Obituaries

[pbrower2a]

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. (AP) — The body of a 2-year-old Nebraska boy who was snatched off a Walt Disney World beach by an alligator and dragged underwater was recovered Wednesday, ending a ghastly search at one of the world's most popular tourist destinations.
Divers found the body of Lane Graves about 16 hours after authorities first got the call that a reptile had taken the boy from the water's edge at Seven Seas Lagoon despite his father's frantic attempt to save the child.
Sheriff Jerry Demings said it appeared the gator pulled the child into deeper water and drowned him, leaving the body near the spot where he was last seen. An autopsy was planned.

"Of course the family was distraught, but also I believe somewhat relieved that his body was found intact," Demings told a news conference.

The boy's parents were identified as Matt and Melissa Graves of Elkhorn, Nebraska, a suburban area of Omaha. A family friend released a statement on behalf of the couple thanking well-wishers for their "thoughts and hope-filled prayers."
CEO Michael Iaccarino of Infogroup, a marketing company where Matt Graves is chief data officer, said Grave's family "is the light of his life."

In a statement from Disney World Resort President George A. Kalogridis, the company said it was "doing what we can" to help the family.
Disney World closed beaches around Seven Seas Lagoon during the search, and it was not immediately clear when they would reopen.
While "no swimming" signs are posted at the beach where the boy was attacked, no signs warn about alligators. A company representative said it would "thoroughly review the situation for the future."

Demings said his agency and state wildlife officials would look into the issue of warning signs. The sheriff told The Associated Press that investigators would also review whether the boy's parents should be charged, but it's not likely.
"There nothing in this case to indicate that there was anything extraordinary" in terms of neglect by the parents, Demings said.
Wildlife officials said the attack was a rarity in a state with a gator population estimated at 1 million. But it still spooked visitors in a city built on tourism.

"We have been to Yellowstone and encountered grizzly bears, but this is just freaky," said Minnesota tourist John Aho, who was staying at the park with his wife, Kim, and their 12-year-old son, Johnny.

The child had waded no more than 1 or 2 feet into the water around nightfall Tuesday when he was taken from a small beach, authorities said.

The boy's father desperately tried to fight off the gator, suffering lacerations on a hand, but he could not save his son. Neither could a nearby lifeguard, officials said.


No other alligator attacks have been reported on the man-made lake, according to Demings.

Some visitors were surprised to learn the reptiles lived on the property.


"My question is why are there alligators in there?" said Michelle Stone, who lives near Detroit and was visiting Disney for 10 days with her two children.

The sheriff said the company has a wildlife management system and has "worked diligently to ensure their guests are not unduly exposed to wildlife here in this area."

Nick Wiley with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said witnesses estimated the alligator was 4 feet to 7 feet long. Crews removed five gators from the lake during the search, and officials said one could have been the animal that attacked the boy.
The beach where the reptile grabbed the child is part of the luxury Grand Floridian resort, across the lake from Disney's Magic Kingdom theme park. The lake stretches over about 200 acres and reaches a depth of 14 feet. It feeds into a series of canals that wind through the entire Disney property.

Though Florida has grown to the nation's third-most populous state, fatal alligator attacks remain rare. Since 1973, 23 people had been killed by wild alligators in Florida, according to data compiled by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. The boy makes 24.

[Eric the Green]

(06-16-2016, 12:20 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Helen Joanne "Jo" Cox[1] (22 June 1974 – 16 June 2016) was a Labour Party politician in the United Kingdom. She was the Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Batley and Spen having retained the seat for Labour in the 2015 general election.[2]

On 16 June 2016, Cox was shot and stabbed multiple times during her lunch break in Birstall, West Yorkshire, where she had been holding a meeting with her constituents. She was left in a critical condition and subsequently died from her injuries in hospital. A 52-year-old man was arrested in connection with the attack.[3]

More here.

What a horrible thing. She was a rising political star and a humanitarian who spoke out in favor of human rights and refugees. She opposed the Brexit, and the insane creep who killed her yelled "Britain first!" as he killed her. I hope the British vote to stay in the union as a tribute to this martyr.

[pbrower2a]

The accused assassin has his first say:

LONDON, June 18 (Reuters) - The man charged with murdering British lawmaker Jo Cox gave his name as “death to traitors, freedom for Britain” when he appeared in court on Saturday accused of a killing that could be a defining moment in a vote on European Union membership.

The murder of Cox, a 41-year-old mother of two young children, has shocked Britain, elicited condolences from leaders around the world and raised questions about the tone of campaigning before the EU referendum which takes place next Thursday.

Cox, an ardent supporter of EU membership, was shot and stabbed in the street in her electoral district in northern England on Thursday.

Wearing a grey sweat shirt and trousers and flanked by two security guards, 52-year-old Thomas Mair was asked his name by a clerk at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London.

“Death to traitors, freedom for Britain,” Mair said. When asked again what his name was, Mair calmly repeated: “My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain.”

“Bearing in mind the name he has just given, he ought to be seen by a psychiatrist,” Deputy Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot told the court.

Mair, balding with a grey goatee beard, made no further comment in the 15-minute hearing, his first appearance in public since police arrested him in the town of Birstall, Yorkshire, where Coxwas killed.

His brief comment in court furthered suggestions that the attack was politically-motivated as it echoed the message put forward by those supporting a so-called Brexit that leaving the EU would be a vote for freedom.

The case is also being by handled by the counter-terrorism unit of Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service.

Prosecutor David Cawthorne told the court that those who witnessed the attack said Cox had been repeatedly stabbed and then shot three times as she lay on the ground.

Her attacker was heard saying “Britain first, Keep Britain independent, Britain always comes first,” Cawthorne said. When he was arrested by police he told them “I’m a political activist,” the prosecutor told the court.

Material relating to far right ideology was found in a search of his home, Cawthorne said.

Mair is charged with murder, causing grievous bodily harm, and possession of a firearm and a knife. He was remanded in custody and will appear at London’s Old Bailey court on Monday.

The killing has shocked the nation. Both sides have temporarily suspended campaigning ahead of Thursday’s vote, which has far reaching implications for both the EU and Britain.

A British exit from the EU would rock the bloc - already shaken by differences over migration and the future of the euro zone - by ripping away its second-largest economy, one of its top two military powers and by far its richest financial center.

Pro-Europeans, including former prime ministers Tony Blair and John Major, have warned that an exit could also trigger the break-up of the United Kingdom by prompting another Scottish independence vote if England pulled Scotland out of the EU.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jo-c...1e?section=

[pbrower2a]

Anton Yelchin, Soviet-born actor (most notable in the remakes of the Star Trek movies as "Pavel Chekhov")

Yelchin was born March 11, 1989, in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia).[2] His family is Jewish.[3][4] His parents, Irina (née Korina) and Viktor Yelchin, were pair figure skaters who were celebrities as stars of the Leningrad Ice Ballet for 15 years.[4][5]
Nationally, Yelchin's parents were the third-ranked pair team; they thus qualified for the 1972 Winter Olympics, but were not permitted to participate by the Soviet authorities[4][5] (Yelchin has said the reason was unclear: "I don't exactly know what that was – because they were Jewish or because the KGB didn't want them to travel").[6] His family moved to the United States in September 1989, when Anton was six months old, after receiving political refugee status from the United States Department of State.[4][5] Yelchin's mother worked as a figure skating choreographer and his father as a figure skating coach, having been Sasha Cohen's first trainer.[7][8] Yelchin's uncle is the children's author and painter Eugene Yelchin.[5]

Yelchin has stated that he "wasn't very good" at figure skating, his parents' profession.[9] He once played in a punk band named The Hammerheads, though the group has since disbanded.[3][10] He enjoys playing the guitar, having said that it gives him "a lot of fulfillment", and is a fan of acoustic blues music. He attended the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies, in Tarzana, California,[7] and enrolled at the University of Southern California in the fall (September/October) of 2007 to study film.[11] As of 2009, he lives in Burbank, California.[12]

On June 19, 2016, it was reported that Yelchin had died from a car accident.

Yelchin began acting at the age of 9 in the independent film A Man is Mostly Water. His earliest roles include Jackson in A Time for Dancing,[1] Milo in Delivering Milo, Tommy Warshaw in House of D, and Jacob Clarke in the miniseries Taken. He made a guest appearance as Stewart, Cheryl David's cousin and a self-described magician (who only knows one card trick), in a season four episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and starred as Byrd Huffstodt, the 14-year-old son of Dr. Craig "Huff" Huffstodt (Hank Azaria), on the television series Huff, which ran from 2004 to 2006. In 2006, he also had a role on an episode ("Tru Love") of the series Law & Order: Criminal Intent, playing a boy who falls in love with his teacher. His biggest film recognition came for the role of Bobby Garfield in Hearts in Atlantis (2001), for which he won Best Performance in a Feature Film – Leading Young Actor at the 2002 Young Artist Awards. He also appeared in the Criminal Minds episode "Sex, Birth & Death" as Nathan Harris, a boy who has fantasies about killing prostitutes.



Yelchin at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival

Yelchin starred in Alpha Dog, a crime thriller that received an American release on January 12, 2007. In the film he played Zack Mazursky, a character based on real-life kidnap and murder victim Nicholas Markowitz.[7] USA Today's review described the performance as "heartbreakingly endearing".[13] After the premiere, Markowitz's mother praised his portrayal of her son.[14] Yelchin subsequently headlined Fierce People, a drama which received a limited release on September 7 of that year and co-starred Diane Lane and Donald Sutherland. In 2008 Yelchin played the title role in Charlie Bartlett, a film about a wealthy teenager in a public high school.[15] Also that year, Yelchin appeared alongside the Russian duo t.A.T.u. in the movie You and I (which was filmed in Moscow during the summer of 2007),[16] and co-starred with Susan Sarandon and Justin Chatwin in Middle of Nowhere. He next starred in two May 2009 releases: the eleventh Star Trek film, in which he portrayed 17-year-old navigator Pavel Chekov, and Terminator Salvation, in which he was cast as a teenage Kyle Reese.[17][18]

[/url]
In 2011, Yelchin portrayed Charley Brewster in the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fright_Night_%282011_film%29]remake of Fright Night, directed by Craig Gillespie,[19] starred in the romantic drama Like Crazy, and voiced Clumsy Smurf in the film adaptation of The Smurfs.[20][21] He provided the voice for the Albino Pirate character in the animated film The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (released in North America as The Pirates! Band of Misfits) (2012).[22][23]
He reprised his role in Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) and played the lead in the thriller Odd Thomas.[24]


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Yelchin

[Eric the Green]

(06-20-2016, 11:53 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(06-18-2016, 10:41 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The accused assassin has his first say:

LONDON, June 18 (Reuters) - The man charged with murdering British lawmaker Jo Cox gave his name as “death to traitors, freedom for Britain” when he appeared in court on Saturday accused of a killing that could be a defining moment in a vote on European Union membership.

The murder of Cox, a 41-year-old mother of two young children, has shocked Britain, elicited condolences from leaders around the world and raised questions about the tone of campaigning before the EU referendum which takes place next Thursday.

Cox, an ardent supporter of EU membership, was shot and stabbed in the street in her electoral district in northern England on Thursday.

Wearing a grey sweat shirt and trousers and flanked by two security guards, 52-year-old Thomas Mair was asked his name by a clerk at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London.

“Death to traitors, freedom for Britain,” Mair said. When asked again what his name was, Mair calmly repeated: “My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain.”

“Bearing in mind the name he has just given, he ought to be seen by a psychiatrist,” Deputy Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot told the court.

Mair, balding with a grey goatee beard, made no further comment in the 15-minute hearing, his first appearance in public since police arrested him in the town of Birstall, Yorkshire, where Coxwas killed.

His brief comment in court furthered suggestions that the attack was politically-motivated as it echoed the message put forward by those supporting a so-called Brexit that leaving the EU would be a vote for freedom.

The case is also being by handled by the counter-terrorism unit of Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service.

Prosecutor David Cawthorne told the court that those who witnessed the attack said Cox had been repeatedly stabbed and then shot three times as she lay on the ground.

Her attacker was heard saying “Britain first, Keep Britain independent, Britain always comes first,” Cawthorne said. When he was arrested by police he told them “I’m a political activist,” the prosecutor told the court.

Material relating to far right ideology was found in a search of his home, Cawthorne said.

Mair is charged with murder, causing grievous bodily harm, and possession of a firearm and a knife. He was remanded in custody and will appear at London’s Old Bailey court on Monday.

The killing has shocked the nation. Both sides have temporarily suspended campaigning ahead of Thursday’s vote, which has far reaching implications for both the EU and Britain.

A British exit from the EU would rock the bloc - already shaken by differences over migration and the future of the euro zone - by ripping away its second-largest economy, one of its top two military powers and by far its richest financial center.

Pro-Europeans, including former prime ministers Tony Blair and John Major, have warned that an exit could also trigger the break-up of the United Kingdom by prompting another Scottish independence vote if England pulled Scotland out of the EU.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jo-c...1e?section=

Death to traitors? Who's the traitor here? How can someone who's part of a group that pledges allegiance to The Kremlin go around calling other people traitors?

You never know what creepy ideas swarm around in the minds of violent lunatics.

[pbrower2a]

People who work within the system are by definition loyal. Assassination of an elected public official is itself a treacherous act. Democracy has consequences, one of which is that one cannot consistently get one's way. Mr. “Death to traitors, freedom for Britain” has established what a traitor is -- himself.

I know not what loyalties Mr.“Death to traitors, freedom for Britain” has -- but it is not to the people who elected Ms. Cox, MP.

[pbrower2a]

Michael Herr (April 13, 1940 – June 23, 2016) was an American writer and war correspondent, best known as the author of Dispatches (1977), a memoir of his time as a correspondent for Esquire magazine (1967–1969) during the Vietnam War. The book was called the best "to have been written about the Vietnam War" by The New York Times Book Review; novelist John le Carré called it "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time." Herr later was credited with pioneering[dubious – discuss] the literary genre of the nonfiction novel, along with authors such as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe.

From 1971 to 1975 he published nothing. Then, in 1977, he went on the road with rock & roller Ted Nugent and wrote about the experience in a 1978 cover story for Crawdaddy magazine.[1] Also in 1977, he published Dispatches, upon which his reputation mostly rests.

Herr contributed to the narration for Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). He co-wrote the screenplay for the film Full Metal Jacket (1987) with director Stanley Kubrick and author Gustav Hasford. That film was based on Hasford's novel The Short-Timers and the screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. Herr collaborated with Richard Stanley in writing the original screenplay for the 1996 adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau. However, Stanley claims the subsequent rewrites cost Herr his writing credit, omitting most of the material created by the two writers. The omission probably worked to his favor, however, since the movie was panned by critics and earned credited writers Stanley and Ron Hutchinson a Razzie Award for Worst Screenplay of 1997.

Herr wrote a pair of articles for Vanity Fair about Stanley Kubrick, which were later incorporated into the small book – Kubrick (2000) – a very personal biography of the director. He declined to edit the script of Kubrick's last film Eyes Wide Shut (1999).[2]
Herr lived with his wife Valerie in Delhi, New York until his death on June 23, 2016 at the age of 76.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Herr

[gabrielle]

Quote:Bernie Worrell, the immensely prolific keyboardist from pioneering funk collective Parliament/Funkadelic, and a frequent collaborator with new wave legends Talking Heads, has died. Worrell was 72, and had been suffering from lung cancer for some time.

http://www.avclub.com/article/rip-bernie...kin-238773

[pbrower2a]

David Willis Johnson (7 August 1932 – June 19, 2016) was an Australian-born company director, resident in the United States of America, who as President and CEO led the Campbell Soup Company from 1990 until 1997 and then again from March 2000 to January 2001. He was also the CEO of Gerber, the president of Entemanns, and on the Board of Directors for Colgate Palmolive.[1]

Johnson was born in New South Wales and grew up near Tumut in the Snowy Mountains. From the family farm he rode to the one room Lacmalac Public School for his primary education. He attended Newington College (1947-1950) and was Senior Boarder Prefect and captained the 1st XV rugby and 1st XI cricket. He continued his sporting career at Wesley College, University of Sydney, where he captained the rugby, athletics and cricket teams, was Senior Student, and won a University rowing Blue. He graduated in Economics at the University of Sydney in 1954 and received a Diploma of Education the following year. In 1958 he received an MBA from the University of Chicago.

He began his business career as an executive trainee for the Ford Motor Company in Geelong, Victoria, where he won a Rotary Foundation Fellowship to study at the University of Chicago. In 1959, he became a management trainee at Colgate-Palmolive International in Australia, and, in 1967, became Chairman and Managing Director of its South African operation. In 1973, he went to Hong Kong as President of Warner-Lambert/Park Davis Asia, and, in 1976, he moved to the United States as President of two successive divisions within that company. In 1979, he became head of Entemann's Inc., and continued as President and CEO when it was acquired by General Foods in 1982. During his leadership of this Company, sales and profits quadrupled, and when, in 1987, he was named Chairman, President and CEO of Gerber Products, earnings grew at an annual rate of more than 50 per cent. In 1990, Johnson joined Campbell Soup Company as President and CEO and retired in from the company in 1997. Under his leadership, the Company's value increased by an average of 23 per cent a year. In 1997, Johnson was named the Director of the Year in the United States of America.

Johnson died June 19, 2016, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He was 83.[2]

(from Wiki)

[Dan '82]

Former NFL coach, defensive guru Buddy Ryan dies at age 82

Quote:Former NFL head coach and influential defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan died Tuesday. He was 82.
Ryan, who was outspoken and coached in the NFL for 26 seasons, was known for building some of football's top defenses with a relentlessness that focused on creating havoc on the field.
His death was confirmed by the Buffalo Bills, who employ twin sons Rex and Rob Ryan. James Solano, Buddy Ryan's agent, said he died in Kentucky but did not give a cause...

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/165794...ies-age-82

[pbrower2a]

Vasyl Yaroslavovych Slipak (Ukrainian: Василь Ярославович Сліпак, December 20, 1974 – June 29, 2016) was an Ukrainian baritone opera singer. From 1994 he frequently performed in France at such venues as Paris Opera and Opéra de la Bastille.[1] For his opera performance, Slipak received several awards, including "Best Male Performance" for the Toreador Song.[1]

Born in 1974 in Lviv Oblast, Slipak liked to sing since his childhood.[1] At the age of 11, Slipak joined the Lviv children's choir group Dudarik. After that, he continued his education at the Lviv Conservatory. During his education, Slipak participated in a vocal contest in the French city of Clermont, winning the contest. In 1996, Slipak received an invitation to perform at Opéra de la Bastille in Paris. In 1997 Slipak graduated from the Lysenko Music Academy in Lviv and then was invited to the Paris Opera where he became an opera singer.[2]

Following the outbreak of the pro-Russian insurgency in Donbass, Slipak returned to Ukraine and participated in the 2014 Ukrainian revolution.[1] In 2015, Slipak joined the fights against pro-Russian insurgents as a member of the 7th Battalion of the Volunteer Ukrainian Corps of the Right Sector. He took the military call sign Mif, a reference to his favorite aria of Mephistopheles from the opera Faust.[1] After the war in Donbass, Slipak planned to continue his career in Paris.

On 29 June 2016, at approximately 6 a.m. Slipak was killed by a sniper shot near Luhansk.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasyl_Slipak

[Odin]

(06-28-2016, 11:37 AM)Dan Wrote: Former NFL coach, defensive guru Buddy Ryan dies at age 82

Quote:Former NFL head coach and influential defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan died Tuesday. He was 82.
Ryan, who was outspoken and coached in the NFL for 26 seasons, was known for building some of football's top defenses with a relentlessness that focused on creating havoc on the field.
His death was confirmed by the Buffalo Bills, who employ twin sons Rex and Rob Ryan. James Solano, Buddy Ryan's agent, said he died in Kentucky but did not give a cause...

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/165794...ies-age-82

People are mostly talking about his '85 Bears team, but he was the defensive coordinator for the Vikings back in the 70s and is one of the reasons the Vikings got the name "Purple People Eaters".

[pbrower2a]

1. Xu Jiatun (Chinese: 许家屯; 10 March 1916 – 29 June 2016) was a Chinese politician and dissident. He was the Chinese Communist Party secretary of Jiangsu Province from 1977 to 1983 and the Governor of Jiangsu from 1977 to 1979. After sympathising with the 1989 Tiananmen Square student protests, he left the country and lived in self-exile in the United States.
   
   Xu was the member of the 11th and 12th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China from 1977 to 1987.[1] He was the Chinese Communist Party secretary of Jiangsu Province from 1977 to 1983 and the Governor of Jiangsu from 1977 to 1979. He became the director of the Hong Kong branch of the Xinhua News Agency from 1983 to 1989,[2][3] then China's de facto political presence in the territory.[2] He participated in the preparatory works of the establishment of the Hong Kong SAR and was vice-chairman of the Hong Kong Basic Law Drafting Committee.
   
2. Xu sympathised with the Tiananmen Square student protests in 1989. After the military crackdown in June, he fled to the United States and lived there in exile.[2] He was later expelled from the Communist Party. In 1994, he published memoirs.
   
3. Xu later lived in Orange County, California, United States. In 1997, he joined an appeal to the Communist Party Congress meeting in Beijing to reverse the government report condemning the 1989 Tiananmen student protests.[4] In an interview with Initium Media in 2016, after a stay in hospital, Xu, in an interview with the Hong Kong journalist Simon Kei shek Ming, predicted that Xi Jinping would arrest "higher level" tigers in the Communist Party.[5] He died in June 2016 at the age of 100.[6]
   References
   
   
   
4. "Xu Jiatun 许家屯". China Vitae.
   
   
5. Zhao, Ziyang (2009). Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang. Simon and Schuster.
   
   
6. Zhao, Suisheng (2004). Chinese Foreign Policy: Pragmatism and Strategic Behavior. M.E. Sharpe. p. 106.
   
   
7. "Exile in U.S. Joins Tiananmen Appeal". Los Angeles Times. 18 September 1997.
   
   
8. "百歲生死許家屯". theinitium.com. Retrieved 2016-06-07.
   
9. "Xu Jiatun dies at the age of 100". RTHK. 29 June 2016.
   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xu_Jiatun

[The Wonkette]

I see that nobody is posting anything about the storied female basketball college coach, Pat Summitt.

Quote:Patricia Sue Summitt (née Head; June 14, 1952 – June 28, 2016) was an American college basketball head coach whose 1,098 career wins are the most in NCAA basketball history.[1] She served as the head coach of the University of Tennessee Lady Vols basketball team from 1974 to 2012, winning eight NCAA championships (a NCAA women's record when she retired), and surpassed only by the 10 titles won by UCLA men's coach John Wooden and the 11 titles won by UConn women's coach Geno Auriemma. She was the first NCAA coach, and one of four college coaches overall, with at least 1,000 wins.[2]

Summitt also won two Olympic medals: a gold as head coach of the 1984 U.S. women's basketball team and a silver as a player on the 1976 team. She was named the Naismith Basketball Coach of the Century in 2000. In 2009, the Sporting News placed her at number 11 on its list of the 50 Greatest Coaches of All Time in all sports; she was the only woman on the list. In 38 years as a coach, she never had a losing season. In 2012, Summitt was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama and received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the 2012 ESPY Awards.

Summitt wrote three books, all with co-author Sally Jenkins: Reach for the Summitt, which is part motivational book and part biography; Raise the Roof, about the Lady Vols' 1997–1998 undefeated and NCAA-championship winning season; and Sum It Up, covering her life including her experience being diagnosed and living with Alzheimer's disease.[3]

Full article here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Summitt

[Odin]

(07-01-2016, 02:40 PM)The Wonkette Wrote: I see that nobody is posting anything about the storied female basketball college coach, Pat Summitt.

Quote:Patricia Sue Summitt (née Head; June 14, 1952 – June 28, 2016) was an American college basketball head coach whose 1,098 career wins are the most in NCAA basketball history.[1] She served as the head coach of the University of Tennessee Lady Vols basketball team from 1974 to 2012, winning eight NCAA championships (a NCAA women's record when she retired), and surpassed only by the 10 titles won by UCLA men's coach John Wooden and the 11 titles won by UConn women's coach Geno Auriemma. She was the first NCAA coach, and one of four college coaches overall, with at least 1,000 wins.[2]

Summitt also won two Olympic medals: a gold as head coach of the 1984 U.S. women's basketball team and a silver as a player on the 1976 team. She was named the Naismith Basketball Coach of the Century in 2000. In 2009, the Sporting News placed her at number 11 on its list of the 50 Greatest Coaches of All Time in all sports; she was the only woman on the list. In 38 years as a coach, she never had a losing season. In 2012, Summitt was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama and received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the 2012 ESPY Awards.

Summitt wrote three books, all with co-author Sally Jenkins: Reach for the Summitt, which is part motivational book and part biography; Raise the Roof, about the Lady Vols' 1997–1998 undefeated and NCAA-championship winning season; and Sum It Up, covering her life including her experience being diagnosed and living with Alzheimer's disease.[3]

Full article here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Summitt

Fuck Alzheimer's.

[pbrower2a]

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

[Odin]

OK, this year is really starting to piss me off.

[pbrower2a]

Just to remind us of what we lost -- one of the last living people who can masterfully discuss one of the worst and most inexcusable crimes of history as a survivor. I hate to violate copyrights, but I invite anyone to subscribe to or donate to this magazine.


 

World
Remembering Elie Wiesel: A Tribute From a Friend and Disciple
The Holocaust survivor, Nobel laureate, author, activist, dead at 87
By Menachem Z. Rosensaft
July 2, 2016 • 3:27 PM


Elie Wiesel died Saturday at the age of 87. In the end, what remains with us, within us, most are the memories.
Much has been said and written, much remains to be said and written, about Elie Wiesel who, after emerging from the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, dedicated himself to perpetuating the memory of the millions of European Jews who were murdered in the Shoah. In doing so, he became the acknowledged voice of its survivors. He often said that he could not, would not speak on behalf of the dead. He did, however, speak forcefully, eloquently for the collectivity of the survivors, and they revered and loved him for it. “Accept the idea that you will never see what they have seen—and go on seeing now,” he wrote in his classic essay, “A Plea for the Survivors,” perhaps subconsciously opening a window into his own heart, “that you will never know the faces that haunt their nights, that you will never know the cries that rent their sleep. Accept the idea that you will never penetrate the cursed and spellbound universe they carry within themselves with unfailing loyalty.”
Not all survivors of the Shoah were able to transcend all they had experienced and witnessed in what Elie Wiesel famously referred to as the “Kingdom of Night.” Suffering, he once observed, “gives man no privileges; it all depends on what he does with it. If he uses his suffering against man, he betrays it; if he uses it to fight evil and humanize destiny, then he elevates it and elevates himself.” He described his own reflective existential crossroads in his lecture upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize: “A recollection. The time: After the war. The place: Paris. A young man struggles to readjust to life. His mother, his father, his small sister are gone. He is alone. On the verge of despair. And yet he does not give up. On the contrary, he strives to find a place among the living. He acquires a new language. He makes a few friends who, like himself, believe that the memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil; that the memory of death will serve as a shield against death.”

There were so many dimensions to this unique, truly extraordinary individual. Elie Wiesel first came to public prominence, at the outset in France, then in the United States, in Israel and across the globe, as an author whose use of words was invariably elegant, direct, and piercing. The overriding common theme of his more than 60 books of both fiction and non-fiction is survival, not just the factual circumstance of survival but its transformative nature and, yes, power. The inmate of a Nazi death camp, the Soviet Jew struggling to retain a national and spiritual identity in the face of political oppression, the open-heart surgery patient, all are more than literary characters—they are alter egos with whom their author was in perpetual dialogue and through whom he taught and will continue to teach the reader the essential elements of overcoming whatever is most daunting, most harrowing, in one’s life. His memoir, Night, brought the horrors of the Holocaust into the consciousness of millions across the globe. His The Jews of Silence became one of the earliest rallying cries on behalf of Soviet Jewry.

Equally important was Elie Wiesel the teacher who made a lasting, often life-changing impact on thousands of students who sat in his classes first at New York’s City College, then at Boston University and Eckerd College, and most recently also at Chapman University. His lectures at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan made the mysteries of Hasidism and Jewish biblical thought accessible to 20th– and 21st-century New Yorkers, Jews and non-Jews alike. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of literature and philosophy coupled with a seemingly inexhaustible intellectual curiosity. Nietzsche in particular fascinated him. At the same time, he was adamant in excoriating those who sought to exploit or trivialize the Holocaust. “Auschwitz,” he wrote, “signifies not only the failure of two thousand years of Christian civilization, but also the defeat of the intellect that wants to find a Meaning—with a capital M—in history. What Auschwitz embodied had none.”

Much has also been said and written, and much will surely continue to be said and written, about Elie Wiesel the man of conscience and human rights activist who urged one U.S. president publicly not to honor the memory of members of Hitler’s notorious Waffen-SS, and who implored another to put an end to the crimes against humanity being perpetrated in Bosnia. “That place,” Elie told President Reagan on April 19, 1985, referring to the Bitburg military cemetery in what was then West Germany, “is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.” And he turned to President Clinton at the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., on April 22, 1993, two years before the genocidal massacre at Srebrenica, and said: “And, Mr. President, I cannot not tell you something. I have been in the former Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep since for what I have seen. As a Jew I am saying that we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country! People fight each other and children die. Why? Something, anything must be done.”

But scholarly assessments of the life and career of the Hasidic boy from the Transylvanian town of Sighet who became a citizen of the world in the truest sense of that term will have to wait for another day. Mourning a friend is always personal, deeply personal, and today, I grapple with my memories of a friendship that spanned more than half a century.

I knew Elie from the time I was a teenager. He was a close friend of my parents, a frequent guest in our home. He and my father would sit for hours discussing the politics of the day and, far more than dwelling on their respective memories of Auschwitz-Birkenau and other Nazi camps, they would focus on the present-day challenges of remembrance and on improving the lot, both physical and spiritual, of their fellow survivors. One of my fondest memories of Elie is of him and my father singing Hasidic melodies, nigunim, their voices harmonizing as they took themselves back for a few minutes to the homes and families that had been torn from them. My favorite, perhaps also theirs: “She-yiboneh beis hamikdosh bi-m’heirah be’yameinu … May the Temple be rebuilt quickly, in our days …”
One evening at the beginning of my senior year of high school, he asked me, as he invariably did, what I was studying and how my classes were going. These were not perfunctory questions. He wanted detailed answers, especially about the books I was reading. I told him that the only class I did not enjoy was an advanced English seminar. I was frustrated by the teacher’s approach and his insistence on intellectually pigeonholing the assigned material. Elie was skeptical. He knew I liked, more than liked, literature. Perhaps, he said, I was subconsciously exaggerating. I showed him the most recent written assignment I had received back annotated with the teacher’s comments. Elie read it over, and said, “I see what you mean. You won’t learn anything that way.” He then offered to get together with me once a week to go over the readings with me, as well as my weekly papers. He was living at the Master Hotel on Riverside Drive and 103rd Street, and for the rest of that year, I went there to receive a weekly tutorial. We discussed in depth classical works of literature, and he patiently taught me how one translates thoughts into written sentences that take on a life of their own. “Write,” he inscribed a photograph of himself to me in French, “so that the words become a burning scar.”

June 6, 1972. Elie calls, his voice trembling with joy. He tells us that he and Marion have a son. Eight days later, my mother carries the child into the Wiesels’ living room on Central Park West to receive his name. Shlomo Elisha son of Eliezer son of Shlomo. Elisha’s birth transforms Elie profoundly, indelibly. For the first time in the more than 10 years that I’ve known him, he seems genuinely, thoroughly happy, content. Over the coming years, he is never happier, never more at ease than when he talks about Elisha and, in recent years, his grandchildren.

That same year, when he was appointed Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at New York’s City College and I was back in New York after graduating from Johns Hopkins, he asked me to be his teaching assistant. He taught a course on the literature of the Holocaust and a seminar on Hasidic thought. My tasks were to interact with the students on a regular basis, to grade papers, and to lecture about Elie’s own books, something he would not do. What struck me the most was how accessible he made himself to his students, especially the sons or daughters of survivors, who wanted to speak with him not about their studies but about themselves, their relationships with their parents, their efforts to understand what their parents had experienced. He would listen patiently, empathize, give advice. Perhaps more than anyone else, he was able to relate to the children and grandchildren of survivors. He not only understood us, but he empowered us to embrace our identity.

Soon after becoming chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council in 1980, he asked me to organize and chair a Second Generation advisory committee. He wanted our input, to hear our perspective. “When I speak to others,” he said to us at the First International Conference of Children of Holocaust Survivors in May of 1984, “surely you know that I mean you, all the time. You are my audience, because it is you who matter. … Do you know what we see in you, in all of you? We see in you our heirs, our allies, our younger brothers and sisters. But in a strange way to all of us all of you are our children.”

June 1981. We are in Israel for the World Gathering of Holocaust survivors. Elie had been asked by the organizers to draft a Legacy of the Survivors for the occasion. He had written it in both French and Yiddish. In the lobby of the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv, Elie calls me over, gives me sheet of paper, and asks, “Have you seen the English translation of the legacy they prepared?” I told him I had not. After I finish reading the text he tells me that he finds it flat, prosaic. “Please write a new translation,” he asks me, adding, “I trust you.” It has always been a tremendous source of pride for me that when the Legacy was read in multiple languages during the closing ceremony at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the English version was my translation of Elie’s text which he had approved.

January 1995. Elie is at Auschwitz-Birkenau. His words during the ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of that death camp’s liberation are searing: “In this place of darkness and malediction we can but stand in awe and remember its stateless, faceless, and nameless victims. Close your eyes and look: Endless nocturnal processions are converging here, and here it is always night. Here heaven and earth are on fire. Close your eyes and listen. Listen to the silent screams of terrified mothers, the prayers of anguished old men and women. Listen to the tears of children, Jewish children, a beautiful little girl among them, with golden hair, whose vulnerable tenderness has never left me. Look and listen as they quietly walk towards dark flames so gigantic that the planet itself seemed in danger.” After escaping and being recaptured by the Germans, my father was tortured for months in the notorious Block 11 of the main Auschwitz camp, known as the Death Block. Days later I receive a note in the mail from Elie: “In front of Block 11 I thought—a lot, profoundly—about your father—and about all of you.”

Elie was always unabashedly, unequivocally Jewish. But in sharp contrast to many of his contemporaries, he neither flaunted his Jewishness nor presumed to impose it on others. Rather he sought to explain its mysteries and to convey his love of the Jewish religion, of Jewish culture and tradition, of Jewish mysticism and Jewish mysteries. And he did so with deep affection and an equally profound reverence for, the subject matter and, perhaps equally important, with respect for his readers and listeners. Most important, his Jewishness was never chauvinistic or exclusionary. “To be Jewish,” he explained, “is to recognize that every person is created in God’s image and thus worthy of respect. Being Jewish to me is to reject fanaticism everywhere.”

He believed fervently, passionately, that a paramount responsibility inherent in his survival, alongside remembrance, was to speak out forcefully against indifference and against suffering, persecution, or oppression of any kind. His charge to the thousands of survivors and their children assembled in Jerusalem for the 1981 World Gathering reflected the universality of this worldview: “In an age tainted by violence, we must teach coming generations of the origins and consequences of violence. In a society of bigotry and indifference, we must tell our contemporaries that whatever the answer, it must grow out of human compassion and reflect man’s relentless quest for justice and memory; and we must insist again and again that it is the Jew who carries that message of humankind to mankind.” In this regard, his message was consistent over the years. In his Nobel lecture he spoke about the need to remember not only Jewish suffering but also “that of the Ethiopians, the Cambodians, the boat people, Palestinians, the Mesquite Indians, the Argentinian ‘desaparecidos’—the list seems endless.” His universal message remained the same even at Auschwitz, perhaps especially at Auschwitz. “As we reflect upon the past,” Elie said there in 1995, “we must address ourselves to the present and the future. In the name of all that is sacred in memory, let us stop the bloodshed in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Chechnya; the vicious and ruthless terror attacks against Jews in the Holy Land. Let us reject and oppose more effectively religious fanaticism and racial hate.”

June 2008. We are in Petra, Jordan. Elie and his wife Marion had asked me to organize an international conference of Nobel laureates for the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Hunger is one of the themes. “Those of us who were never hungry will never understand hunger,” said Elie. “Hunger brings humiliation. The hungry person thinks of bread and nothing else. Hunger fills his or her universe. His prayer, his aspiration, his hope, his ideal are not lofty: They are a piece of bread. To accept another person’s hunger is to condone his or her tragic condition of helplessness, despair, and death.” The afternoon of the last day of the conference he and I walk through the ruins of a 2,000-year-old Nabataean temple. “Tu te rends compte, do you realize,” he says to me, “the distance between Auschwitz and Petra?”
And finally, always, there was Jerusalem. Elie was an ardent defender of and advocate for the State of Israel, but he loved Jerusalem, both the actual city and the ethereal, incorporeal concept of the place to which Jews yearned to return for almost two thousand years; the original city on a hill that provided a psychological, spiritual refuge that even the Nazis could not take away from the child he had been in a Birkenau barrack surrounded by death and desolation. Walking in Jerusalem with Elie was a timeless experience, almost like accompanying him to a place he knew intimately, but that somehow remained out of reach. “I see myself back in my town,” he wrote in A Beggar in Jerusalem, “back in my childhood. Yom Kippur. Day of fasting, of atonement. That evening one cry bursts with the same force from every heart: ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’ On my right, among the men draped in their prayer shawls, there was one who did not pray. The next morning I saw him again at the entrance of he Bet Hamidrash, among the beggars and simple-minded. I offered him some change; he refused. ‘I do not need it, my child,’ he said. I asked him how he subsisted. ‘On dreams,’ he answered.”

For Elie, Auschwitz and Jerusalem, Sighet and Petra, Paris, New York, and Washington were all linked together in a mystical chain that existed beyond reason or explanation. Perhaps my favorite of the many stories I heard him tell is the following Hasidic tale: “Somewhere,” said Rebbe Nahman of Bratzlav, “there lives a man who asks a question to which there is no answer; a generation later, in another place, there lives a man who asks another question to which there is no answer either—and he doesn’t know, he cannot know, that his question is actually an answer to the first.”
My visits with Elie in the weeks before he died were deeply personal and emotional. He spoke nostalgically about the vacations he, Marion, and Elisha had spent with our family in San Remo, Italy, how he had been able to relax there. “I miss your father,” he said. He wanted to know about our daughter, Jodi, and our grandchildren, and whether I was satisfied with my work and career. He reminded me how he had co-officiated at Jeanie’s and my wedding, and how he had eulogized my father at his funeral more than 40 years ago. He was also one of the witnesses at Jodi’s wedding and recited a blessing at the joint bris/simchat bat ceremony when we welcomed our twin grandchildren into the Jewish community. “I promised your father I would watch over you,” he told me several times.
But we also spoke about the present, about the depressing state of politics in both the United States and Israel. And about the presidential election campaign. He told me how much he liked and respected Hillary Clinton, reminisced about his private meetings with Barack Obama, and said that while he had met Donald Trump, he was repulsed by his xenophobic rhetoric.

Sitting with him, far more frail than I had ever seen him, I realized that he had totally retained his moral and aesthetic compass. Elie could never abide crudeness or boorishness, whether in speech or in behavior. He abhorred bigotry of any kind, against Jews certainly, but with equal fervor if it was directed at any other group. In the past we had often argued politics, but now he seemed to be giving me one final assessment, a mental guide in case I should ever be uncertain where he stood. A sad reminder that I would soon no longer be able to ask him his opinion directly but would only be able to imagine what he would say and what he would advise me to do.
In his eulogy at my father’s funeral he said, “I know countless souls, sanctified by fire, will soon greet you there. … And they will embrace you as one of their own and bring you to the Heavenly Tribunal and, still higher, to the Celestial Throne, and they will say, ‘Look, he did not forget us.’ Day in, day out, from morning until late at night, everywhere and under all circumstances, even on simchas, his spirit glowed in our fire. Few sanctified the Holocaust as he did. Few suffered it as he did. Few loved its holy martyrs as he did. So they will embrace him with love and gratitude as though he were their defender.”

I can think of no more appropriate words with which to bid farewell, a most reluctant and love-filled farewell, to my friend, my teacher, my mentor, Elie Wiesel.


***
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Menachem Z. Rosensaft is the General Counsel of the World Jewish Congress, and teaches about the law of genocide and war crimes trials at the law schools of Columbia and Cornell Universities. He is the editor of God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors.

[pbrower2a]

Never forget. Never trivialize the horror. Tell your children; have them tell their children's children forever.
Never forgive the perpetrators of the Holocaust and its analogues; damn the perpetrators to the edge of the Universe and to the end of Time!
Forgive the innocent among the peoples (including the Germans) in whose name these horrible crimes were done.
Resist anything that could conceivably lead to a repetition even on the smallest of scales no matter who the victims will be.

When you have a reasonable chance of success, smash hate speech whenever or wherever it happens!

[pbrower2a]

(07-05-2016, 10:05 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(07-02-2016, 02:56 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: 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]

[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elie_Wiesel#cite_note-75][/url]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elie_Wiesel

Nazi punks f____ off!

Having seen this gentle soul on television -- regrettably the only way that I could -- I can hardly imagine how anyone could attack him. But in view of 6 million other Jews... it happened, and Eric Hunt showed what an angry fool he is.

Holocaust denial is one of the most absurd misrepresentations of history possible, something that (even if one ignores its cruelty and disrespect of people who died for no comprehensible reason) negates the meaning and value of the study of history. Yes, history is often a horrific story written in the blood and ashes of innocent people. There's still good reason to see in its rawest, harshest form -- so that we never allow its worst deeds to happen again.

Maybe someday someone as similarly cruel as Eric Hunt will deny the Atlantic slave trade, one of the few evils as horrible )if more protracted) as the Shoah. The Holocaust deniers have established the precedent for others to treat the worst events of History as something to pretend never happened instead of the NC-17 (the old X rating) film that children absolutely must see. Yes, rape is also a part of history, which allows the most obvious excuse for an NC-17 rating for History at its harshest.

Between 1933 and 1945 Christian civilization completely failed in Germany; from 1938 to 1945 it completely failed in Austria. Christianity without conscience is itself a gross heresy.