Born in a rural neighborhood of the city's district of Midyat, Beğtaş stopped her schooling as a child at her mother's insistence. She later married Yusuf Beğtaş, a Syriac language educator and head of a Syriac language and culture association. Beğtaş devoted much of her life to raising her five children.
Bern -- On September 17 the Federal Parliament in Bern hosted the Sayfo Genocide Conference, organized by the the European Syriac Union (ESU) in cooperation with the Swiss-Syriac Friendship Group and Swiss-Armenian Friendship Group. The event focused on the mass atrocities committed by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 against the Syriac (Aramean--Assyrian--Chaldean), Armenian, and Greek peoples.
Budapest -- Catholicos-Patriarch Awa III of the Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East recently visited Budapest with a stark warning: Christianity in the Middle East is vanishing. Entire communities are being erased, while the Western world looks away.
Sorya, Iraq -- Chaldean-Syriac-Assyrian modern history is overshadowed by massacres and genocides. After the 1915 Genocide, the Kafno, and the 1933 Simmele Massacre, the wronged Chaldean-Syriac-Assyrian people were subjected to another massacre on September 16, 1969, in the remote village of Sorya, Zakho district of Nohadra (Duhok) Governorate in what is now the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI).
A visiting Assyrian delegation from the United States to the Kurdistan Region told Rudaw that they obtained a landmark approval from Duhok authorities to build a monument in Simmele to honor victims of the 1933 Simmele massacre.
Chaldean Patriarch Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako on Tuesday called for rejecting proposed amendments to the law governing the Endowments Office for Christians, Yazidis, and Mandaeans, warning that the changes could undermine the identity and rights of these historic religious communities.