The New York Times says Wiesel, more than anyone else, “seared the memory of the Holocaust on the world’s conscience”. “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. “At the same time anti-Semitism, Holocaust revisionism keeps rising”.
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A procession exits the Fifth Avenue Synagogue during the funeral for Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wieselon on July 3, 2016 in NY.
Wiesel, who survived the infamous Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, was perhaps the most prolific of Holocaust survivors who wrote about his experiences.
“Today, we mourn the loss of legendary New Yorker, author and activist Elie Wiesel”, Governor Cuomo said.
A preschool teacher who had come to pay her respects, Bardin said she knew Wiesel only through his writing. He was buried at Sharon Gardens cemetery in Valhalla, N.Y. Sara Bloomfield, director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., credited Wiesel with making organizations like hers possible.
In awarding the Peace Prize in 1986, the Nobel Committee praised him as a “messenger to mankind” and “one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression and racism continue to characterise the world”.
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Wiesel is best known for his groundbreaking work Night, a book describes the horrors he experienced as a Jewish survivor of the Nazi death camps of the Holocaust during World War II. Foxman said that in recent months he and Wiesel would reminisce, in Yiddish, and talk philosophy. “Well now he’s a little closer”.
