Elie Wiesel, 87, OBM

By Yaakov Ort – Chabad.org

Elie Wiesel, who perpetuated the memory of the Holocaust, championed international recognition of evil in all its forms, and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, passed away Saturday at his home in Manhattan.

He was 87.

“Wiesel is a messenger to mankind,” wrote the Nobel committee. “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.”

Eliezer Wiesel was born in 1928 to Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel in Sighet, Romania, where he received a traditional yeshiva education. His maternal grandfather, Dodye Feig, was a member of the Vishnitz Chassidic sect and had a strong, influence on the development of the values that would earn him the Nobel Prize.

In 1940, Hungary annexed Sighet and its Jewish residents were forced into two ghettoes where they lived in extreme poverty until May, 1944, when the Nazis, with Hungary’s agreement, transferred the entire community to Auschwitz.

Wiesel was sent to the Buna Werke labor camp, before being transferred near the war’s end to a series of other concentration camps, including Buchenwald. His book “Night,” published in 1960, detailed the harrowing life of a 15-year-old in a Nazi concentration camp.

Wiesel studied at the Sorbonne following the war and began work as a journalist, translating Hebrew articles into Yiddish for the Irgun militia. He visited Israel in 1949 as a foreign correspondent for the French newspaper L’arche, and was subsequently hired by the daily Yedioth Ahronoth as its Paris correspondent. He also worked as a freelance writer covering the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

In subsequent years he devoted himself in novels, essays and public speaking to keeping the memory of the Holocaust and its atrocities alive in the world’s consciousness.

Through his early work as a reporter and columnist he met fellow-journalist Gershon Jacobson, who suggested in 1960 that he meet the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory.

“But I’m a Vishnitzer Chassid,” Wiesel jokingly told Jacobson, who suggested that he visit the Rebbe “as a journalist, not as a Vishnitzer.” Wiesel agreed and met the Rebbe for the first of a number of private audiences, and he would correspond with the Rebbe over the next three decades.

Facing Evil With Faith

In one 1965 letter to Wiesel, the Rebbe asserted that only a true believer could sincerely confront G‑d with the question Will the Judge of All the Earth not do justice?The challenge for humanity, the Rebbe concluded, is not only to remember the Holocaust, but to actively work against Hitler’s “final solution.”

In 1992 Wiesel spoke at congressional dinner held in Washington on the occasion of the Rebbe’s 90th birthday. “I hope I will always remember what I felt when I was first introduced into his study, some thirty years ago, and what we said to one another,” recalled Wiesel. “Time in his presence begins running at a different pace. You feel inspired, you feel self-examined, you are made to wonder about the quest for meaning which ought to be yours. In his presence nothing is superficial, nor is it artificial. In his presence you come closer in touch with your inner center of gravity.”

“Thanks to the Rebbe,” Wiesel continued, “a Jew becomes a better Jew, thus a better human being, thus making his fellow human beings more human, more hospitable, open to a greater sense of generosity.”

Later, Wiesel spoke at the at the award ceremony of the Rebbe’s Congressional Gold Medal.

Although he once said that he would never go back to his former home, he returned in 2009 to help honor the 20th anniversary of Chabad-Lubavitch activities in Hungary.

Wiesel is survived by his wife Marion, their son Shlomo Elisha Wiesel, and his stepdaughter Jennifer and two grandchildren.