Elie Wiesel Laid To Rest

By COLlive reporter
Photos by Gabriela Popon

A crowd in New York City bid farewell to the most notable Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, as condolences kept being shared from around the world.

Wiesel, the Nobel peace laureate who articulated the destruction of European Jewry during World War II, passed away on Shabbos at the age of 87.

150 people gathered for the private funeral at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side on Sunday morning.

“It’s a great loss for Jewish people. It’s a great loss for mankind. He was a unique individual and we will miss him dearly,” Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, was quoted by AFP.

VIDEO:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Holocaust survivor Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, and Robert Rozett of Yad Vashem mourn the death of renowned Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel.

Wiesel authored 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including “Night,” a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.

Along with writing, he was professor of the humanities at Boston University, which created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor.

He was involved with Jewish causes, and helped establish the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

In his political activities he also campaigned for victims of oppression in places like South Africa and Nicaragua and genocide in Sudan.

He publicly condemned the Armenian genocide of a century ago and remained a strong defender of human rights during his lifetime.

Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, at which time the Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a “messenger to mankind,” stating that through his struggle to come to terms with “his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler’s death camps”, as well as his “practical work in the cause of peace”, Wiesel had delivered a message “of peace, atonement and human dignity” to humanity.