WORLD IN BRIEF : ARMENIA : Genocide Resolution Opposition Is Told

Israel has asked influential American Jewish organizations to lobby against a Senate resolution to proclaim a national day of remembrance for victims of the Armenian genocide early this century, Jewish sources said. “As a people which was itself a victim of genocide, we feel natural sympathy for the Armenians,” one source said. “But Israel wants to foster its relations with Turkey, which it views with great importance.” The massacres of 1915-23, in which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians died, took place before the emergence of the modern Turkish state from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey rejects the genocide accusation.