worked earlier as an electrical engineer — a career path typical of small-community journalism across the former Soviet Union, where community newspapers are made by devoted generalists rather than large professional staffs. The paper's editorial office is small, housed in the building at 69 Yeznik Koghbatsi Street in central Yerevan that also hosts the community's activities. Contributors over the years have included community members writing history, memoir and commentary; during the 2006 Lebanon war, for example, a Magen David contributor, Inna Astvatsatryan, was quoted by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency expressing the community's anxieties as Lebanese Armenian refugees arrived in Yerevan — a glimpse of the paper's writers acting as the community's informal spokespeople to the wider Jewish world.

Contents: Community, History and Israel

Monthly issues of Magen David feature articles on Jewish communal life in Armenia, the holidays and cultural events held by the community, the history of Armenia's Jewry, and local and global news with a special focus on Israel. That formula — community chronicle, festival calendar, history and Israel — is the standard architecture of the small-community Jewish newspaper worldwide, and in Armenia it carries unusual historical weight. Jewish presence in Armenia is ancient in tradition and documented in the medieval period by the remarkable Jewish cemetery at Yeghegis, whose Hebrew and Aramaic tombstones of 1266–1346 the community helped clean up and turn into a recognised heritage site after centuries of abandonment. Community members have co-authored multilingual books on that heritage, including Jews in Armenia: The Middle Ages in 2009 and The Jews of Noah's Land in 2020, the latter authored by the community's chair. Magen David's history pages draw on and popularise the same research, while its communal pages record the present: the Yerevan synagogue and its rabbi, the community's Sunday school and Hebrew ulpan, its children's vocal ensemble Keshet, holiday celebrations, humanitarian aid to smaller Jewish groups in Vanadzor and Sevan, and the community's Holocaust and Armenian genocide memorial work in Yerevan, where it installed a monument commemorating the victims of both catastrophes.

Distribution and Digital Archive

Magen David is a monthly, and its distribution matches its scale. Paper copies are distributed free of charge at the Jewish Community of Armenia's Yerevan office — there is no newsstand network or subscription business in the commercial sense — and a digital archive of issues published since 2018 can be accessed through the community's website, jewish.am, a site launched in 2004. Free distribution is not a marketing choice but the model itself: the newspaper is a community service funded by grants and donations, intended to reach every Jewish household the community knows and to be available to researchers, officials and the curious. The online archive since 2018 has quietly extended that reach worldwide, giving the Armenian Jewish diaspora — former Yerevan Jews now in Israel, the United States and elsewhere — continuing access to the community's record, and giving scholars of small Jewish communities a rare, continuous, self-published source.

The Funding Crisis of 2021

The newspaper's most documented modern episode is its near-death in 2021. After a temporary suspension of the state-budget funding channelled through the Council for National Minorities, Magen David was at risk of closure. Salvation came from inside the community: the small editorial office received financial support from Zvezda, a local security-equipment supply company owned by Igor Podolsky, a member of Armenia's Jewish community. Armenian Jewish commentary at the time insisted the community's newspaper was not just a scrap of paper — the headline of a June 2021 article defending it — and the episode exposed the structural fragility shared by minority media in Armenia: a single delayed grant line can silence the only newspaper of an entire community. The paper's continuation after 2021, with its archive still maintained, should be read as resilience rather than security; no verified circulation figure exists for it, and none is claimed here, because for a free monthly serving a community of hundreds the meaningful measure is not copies but continuity.

The Community It Serves

To understand Magen David, a reader needs the community in frame. Armenia's Jews are among the smallest of the fifteen post-Soviet republics' Jewish populations. Estimates have varied widely — a Jewish Telegraphic Agency report in 2006 cited figures from about one hundred to several hundred, while other accounts have put the community at around two thousand, mostly in Yerevan — with emigration to Israel having reduced a Soviet-era population swelled during the Second World War, when Armenia offered safe haven to Jews fleeing Nazi-occupied territories. The community maintains the country's only synagogue, in Yerevan, under the Chief Rabbi of Armenia, Gersh Meir Burshtein, alongside the community centre functions housed with the newspaper's office. Since 2022 the community has also temporarily grown with Jews fleeing Russia and Ukraine. For such a community, a newspaper performs duties a larger press takes for granted: announcing holidays and funerals, teaching history to the young, honouring elders, arguing for the community before the state, and proving — in print, monthly — that Armenian Jewry still exists. Magen David's pages are the instrument of that proof.

Assessment

Magen David is, by circulation and staff, among the smallest newspapers in this directory, and by distinctiveness among the most significant. It is Armenia's only Jewish newspaper, founded in 2002 by the Jewish Community of Armenia, edited by Adelina Livshitz with Karen Hovhannesyan, published monthly in Russian, Armenian and Hebrew from 69 Yeznik Koghbatsi Street in Yerevan, funded principally through the Council for National Minorities, saved in 2021 by a community benefactor, distributed free and archived online since 2018. In a country whose press history is dominated by state gazettes, party organs and polemical dailies, it represents a fourth Armenian tradition: the minority community newspaper, keeping a small people's language, memory and institutions in print. As long as it appears, the Jewish community of Armenia has a voice of its own — and that, for its editors and readers, is the entire point.