Social and philanthropic projects

If, like us, you are moved by the plight of the Nagorno-Karabakh refugees and would like to offer them a new future, join us and make a donation to increase the impact of our action.

Reinforce the aid we are sending by making a donation to the Friends of the Boghossian Foundation account, via the King Baudouin Foundation.

Donate via the King Baudouin Foundation
Account number: BE10 0000 0000 0404
Communication : 623/3828/30013

Donations of at least 40 euros made to the King Baudouin Foundation give rise to a tax reduction.

Jean and Albert Boghossian took immediate action in Lebanon with 400,000$ of funding for:

• the distribution of thousands of emergency food rations
• rebuilding schools
• awarding 80 scholarships of 2,000$ each

Rebuilding schools

Last summer, with the new school year approaching, rebuilding schools in Beirut was a priority.
The explosion caused extensive damage to the Mesrobian school which the Boghossian Foundation has supported since 1996. The building’s windows were shattered and walls destroyed.
A portion of the donations was also allocated to clearing and rebuilding the Collège Notre Dame de Nazareth, whose buildings were destroyed in the explosion only a few weeks before the beginning of the school year, as well as the Zahrat El-Ihsan, Mont de la Salle and Hripsimiantz schools.

Scholarship grants

Whether they are studying physiotherapy, medicine or management, these low-income students are the future of Lebanon and will contribute to rebuilding their country.
The Foundation has granted scholarships to 80 students from the Université Saint-Joseph as well as the universities of Antonine, Haigazian and Notre Dame. The Université Saint-Joseph, located in close proximity to the explosion site, was particularly impacted.

A united stand

Following our call for solidarity in August 2020, countless donations helped amplify our efforts for action in Beirut. With almost 40,000$ raised, the Foundation was able to grant 20 scholarships. The entire Boghossian Foundation team in Brussels and Beirut was very moved by this outpour of generosity and demonstration of solidarity.

Beirut today

A year after the explosions that killed 207 people and injured more than 6500, Beirut is still hurting and lies at the heart of a country that remains in the throes of a political, economic, social and sanitary crisis.

If, like us, you have been moved by the situation in Lebanon and want to help the country rebuild itself, please join us in our efforts by making a donation; this will increase the impact of our actions and help us to be able to fund more scholarships.

Your donation will strengthen the aid we are planning to provide; please make a payment to the Fund of the Friends of the Boghossian Foundation, via the King Baudoin Foundation.
 

Make a Donation via the King Baudouin Foundation
Account number: BE10 0000 0000 0404
Communication: 019/1760/00021

 
 Donations of more than 40 euros to the King Baudouin Foundation are entitled to a tax reduction of 45% of the total amount paid.

This museum is entirely dedicated to the photographs taken by generations of Jesuits. Since the early second half of the 19th century, alongside Constantinople and Jerusalem, Beirut became one of the most important photographic centres of the region. Among the orientalists who flocked to the East, many renowned photographers, such as Tancrède Dumas and Félix Bonfils, took up residence in Beirut. They were soon followed by indigenous photographers as George Sabounji and the Sarrafian brothers. The missionaries themselves also played a big part in the strong momentum that the discipline knew around that time. As early as 1865, father A. Bourquenoud and A. Dutau, followed by many others, systematically took along and abundantly used their camera during their trips, be it through the Lebanese mountains, the Beqaa valley, or during their travels to Syria, Armenia and Egypt.

The enthusiasm the Jesuits showed for photography is mainly due to the fact that they saw it as a valuable educational and documentary means. As missionaries, they often used photography to spread their apostolic message. Besides this the Jesuits are also known for their interest in science, which explains the variety of disciplines covered. The photos taken by the Jesuits and exhibited by the museum cover several decades of photographic history, archaeological discoveries, ethnographic studies and scientific innovation.

As part of this partnership the Boghossian Foundation and the Oriental Library of Beirut worked along with the Photography Museum of Charleroi to set up an exhibition end 2014. The exhibition presented a selection of works from the photographic archives, all around the theme of population movements in the early 20th century in the East.

The photographic library’s purpose reaches further than just managing and exploiting the photographic collection, it also intends to enrich the collection through the acquisition of other private, scientific and artistic collections. A call was sent out to all collectors!

The implementation of this project included several steps:
• Fitting a room with appropriate equipment, including temperature and humidity control. Saint Joseph University provided a 100 m² room located on the Oriental Library’s ground floor
• Preserving documents in acid-free cabinets, boxes and envelopes
• Compiling, inventorying and digitizing the collection for its subsequent management, development and distribution, including the purchase of the, therefore, necessary equipment (computers, appropriate scanners, databases…)
• Training qualified personnel to handle the collection’s digitizing and preservation

A part of the collection has been highlighted in various exhibitions and publication of exhibition catalogues:
• The origins of Aerial Archaeology, (exhibition – USJ, Beirut), 2000
• Father Joseph Delore’s “Little Schools of Mount Lebanon (exhibition – USJ, Beirut), 2003
• An archaeological adventure, (exhibition Musée Archéologique, Arles), 2004
• Michel Jullien and Paul Soulerin’s archaeological trip to Syria and Lebanon in 1888, 2004
• The Armenian people, a quest for sanctuary, 1917-1939, (exhibitions USJ, Beirut and Cité de l’Emigration, Paris), 2006
• Photographic portraits of the East, 2010
• The Armenians of Cilicia, 2012

Since the beginning of the crisis in Syria, more than 4.5 million Syrians have found refuge in neighbouring countries. By welcoming more than a quarter of these Syrians, Lebanon is coping with the most refugees in the region. The large scale of this influx has put intense pressure on the Lebanese public sector, especially on the education system. Despite all the Lebanese government’s efforts, and those of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the influx of Syrian children is overwhelming the Lebanese school infrastructure and nearly 80% of Syrian refugee children do not go to school.

The Kayany Foundation, a Lebanese non-governmental organisation founded in 2013 in response to the Syrian refugee crisis, is one of the most effective NGOs involved in this mission. Since its inception, the Gatha Project has initiated four schools in refugee camps in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valey, offering high quality education to 3.500 students aged between 6 to 18 years. Besides these four schools, Kayani has built and runs two secondary and vocational schools for girls aged between 14 and 18 years old.

Ghata is the name given to the portable structures designed by professor Rabih Ghibli of the American University of Beirut and his students. These structures, each approximately 20 square meters in size, can be assembled to create a 40 square meter space which can host up to 35 students.
Easy to assemble and disassemble, and resistant to the most severe weather conditions, these units can be built by refugees using inexpensive local materials. The modularity of these elements makes it easy to adapt them to the specific needs of each site, and also to give them diverse functions, ranging from classrooms to kitchen areas which can then provide refugees students with two daily healthy meals. To this day, Ghata is the only portable structure approved by the Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs.

Few pictures of the horrors of those massacres are known. Nevertheless, from 1881, photographs of ruins, deportees or orphans, in the refugee centres of Alep or Beirut, were collected by Jesuit missionaries present in that part of the world or taken directly by them. Some of those Jesuits turned out to be talented photographers, such as Antoine Poidebard (1878-1955) or Guillaume de Jerphanion (1877-1948). If some of these photographs have sometimes been previously reproduced, the exhibition The Armenians. Pictures of a destiny makes it possible for most of the photos to be released for the first time from the collections of the Oriental Library at Saint Joseph’s University in Beirut.

Almost a hundred photographs made up this exhibition. They were divided between original prints and photos printed from glass plate negatives in the laboratory of the Museum of Photography in Charleroi.

If the exhibition The Armenians. Pictures of a destiny resounds unfortunately like an appalling echo of news from the Middle East, its intention was not to bear witness to the actual tragedy of the massacre of the Armenians, but rather to its consequences. In addition, it made it possible to put a face to these people, to discover their living conditions prior to 1915 and their attempts to rebuild their lives in exile, in camps or schools.

This exhibition was the fruit of cooperation between the Picture Library of the Oriental Library at Saint Joseph’s University in Beirut, the Boghossian Foundation and the Museum of Photography in Charleroi, within the framework of patronage by the Boghossian Foundation. Patronage is devoted to the development of that picture library aimed at preserving the photographic collections of the Oriental Library, with the guidance of the Museum of Photography in Charleroi.

Amongst other artists, the Boghossian Foundation invited Jean-Michel Othoniel and Nadim Karam to design new monumental works for the Lovers’ Park making it a space for cultural and artistic events, as well as a playground and meditation area all of which alternate in a harmonious rhythm, away from the hustle and bustle of city life.

In 2014, Jean-Michel Othoniel created the sculpture Coeur d’Obstidienne. The sculpture is made entirely from obsidian, this material come from seams of obsidian, which are one of Armenia’s particularities. This work seems to burst out from the water. Its shape symbolizes the country itself, the material stands for the power of fire, and the place where it was installed was chosen to symbolize permanence.

In 2017, Nadim Karam conceived a work entitled Trio Elephants. It consists of 3 sculptures representing a family of elephants. Made of perforated corten steel sheets, the sculptures combine shapes of the 1001 elements of Karam’s lexigram, suggesting that the elephants carry memories within. The installation thus invites the strollers of the Lover’s Park to weave their own stories, while playing hide and seek with the elephants that seem to disappear and reappear in the park due to their color.

The center has been created with following objectives:

• The center aims to provide young Armenians quick and easy access to knowledge concerning international art news.
• To support the process of search, discovery, and conquest of “new frontiers” in the arts.
• To facilitate creation and presentation of contemporary art by Armenian artists, at home as well as at international fori.
• To counteract commercialization of art, and to replace market criteria by intellectual and emotional determinants.
• To create partnership between Diaspora Armenians and the art community in the Republic of Armenia in support and promotion of the Armenian arts and literature.

Equipped with a library, a video archive and computer facilities, the center is now staffed with professional guides and organize courses and lectures on art history.