Wiesel died in NY on July 2, 2016 at age 87.
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The Holocaust happened more than 70 years ago and few authors from that time remain. “He interceded against our worst instincts”.
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. “He fought for the memory of the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, and he fought for Israel”, Marion Wiesel, his wife, said in a statement.
While Berkowitz and others worry that the Holocaust’s lessons will be forgotten, some note that Wiesel himself worked to make memories endure.
A hearse was seen outside the Orthodox Jewish synagogue and mourners were arriving around 10 a.m. Among them was former national director of the Anti-Defamation League Abraham Foxman.
“He carried a message universally, he carried the Jewish pain, the message of Jewish tragedy to the world but he took it way beyond”.
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President Barack Obama said of Wiesel on Saturday, “As a writer, a speaker, an activist, and a thinker, he was one of those people who changed the world more as a citizen of the world than those who hold office or traditional positions of power”. In 1958, he published his first book, Night, about his experience at Auschwitz, which became one of the most representative books of Holocaust literature. “And, I personally have lost a very special friend”, Foxman said. Despite unimaginable odds, Elie survived the Holocaust and devoted the rest of his life to ensuring the world would never forget its horrors. “Now he can challenge the Almighty much closer and maybe he’ll get some answers, which he asked, but never got the answers to”.
