NEW YORK — Joyce Sulahian, a leader of the Armenian Church community, passed away on Saturday, February 10. She was 79.
Joyce Lynne Sulahian was born and raised in Watertown and educated in the city’s public schools. She was the daughter of Garabed and Eugenie Sulahian. The Sulahian family was extremely active in the Armenian Church and community, going back to the family’s roots in Syria and Lebanon, and including several generations of clergy in the Apostolic and Protestant traditions. The family had taken up the same ethic of service when settling in the United States.
Her father Garabed “Charles” H. Sulahian was an important leader of the Armenian Democratic Liberal Party (ADL) and chairman of its Eastern District Committee of the United States and Canada for many years. He was one of the leaders of the campaign to establish the Baikar Building in Watertown, where the ADL’s Armenian-language newspaper of the same name, as well as the Mirror-Spectator, was published.
Joyce herself became intimately involved in the church at age 16, when she joined the choir at Watertown’s St. James Church. She attended Concordia College, in Bronxville, NY, and began a professional career in administrative positions, first for Harvard University’s Dean of Engineering, and subsequently for the head of the university’s Computer Laboratory and Statistics Department.
In 1969, Joyce took up a role with the Diocese of the Armenian Church of America in New York. These were the early days of the St. Vartan Cathedral Complex, and then-Primate Archbishop Torkom Manoogian was seeking out talented, committed individuals to fill key roles on his staff. Joyce joined as the administrative assistant to Archbishop Torkom, whom she had known since childhood as a close friend of the Sulahian family.
In 1974 she began a long career at the United Nations, first serving in the Department for Political and Security Council Affairs, and later promoted to a post in the Department for Disarmament Affairs, where she spent 15 years in the office of the UN’s Undersecretary General. In that post, she traveled extensively throughout the world, organizing and administering international conferences on disarmament-related topics, side-by-side with world experts in that crucial field as well as leading government officials of the day.
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