Eli Wiesel is a Holocaust survivor, human rights activist, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, an American professor and the author of 57 books. He is the author of the internationally acclaimed novel Night, an autobiography of his experiences in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945. Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, present-day Romania, to an Orthodox Jewish family. His family was deported to Auschwitz when he was 15-year-old. His parents and younger sister perished in the Holocaust; he and his two older sisters survived. After the war, studied in Paris and went on to work as a journalist. In 1969, Wiesel married Marion Erster Rose. They had a son a 1972, who they named Shlomo Elisha Wiesel, after Wiesel’s father. In 1978, US President Jimmy Carter asked Wiesel to head the President's Commission on the Holocaust. In 1980, he became Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. For his human rights activism, Weisel has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States Congressional Gold Medal and the Medal of Liberty Award, the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor. After he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, his wife established The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.
Now is precisely the time Elie Wiesel's work and life should be remembered. We must carry on his mission of bearing witness, and his role as "messenger to mankind."
The day of his arrival, I saw him from afar walking with the rabbis, a thin, dark-haired man, chest concave — enwrapped, it seemed to me, in a mist of sadness, not fully of this world.
Police made several arrests at the protest, which began at Grand Central Station and continued onto Penn Station, stopping along the way at Port Authority Bus Terminal.
As a teacher, he was uniquely compelling and continues to inspire through The Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies.
What is the role of Holocaust education? It’s not the answer to a 2,000-year-old problem that manifests itself in multiple forms.
The district allowed the high school to put the posters back up the next day and used a statement highlighting that Wiesel's memoir is part of its curriculum.
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