Recent Arrivals Desperate for Quake News : L.A. Armenians Mobilize to Aid Victims

Southern California’s quarter-million Armenians, traumatized by another disaster in the tragedy-prone history of their people, searched desperately Thursday for scraps of information on Armenia’s devastating earthquake and tried to marshal help for victims.

Reports of tens of thousands of deaths stunned and instantly mobilized dozens of organizations representing the Armenians’ diverse elements here and abroad.

Hardest hit was the rapidly growing group of 13,000 immigrants who have arrived, largely in Hollywood and Glendale, in the past year.

Phone Lines Jammed

Thousands of these Armenians jammed phone lines to their homeland Thursday, seeking news of relatives and friends.

“All night I was trying to get in touch with our spiritual headquarters in Armenia, and the operator kept telling me that all lines are busy,” said Archbishop Datev Sarkissian of the Hollywood-based Western prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America.

Those unable to make contact overseas called local Armenian newspapers, political organizations and social agencies, which struggled to salve individual fears as they worked out details of a relief effort.

Others simply tried to assimilate the pain. The Alex Pilibos School in Hollywood held a prayer assembly and individual counseling sessions for its 700 pupils, most of them Soviet immigrants.

“We’re trying to have the students understand that this is a natural disaster,” vice principal Hovhannes Karakashian said. “We’re trying to cope with it. This is a fact, a reality. This happens.”

One student, Esther Oganesyan, 17, said she had spoken Wednesday night to her family in Yerevan, but that the news was incomplete.

“We heard the building they lived in collapsed,” Oganesyan said. She learned that her aunt and uncle escaped without injury, although her 7-year-old cousin was separated from the family when his school was evacuated.

But student body president Melanie Killedjian, 16, had been unable to reach her relatives in Soviet Georgia.

“They’re not letting calls in, and it’s making a lot of people uneasy,” she said.

To fight the helplessness, the students were scheduled to attend a candlelight vigil Thursday night and to donate their lunch money today to the relief effort, Karakashian said.

The horror of the earthquake adds to the pain already absorbed by Armenians this year because of ethnic strife in the southern Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, many local Armenians said.

“I was talking to a bunch of Armenians last night,” said Harut Sassounian, editor of the Armenian weekly California Courier. “We were all saying, ‘What’s going on? Why are we so unlucky? Is there a curse on our people? What have we done wrong? There’s the Turkish massacre (of Armenians in 1915) . . . and the killings and the refugees--and now this.’ ”

The new crisis has multiplied the strain on Armenian social organizations that were already hard-pressed to handle the needs of newly arriving immigrants.

Hundreds of Calls

“We are trying to get at least six volunteers to help us handle the hundreds of calls that are coming into our office,” said Varsenig Der Megerdichian, chairwoman of the Armenian Relief Society’s western region executive committee in Hollywood. “It is really an overwhelming situation.”

Meeting Wednesday night in a church in Glendale, the prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Armenian National Committee and smaller organizations designated the Armenian Relief Society as the primary channel for the relief effort.

By Thursday morning, the agency had set up the Earthquake Relief Fund for Armenia to receive donations and was outfitting a plane of relief supplies in New York.

But at a news conference Thursday, the relief society’s western executive committee said the plane had been denied State Department clearance to take off, although Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev had given permission for it to land.

Meanwhile, leaders of non-Armenian relief organizations warned against spontaneous donations.

“We want to caution the community not to make the mistake that Jamaicans made during the hurricane (last September), which was to start collecting massive amounts of clothing and foodstuffs,” said Richard Walden of the earthquake relief organization Operation California.

Walden said his group is working with the State Department to ensure that only needed supplies are purchased and that they be flown directly to Yerevan, the Armenian capital.

“The pipeline is going to be very narrow,” Walden said. “You don’t want to clog it up with extraneous stuff.”

In spite of such warnings, individuals stepped forward with sometimes elaborate personal plans to help.

Varkis Narjarian, chief of orthopedic surgery at Glendale Memorial Hospital, said Thursday that he was calling doctors and drug suppliers to form a trauma team to leave for Armenia.

Narjarian, who last year founded Medical Outreach for Armenians, has made annual trips to Armenia with supplies for orthoscopic surgery and hip replacements.

In a statement, Gov. George Deukmejian expressed concern about the victims of the earthquake.

“This region has been the subject of political strife in recent weeks,” said Deukmejian, the son of Armenian immigrants. “The additional turmoil associated with a devastating earthquake has certainly disrupted the lives of thousands, if not millions, of people. We are all very concerned about the victims of this natural disaster, and our thoughts and prayers are with them during this very difficult time.”

Times staff writers Hector Tobar and Martha Willman contributed to this story.