Eliezer "
Elie"
Wiesel KBE (
/ˈɛli wɪˈzɛl/;
[2] September 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016)
[3] was an American Romanian-born Jewish writer,
[3] professor, political activist, Holocaust survivor, and Nobel Laureate. He was the author of 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including
Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the
Auschwitz,
Buna, and
Buchenwald concentration camps.
[4] Wiesel was also the Advisory Board chairman of the newspaper
Algemeiner Journal. He was the Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at
Boston University, in
Boston, Massachusetts.
When Wiesel was awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, the
Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a "messenger to mankind," stating that through his struggle to come to terms with "his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in
Hitler's death camps", as well as his "practical work in the cause of peace", Wiesel had delivered a powerful message "of peace, atonement and human dignity" to humanity.
[5]
Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, Transylvania (now
Sighetu Marmației),
Maramureș,
[6] Romania,
[6] in the
Carpathian Mountains. His parents were Sarah Feig and Shlomo Wiesel. At home, Wiesel's family spoke
Yiddish most of the time, but also German,
Hungarian, and
Romanian.
[7][8] Wiesel's mother, Sarah, was the daughter of Dodye Feig, a celebrated
Vizhnitz Hasid and farmer from a nearby village. Dodye was active and trusted within the community. In the early years of his life, Dodye had spent a few months in jail for having helped
Polish Jews who escaped and were hungry.
Wiesel's father, Shlomo, instilled a strong sense of
humanism in his son, encouraging him to learn
Hebrew and to read literature, whereas his mother encouraged him to study the
Torah. Wiesel has said his father represented reason while his mother Sarah promoted faith.
[9]
Wiesel had three siblings – older sisters Beatrice and Hilda, and younger sister Tzipora. Beatrice and Hilda survived the war and were reunited with Wiesel at a French orphanage. They eventually emigrated to North America, with Beatrice moving to
Montreal,
Quebec, Canada. Tzipora, Shlomo, and Sarah did not survive
the Holocaust.
In 1940, Romania lost the town of Sighet to Hungary following the
Second Vienna Award. In 1944, when he was 15, Wiesel, his family, and the rest of the town were placed in one of the two ghettos in Sighet. Wiesel and his family lived in the larger of the two, on Serpent Street.
On May 6, 1944, the Hungarian authorities allowed the German army to
deport the Jewish community in Sighet to
Auschwitz-Birkenau. At Auschwitz, his inmate number, "A-7713", was tattooed onto his left arm.
[11][12]
Separated from his three sisters and mother, he went to the same camp with his father.
Wiesel and his father were sent to the attached work camp Buna, a subcamp of
Auschwitz III-Monowitz. He managed to remain with his father for more than eight months as they were forced to work under appalling conditions and shuffled among three concentration camps in the closing days of the war.
On January 28, 1945, just a few weeks after the two were marched to
Buchenwald, Wiesel's father was beaten
[13] by an SS guard as he was suffering from
dysentery,
starvation, and
exhaustion. He was also beaten by other inmates for his food. He was later sent to the crematorium, only weeks before the camp was liberated by the U.S.
Third Army on April 11.
[14]
After World War II, Wiesel taught
Hebrew and worked as a choirmaster before becoming a professional journalist. He learned French, which became the language he used most frequently in writing.
[15] He wrote for Israeli and French newspapers, including
Tsien in Kamf (in
Yiddish).
In 1946, after learning of
Irgun's bombing of the
King David Hotel, Wiesel made an unsuccessful attempt to join the underground movement. In 1948 he translated articles from Hebrew to Yiddish for Irgun periodicals, but says he was not a member of the organization.
[16] In 1949 he travelled to
Israel as a correspondent for the French newspaper
L'arche. He then was hired as Paris correspondent for the Israeli newspaper
Yedioth Ahronoth, subsequently becoming its roaming international correspondent.
[17]
For ten years after the war, Wiesel refused to write about or discuss his experiences during the Holocaust. However, a meeting with the French author
François Mauriac, the 1952
Nobel Laureate in Literature who eventually became Wiesel's close friend, persuaded him to write about his experiences. Wiesel said that a discussion he had with Rabbi
Menachem M. Schneerson was a turning point in his writing of the Holocaust.
[18]
Wiesel first wrote the 900-page memoir
Un di velt hot geshvign (
And the World Remained Silent) in
Yiddish, which was published in abridged form in
Buenos Aires.
[19] Wiesel rewrote a shortened version of the manuscript in French, which was published as the 127-page
La Nuit, and later translated into English as
Night. Even with Mauriac's support, Wiesel had trouble finding a
publisher for his book and initially it sold only a few copies.
[20]
In 1960 Arthur Wang of
Hill & Wang agreed to pay a $100 pro-forma advance and published it in the United States in September that year as
Night. The book agent was
Georges Borchardt, then just starting his career. Borchardt remains Wiesel's literary agent today.
The book sold just 1,046 copies over the next 18 months, but attracted interest from reviewers, leading to television interviews with Wiesel and meetings with literary figures such as
Saul Bellow. "The English translation came out in 1960, and the first printing was 3,000 copies," Wiesel said in an interview. "And it took three years to sell them. Now, I get 100 letters a month from children about the book. And there are many, many million copies in print." The 1979 book and play
The Trial of God are said to have been based on his real-life Auschwitz experience of witnessing three Jews who, close to death, conduct a
trial against God, under the accusation that He has been oppressive of the Jewish people. Regarding his personal beliefs, Wiesel calls himself an agnostic.
[21]
Night has been translated into 30 languages. By 1997 the book was selling 300,000 copies annually in the United States alone. By March 2006, about six million copies were sold in the United States. On January 16, 2006,
Oprah Winfrey chose the work for her book club. One million extra paperback and 150,000 hardcover copies were printed carrying the "
Oprah's Book Club" logo, with a new translation by Wiesel's wife, Marion, and a new preface by Wiesel. On February 12, 2006, the new translation of
Night was No. 1 on
The New York Times bestseller list for paperback non-fiction and the original translation placed third.
[22]
Film director
Orson Welles approached Wiesel about making
Night into a feature film. Wiesel refused, saying that his widely read memoir would lose its meaning if it were told without the silences in between his words.
[23]
In 1955, Wiesel moved to
Washington, D.C., having become a U.S. citizen. He was offered this citizenship to resolve his status of living with an expired visa from being forced to stay in New York due to an injury. In 1964, Rabbi Men M. Schneerson encouraged Wiesel to get married.[
citation needed] Wiesel went on to marry Marion and they had a son, Elisha.
[24] In the US, Wiesel wrote over 40 books, both fiction and non-fiction, and won many literary prizes. Wiesel's writing is considered among the most important in
Holocaust literature. Some historians credit Wiesel with giving the term "Holocaust" its present meaning, but he does not feel that the word adequately describes the event and wishes it were used less frequently to describe significant occurrences as everyday tragedies.
[25]
He was awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for speaking out against
violence,
repression, and
racism. He has received many other prizes and honors for his work, including the
Congressional Gold Medal in 1985, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and The International Center in New York's Award of Excellence.[
citation needed] Additionally, he was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996
http://www.artsandletters.org/academicians2_current.php
Wiesel also played a role in the initial success of
The Painted Bird by
Jerzy Kosinski by endorsing it before revelations that the book was fiction and, in the sense that it was presented as all Kosinski's true experience, a
hoax.
[26][27]
Wiesel has published two volumes of his
memoirs. The first,
All Rivers Run to the Sea, was published in 1994 and covered his life up to the year 1969. The second, titled
And the Sea is Never Full and published in 1999, covered 1969 to 1999.[
citation needed]
Wiesel and his wife, Marion, started the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. He served as chairman for the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust (later renamed US Holocaust Memorial Council) from 1978 to 1986, spearheading the building of the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington, D.C., during which he pleaded for intervention during the persecutions in Yugoslavia after a visit in December 1992.
https://www.ushmm.org/educators/lesson-p.../handout-1
Wiesel is particularly fond of teaching and holds the position of
Andrew Mellon Professor of the
Humanities at
Boston University, where he became a close friend of the late president and chancellor
John Silber.
[28] From 1972 to 1976, Wiesel was a Distinguished Professor at the
City University of New York and member of the
American Federation of Teachers. In 1982 he served as the first
Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in Humanities and Social Thought at
Yale University. He also co-instructs Winter Term (January) courses at
Eckerd College,
St. Petersburg, Florida. From 1997 to 1999, he was Ingeborg Rennert Visiting Professor of
Judaic Studies at
Barnard College of
Columbia University.
[29]
Wiesel in 1987.
Wiesel co-founded
Moment Magazine with
Leonard Fein in 1975. They founded the magazine to provide a voice for American Jews.
[30]
Wiesel has become a popular speaker on the subject of the Holocaust. As a
political activist, he has advocated for many causes, including
Israel, the plight of
Soviet and
Ethiopian Jews, the victims of
apartheid in
South Africa,
Argentina's
Desaparecidos,
Bosnian victims of genocide in the former
Yugoslavia,
Nicaragua's
Miskito Indians, and the
Kurds. Conversely, he withdrew from his role as chair of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide, and made efforts to abort the conference, in deference to Israeli objection to the inclusion of sessions on the
Armenian genocide.
[31][32]
In 2004, he voiced support for intervention in
Darfur, Sudan at the Darfur Emergency Summit convened at the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York by the American Jewish World Service and the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
[33] He also led a commission organized by the Romanian government to research and write a report, released in 2004, on the true history of the Holocaust in Romania and the involvement of the Romanian wartime regime in atrocities against Jews and other groups, including the
Roma. The Romanian government accepted the findings in the report and committed to implementing the commission's recommendations for educating the public on the history of the Holocaust in Romania. The commission, formally called the International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, came to be called the
Wiesel Commission in honor of his leadership.
Wiesel is the honorary chair of the
Habonim Dror Camp Miriam Campership and Building Fund, and a member of the International Council of the New York–based
Human Rights Foundation.[
citation needed]
On March 27, 2001, Wiesel appeared at the
University of Florida for Jewish Awareness Month and was presented with an honorary degree from the University of Florida.
[34]
In 2002, he inaugurated the Elie Wiesel Memorial House in Sighet, in his childhood home.
[35]
President
George W. Bush, joined by the
Dalai Lama and Wiesel, Oct. 17, 2007, to the ceremony at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., for the presentation of the
Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama
In early 2006, Wiesel traveled to
Auschwitz with Oprah Winfrey, a visit which was broadcast as part of
The Oprah Winfrey Show on May 24, 2006.
[36] Wiesel said that this would most likely be his last trip there. In September 2006, he appeared before the
UN Security Council with actor
George Clooney to call attention to the humanitarian crisis in
Darfur. On November 30, 2006, Wiesel received a
knighthood in London in recognition of his work toward raising Holocaust education in the United Kingdom.
[37]
During the early 2007 selection process for the
Kadima candidate for
President of Israel,
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reportedly offered Wiesel the nomination (and, as the ruling-party candidate and an apolitical figure, likely the presidency), but Wiesel "was not very interested."
[38] Shimon Peres was chosen as the Kadima candidate (and later President) instead.
In 2007, Wiesel was awarded the
Dayton Literary Peace Prize's Lifetime Achievement Award.
[39] That same year, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity issued a letter condemning
Armenian genocide denial, a letter that was signed by 53 Nobel laureates including Wiesel. Wiesel has repeatedly called
Turkey's 90-year-old campaign to downplay its actions during the
Armenian genocide a double killing.
[40]
Wiesel is a member of the International Advisory Board of
NGO Monitor.
[41]
Wiesel and his wife invested their life savings, and the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity invested nearly all of its assets (approximately $15.2 million USD) through
Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme,
[42] an experience Wiesel later spoke about at a
Condé Nast roundtable. Although an exact recovery percentage is not yet known, as of April 2013, 53% of victims' monies have been recovered and returned to them.
[43] In a
New York Times article, Wiesel called Madoff a "thief, scoundrel, criminal."
[44]
In 2009, Wiesel criticized the
Vatican for lifting the
excommunication of controversial bishop
Richard Williamson, a member of the
Society of Saint Pius X.
[45]
On June 5, 2009, Wiesel accompanied US President
Barack Obama and German Chancellor
Angela Merkel as they toured
Buchenwald. Merkel and Wiesel each spoke about Buchenwald in personal terms, with Merkel considering the responsibility of Germans vis-à-vis
Nazi history, and Wiesel reflecting on the suffering and death of his father in the camp.
[46]
Wiesel returned to
Hungary for the first visit since the Holocaust between December 9–11, 2009, by the invitation of Rabbi
Slomó Köves, executive rabbi of the Unified Hungarian Jewish Congregation and the Hungarian branch of the
Chabad-Lubavitch movement. During his visit, Wiesel participated in a conference at the Upper House Chamber of the
Hungarian Parliament, met Prime Minister
Gordon Bajnai and President
László Sólyom, and made a speech to the approximately 10,000 participants of an anti-racist gathering held in
Faith Hall. The speech was broadcast live by
Magyar ATV, a nationwide television channel.
[47][48][49]
In November 2011, Wiesel accepted an appointment to the Board of Visitors of
Ralston College, a start-up liberal arts college based in
Savannah, Georgia.
[50]
In June 2012, he protested against "the whitewashing of tragic and criminal episodes" that happened in Hungary during the Holocaust. He gave up the Great Cross award received from the Hungarian government and sent a letter to
László Kövér, the Speaker of
Hungarian Parliament, where he criticized him for his participation in a ceremony celebrating
József Nyírő, a loyal member of Hungary's World War II fascist parliament. During the short rule of the
Arrow Cross Party, which led a
government in Hungary, ten to fifteen thousand
Jews were murdered outright,
[51] and 80,000 Jews, including many women, children and elderly were deported from Hungary to their deaths in the
Auschwitz concentration camp.
[52] In his letter Wiesel wrote:
Quote:It has become increasingly clear that Hungarian authorities are encouraging the whitewashing of tragic and criminal episodes in Hungary's past, namely the wartime Hungarian governments' involvement in the deportation and murder of hundreds of thousands of its Jewish citizens. I found it outrageous that the Speaker of the Hungarian National Assembly could participate in a ceremony honoring a Hungarian fascist ideologue.[53]
Kövér, in his answer letter to Wiesel, stated the American, British and
Soviet generals in the
Allied Control Commission declared in 1945 and 1947 that Nyirő was not a war criminal, nor fascist or anti-Semitic when they refused to extradite the exiled writer two times at the request of the contemporary Hungarian Communist Minister of the Interior.
[54] He also mentioned that
Nicolae Ceauşescu's government treated Nyírő as a well-recognized writer and ensured pension for his widow in the 1970s.
[54] Kövér cited a Hungarian Jewish scientific review (the Libanon) and the newspaper stated that
Nazi ideals or
anti-Semitism cannot be found in Nyírő's literary works.
[54] Nyírő, the Transylvanian-born Hungarian writer, deserves respect not because of his—although insignificant, certainly tragically misguided—political activities but for his literary works according to Kövér.
[54]
In fact, Nyírő was a great admirer of
Joseph Goebbels; he wrote lyrics about the
Nazi Minister of Propaganda and was a politician associated with Fascist
Arrow-Cross parliament in 1944, who later escaped retribution and participated in the propaganda work of
Hungarian Fascist emigrants.
[55]
Wiesel is currently an adviser at the
Gatestone Institute.
[56] In 2010, Wiesel accepted a five-year appointment as a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at
Chapman University. In that role, he makes a one-week visit to Chapman annually to meet with students and offer his perspective on subjects ranging from Holocaust history to religion, languages, literature, law and music.
[57]
Wiesel was in attendance and his famous "Never Again" quote was recited by the Israeli prime minister's Benjamin Netanyahu; during Netanyahu 2015 address to United States congress.
[58]
2007 attack on Wiesel
Elie Wiesel at the 2008
World Economic Forum.
On February 1, 2007, Wiesel was attacked in a
San Francisco hotel by 22-year-old
Holocaust denier Eric Hunt, who tried to drag Wiesel into a hotel room. Wiesel was not injured and Hunt fled the scene. Later, Hunt bragged about the incident on the website
Stormfront.
[59] Approximately one month later, he was arrested and charged with multiple offences.
[60] Hunt was convicted on July 21, 2008,
[61] and was sentenced to two years imprisonment, but was given credit for time served and good behavior; he was released on
probation and ordered to undergo psychological treatment. The jury convicted Hunt of three charges but dismissed the remaining charges of attempted
kidnapping,
stalking, and an additional count of
false imprisonment, amid Hunt's withdrawal of his
insanity plea.
[62] District Attorney
Kamala Harris said, "Crimes motivated by hate are among the most reprehensible of offenses ... This defendant has been made to answer for an unwarranted and biased attack on a man who has dedicated his life to peace."
[63] At his sentencing hearing, Hunt apologized and insisted that he no longer denies the Holocaust;
[64] however, he continued for some time afterwards to maintain and update a (now defunct) blog that was critical of prominent Jewish people and denied the Holocaust.
[65]
Reaction to proxy baptizing of Jews by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
On February 13, 2012, the
Salt Lake City Tribune announced that
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints performed a
posthumous baptism of
Simon Wiesenthal's parents.
[66] The following day, the
Huffington Post announced that Wiesel's name had been submitted by a Latter-day Saint to a genealogical database used for proposing proxy baptisms. The
Huffington Post also notified Wiesel, prompting him to speak out against the practice of posthumously baptizing Jews and to call on United States presidential candidate and Latter-day Saint
Mitt Romney to denounce it.
[67][68][69] In an interview on February 15, 2012 with
Lawrence O'Donnell, Wiesel called the practice "bizarre", and said, "I am a Jew. Born a Jew. Lived as a Jew. Tried to write about the Jewish condition...the human condition all over the world, and they should do it to me?" He reported that he had worked for two years with Bobby Adams and Holocaust survivor Ernest Michel to achieve an agreement with the LDS church regarding the practice of baptizing Holocaust dead, and that LDS church apostle
Quentin Cook apologized to him by telephone earlier that day for the database submission of his family's names, and reported blocking the name of former Prime Minister of Israel
Golda Meir from proxy baptism.
[70]
Iran and Gaza
In December 2013, Wiesel wrote an ad in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal declaring that "Iran must not be allowed to remain nuclear", and that "If there is one lesson I hope the world has learned from the past it is that regimes rooted in brutality must never be trusted. And the words and actions of the leadership of Iran leave no doubt as to their intentions."
[71]
In an August 4, 2014, full-page advertisement in
The New York Times and other newspapers, Wiesel condemned
Hamas for the "use of children as human shields" during the
2014 Israel-Gaza Conflict[72] The London Times refused to run the advertisement, saying "the opinion being expressed is too strong and too forcefully made and will cause concern amongst a significant number of Times readers."
[73][74]
Wiesel lived in Greenwich, Connecticut.
[75]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elie_Wiesel