Elie Wiesel, a giant of the Jewish nation passed away on Saturday aged 87. There is surely hardly anyone who hasn’t heard of the Holocaust survivor who became “the conscience of the world”, standing up for Holocaust survivors, the Jewish nation, and victims of racism and genocide worldwide. The Jerusalem Post provides a condensed bio:
Called “the world’s leading spokesman on the Holocaust” by the Nobel committee, Wiesel dedicated his life to perpetuating the memory of the Holocaust and promoting Holocaust education, as well as “to combat[ ting] indifference, intolerance and injustice through international dialogue and youth-focused programs that promote acceptance, understanding and equality,” according to his foundation.
Wiesel said the fight against indifference and the concomitant attitude that “it’s no concern of mine” was a struggle for peace. “The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference,” he said. “To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all.”
[...]
Wiesel was the author of some four dozen works dealing with Judaism, the Holocaust and the moral responsibility of all people to fight hatred, racism and genocide.
But it was his first, the memoir Night (1956), which gained Wiesel fame. It tells of his experience with his father in Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, to where he was taken at age 15 from his Romanian hometown of Sighet.
[...]Dozens of obituaries and articles about Elie Wiesel have been published in the last 24 hours, too many to link to or post here. I will just link to a couple which stood out in my mind.
Wiesel was not without a sense of humor. Upon receiving the World Jewish Congress’s Theodore Herzl Award in 2013, Wiesel said: “There were two great men in Europe at that time: Herzl and Freud. Luckily they never met. Just imagine Herzl knocking on the door of Dr. Freud: ‘I had a dream.’ Freud would have said, ‘Sit down. Tell me about your mother.’”
