SOAR - Phoenix Chapter
9749 E Dreyfus Ave
Scottsdale, AZ 85260
Phoenix joined the SOAR family in March 2013. Armenian Christians relish telling the story of how King Abgar sent a letter to Jesus asking him to come to Edessa (modern-day Urfa in Turkey) and cure him of leprosy. As the story goes, the Apostle Thaddeus, after the Crucifixion, established the Church of Edessa, before moving on to Persia to spread the word. The Apostle Bartholomew also preached in Armenia, which adopted Christianity as its state religion in 301. It is recognized as the world’s oldest national church and maintains “Apostolic” in its name because of its direct ties to Christ’s two apostles. That early history is celebrated at the Armenian Apostolic Church of Arizona in Scottsdale. The community received its first formal leadership and formed a congregation in 1963 in connection with the visit of Bishop Torkom Manoogian, then ecclesiastical leader for the Holy See of Echmiatsin, Armenia. The Scottsdale Church allows families with Armenian heritage to preserve the language, culture, and traditions in the Phoenix area.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS:
Soseh Axian
Vice President
Soseh Axian is a native Californian. In her youth, she attended Davidian & Mariamian Armenian School, was a member of the Armenian Youth Federation, and a volunteer with the Armenian National Committee of America. She grew up playing basketball and was a girl scout for the Homenetmen Burbank Sipan Chapter, where her father is a founding member.
Soseh studied children’s rights and the refugee crisis abroad at Zhejiang University Guanghua Law School (光華法學院) in Hangzhou, China, where she analyzed the impact of China’s—more recently abandoned—one child policy as well as societal beliefs and circumstances that result in many women abandoning their newly born female babies.
Soseh earned her Bachelor’s degree in Accounting with a minor in Economics and has been a licensed Real Estate Salesperson in commercial real estate for over a decade. Soseh also studied law abroad at the Université Nice Sophia Antipolis Faculté de Droit et Science Politique in Nice, France, and earned a Juris Doctor from Lewis & Clark Law School.
She left Portland at the start of the year to work for the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Diego. She currently travels between Portland and San Diego.
Margaret Ehramjian
Event Planner
Margaret was born and raised in New Jersey, surrounded by a large Armenian community. She attended William Paterson University in NJ and received a BA in Early Childhood Education and English as a Second Language Education. Margaret moved to Arizona in 1992 when she married her husband, Arthur, who was living in Tucson. They have one daughter, Ani. Margaret taught pre-kindergarten until she retired in 2014. She and her family attend St. Apkar Armenian Apostolic Church in Scottsdale, AZ.
Berj Dikranian
Berj was born in Baghdad, Iraq, and then migrated with his family to Phoenix Arizona in 1999. Since his youth, Berj was very much into serving his community, where he was a choir member at the St. Gregory the Illuminator church in Baghdad, and when moved to Arizona, he served on the St. Apkar Armenian Church’s Parish Council board, as well as a treasurer for (Hye-Way) an Armenian cultural organization.
During the past 8 years, Berj worked mainly in the linguistics and interpretation industry, where his knowledge in the Arabic language is utilized, in addition to Armenian and English. After working as a bilingual support specialist for a computer consulting company, he had the opportunity to work with the United States Armed Forces, and was assigned as a civilian interpreter to a Special Operations Combat team and deployed to Diyala province in Iraq. After about 2.5 years he returned to Arizona to the same computer consulting company and is currently working as a Quality Assurance analyst.
Berj leads a healthy lifestyle where he enjoys the beautiful weather Arizona has to offer and hikes at least once a week at different trails.