Dear colleagues and friends,
Ara Aharonian, member of the ADL Central Board and a tireless and devoted servant who ably served multiple terms as chair of the ADL Western United States Regional Board, has been taken from the ranks of the Armenian Democratic Liberal Party prematurely.
Ara Aharonian was the worthy son of long-time and esteemed party figures, teacher and editor Paylak Aharonian and his wife Mari. He was born in 1952 in Tripoli, Lebanon, and after completing the local elementary school, received his secondary education at the AGBU Hovagimian-Manougian Boys Secondary School, nurtured under the breath of the school’s distinguished teachers. During the devastating years of the Lebanese civil war, he settled in the United States, where he received his higher education at Pacific College and CSUN (California State University, Northridge), specializing in the field of Digital Electronics.
Ara Aharonian was one of those rare party members endowed with unparalleled knowledge of the history of the ADL and the Armenian people, successfully combining all this with fruitful party activity. Indeed, with his enviable memory, vast knowledge and command of facts, he was undoubtedly one of the intellectual figures of the ADL of the last forty years. His photographic memory remained one of his striking traits, by which he could confidently be considered the living encyclopedia of the ADL, from the Armenakan era to the ADL’s most recent activities.
Few ADL figures have been able to combine party activity with local government offices, municipal and state bodies, thanks to which Ara was able to successfully complete the programs of the ADL and the Armenian Rights Council of America (ARCA). His untimely departure will create a deep void in our ranks.
He was undoubtedly a tireless party worker. Worthy of mention is his active participation in the founding of the Armenakan movement in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was during these years that Ara, together with his peers and elders, carried out broad activity and inspired many young men and women with the ideas of Khrimian Hayrik, Potoukalian, Yegarian, Avetisian and Bashinjaghian, and thus he justly and rapidly rose through the ranks of the ADL, reaching the honorable positions of member and chair of the ADL Western United States Board and member of the Central Board. He participated in numerous ADL delegate conventions, traveling from country to country for this purpose, and visited Armenia and Artsakh many times. For the sake of history, it must be recorded that he established close ties not only with officials in the United States, but also abroad, and especially with state figures of the Homeland and Artsakh.
Ara Aharonian was also a man of the pen. From his school and student years, he signed articles in “Zartonk,” “Baykar,” “Nor Or” and other party newspapers. Over the last thirty years, he published several important books, including “The Path of the Benefactors,” Volumes I and II, “The Republic of Mountainous Karabagh,” in Armenian and English (2001, 2011), Heroic Figures of ADL (2006), “The Challenges of the Republic of Armenia” (2014). In the last decade, Aharonian was tirelessly engaged in the important mission of presenting the ADL’s benefactors to the broad reading public, and in the last few years, with all his soul and intellectual abilities, he was preparing to bring to light a comprehensive illustrated history of the ADL of some 650 pages. Alongside all this, we cannot fail to mention one of his gifts — his operatic voice, with which he enlivened ADL and TMM gatherings and meetings.
The measure of the loss and the grief is very deep and cannot be expressed in words. With the premature death of Ara Aharonian, deep mourning falls upon his spouse Diana, his daughter Rita, his son Alex, his sister Arpi, his brothers-in-law and relatives, the ADL Central Board, the ADL Western United States Regional Board, the Tekeyan Cultural Association, the great AGBU Hovagimian-Manougian family, the AGBU, the entire membership, friends and loved ones. We will soon feel the great void he has left, but we will find consolation when, through our collective efforts, we bring to fruition the large volume currently under his editorship.
May the memory of the righteous be blessed.
ADL CENTRAL BOARD
