LOS ANGELES — Cecile Keshishian, known for her passion and activism for both the Armenian community and those less fortunate, died from pneumonia on May 27, 2024 in Los Angeles.
Keshishian, née Simonian, was born on April 30, 1934 in Antioch, Turkey, and grew up in Beirut, Lebanon. Her parents were both survivors of the Armenian Genocide. She was the second of their four children.
The family planned to relocate to Armenia after World War II. But the transport ship sank before arriving in Beirut, so the family stayed in Lebanon.
For her secondary education, Cecile attended the Melkonian Educational Institute, a boarding school in Cyprus. She was a star basketball player, a medical volunteer, a student leader and one of four teenagers chosen to represent Cyprus at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in England in 1953.
After graduating from Melkonian, she returned to Beirut and began work as an executive assistant at Canada Dry International at a time when the company was expanding into the Middle East. In her spare time, she was a founder and early leader of the Girl Scouts movement in Beirut. During this same time, she met and became engaged to Dr. Kevork Keshishian. They married on October 1, 1960.
Both of the couple’s children, Alek and Aleen, were born in Beirut. In 1968, the young family moved to the United States, settling first in Brookline, Mass., and later in Manchester, NH, where Dr. Keshishian worked as a board-certified radiologist.
