His wife was among mourners who attended a private funeral service on Sunday at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
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Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and writer who died Saturday at home in CT, visited the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie a few years ago as part of the museum’s dedication.
Despite unimaginable odds, Elie survived the Holocaust and devoted the rest of his life to ensuring the world would never forget its horrors.
Rabbi Perry Berkowitz called Wiesel’s death a “double tragedy”, since the world lost someone so “rare and unusual” and that Holocaust survivors are dying out.
Wiesel, 87, died on Saturday at his home in New York City.
Among the attendees was Abraham Foxman, former national director of the Anti-Defamation League.
Even as he received the Congressional Gold Medal at the White House in 1985, he rebuked U.S. President Ronald Reagan for planning to lay a wreath at a German cemetery where some of Hitler’s notorious Waffen SS troops were buried.
Mr Wiesel shared his harrowing story of encampment at Auschwitz as a teenager through his classic memoir Night, one of the most widely read and discussed books of the 20th century. “He stood up for the people in Rwanda, he stood up for the Yugoslavians, he stood up for the Cambodians”, said Foxman, who has known Wiesel for decades.
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He wrote dozens of books, and in 1986 he won the Nobel Peace Prize for speaking out about the Holocaust, as well as fighting indifference.
