GIBORIM 2021 – ELIE WIESEL

Born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, Romania, Elie Wiesel pursued Jewish religious studies before his family was forced into Nazi death camps during WWII. Wiesel survived, and later wrote the internationally acclaimed memoir Night. He also penned many books and became an activist, orator and teacher, speaking out against persecution and injustice across the globe. Wiesel died on July 2, 2016 at the age of 87.

After the Holocaust, Wiesel studied at the Sorbonne in France from 1948-51 and took up journalism, writing for French and Israeli publications. His friend and colleague François Mauriac, a French Nobel Laureate for Literature, encouraged him to write about his experiences in the camps; Wiesel would publish in Yiddish the memoir And the World Would Remain Silent in 1956. The book was shortened and published in France as La Nuit, and as Night for English readers in 1960. The memoir eventually became an acclaimed bestseller, translated into many languages, and is considered a seminal work on the terrors of the Holocaust.

Wiesel moved to New York in 1955 and became a U.S. citizen in 1963. He met Marion Rose, an Austrian Holocaust survivor, in New York, and they married in Jerusalem in 1969.

Wiesel also became a revered international activist, orator and figure of peace over the years, speaking out against injustices perpetrated in an array of countries, including South Africa, Bosnia, Cambodia and Rwanda. In 1978, Wiesel was appointed chair of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust by President Jimmy Carter. He was honored across the world with a number of awards, including the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honor’s Grand Croix.

Teaching was another of Wiesel’s passions, and he was appointed in the mid-1970s as Boston University’s Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities. He also taught Judaic studies at the City University of New York, and served as a visiting scholar at Yale.

Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The Nobel citation honoring him stated: “Wiesel is a messenger to mankind. His message is one of peace, atonement and human dignity. His belief that the forces fighting evil in the world can be victorious is a hard-won belief.”

He founded the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity with his wife Marion to “combat indifference, intolerance and injustice” throughout the world. The couple had one son, Elisha. Wiesel died on July 2, 2016 at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.