Filipino comic strips

Mourners say farewell to Elie Wiesel in New York

Agence France-Presse

This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.

Mourners say farewell to Elie Wiesel in New York

AFP

Mourners, including world leaders, pay tribute to Wiesel who died at the age of 87

NEW YORK, USA – Mourners gathered in New York on Sunday, July 3 to bid farewell to Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel peace laureate hailed for his life’s work of keeping alive the memory of Jews slaughtered during World War II.

Wiesel, who died in New York on Saturday, July 2 at age 87, was honored at private services at a synagogue, as tributes poured in from around the world to the man who warned that “to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”

His wife Marion, in a wheelchair, was among those who arrived in a stream of black cars on the Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan. The hourlong service ended around 12:00 pm (1600 GMT). 

The burial was set to take place in the afternoon in the Jewish sector of a cemetery in Westchester County further upstate, a source close to funeral organizers told Agence France-Presse.

“It was extremely moving, especially when Elie Wiesel’s son and grandson spoke,” film producer and critic Annette Insdorf said after the funeral.

“It made very personal the loss of a man with such huge public stature.”

Beatrice Malovany, wife of Fifth Avenue Synagogue cantor Joseph Malovany, praised the “very dignified service.”

“They really brought out the true character of Elie,” she said.

“He was an absolutely decent human being. He respected humanity. He respected people. No matter what situation they were in. He respected the soul of the person. He was deeply religious.”

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered the top of One World Trade Center lit in the blue and white colors of the Israeli flag later Sunday in honor of Wiesel.

The Romanian-born Wiesel, a US citizen once known as “the world’s leading spokesman on the Holocaust,” was perhaps best known for his memoir Night detailing his experiences in Nazi death camps. 

He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, when he was described as having “made it his life’s work to bear witness to the genocide committed by the Nazis during World War II.”

In his Nobel acceptance speech, he said the award “both frightens and pleases me.”

“It frightens me because I wonder: Do I have the right to represent the multitudes who have perished? Do I have the right to accept this great honor on their behalf?” Wiesel said. (READ: Key works of Nobel peace winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel)

“I do not. That would be presumptuous. No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.”

 

‘Exemplar of humanity’ 

Tributes poured in from world leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who reportedly tried to convince Wiesel to run for president in 2014.

“In the darkness of the Holocaust, in which six million of our brothers and sisters perished, Elie Wiesel was a beacon of light and an exemplar of humanity that believes in man’s good,” Netanyahu said in a statement. 

US President Barack Obama hailed Wiesel as “one of the great moral voices of our time, and in many ways, the conscience of the world.”

At the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, which Wiesel helped to create, the facility’s chairman Tom Bernstein said the world “feels incomplete” after Wiesel’s death.

“He was a transformative figure who exemplified the very ideals that the Museum encourages all to aspire to – that memory calls us to action. We all bear the tremendous responsibility to carry on his legacy,” he said.

 

‘Living memorial’ 

Eliezer Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928 and grew up in a small town in Romania.

His parents raised him and his 3 sisters in a Jewish community, until they were all detained during the Holocaust when he was a teenager.

His mother and younger sister were killed in the gas chamber at Auschwitz, according to his biography. His father died of dysentery and starvation at Buchenwald, where Wiesel was freed by US soldiers at the age of 17.

He was reunited with his two older sisters in France, and eventually studied at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Wiesel traveled back to Auschwitz in 2006 with US talk show host Oprah Winfrey. He also accompanied Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on a tour of the Buchenwald camp.

“After we walked together among the barbed wire and guard towers of Buchenwald… Elie spoke words I’ve never forgotten – ‘Memory has become a sacred duty of all people of goodwill,'” Obama said Saturday.

“Elie was not just the world’s most prominent Holocaust survivor, he was a living memorial,” he added.

Merkel said “a voice of morality and humanity has been silenced” with the death of Wiesel, whom she praised as a “big-hearted reconciler.”

“Elie Wiesel has offered the hand of friendship to us Germans and worked tirelessly with us to make a better world.”

 

Writer, scholar, activist 

Wiesel’s internationally acclaimed Night was published in 1956 and has been translated into more than 30 languages. It was later expanded into a trilogy with “Dawn” and “Day.”

While Wiesel’s focus was the Holocaust and the plight of the Jewish people, he was also a rights activist and a professor of Judaic studies and the humanities.

Soon after he won the Nobel Prize, Wiesel and his wife founded The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity with a mission to “combat indifference, intolerance and injustice through international dialogue and youth-focused programs.” – Rappler.com

Add a comment

Sort by

There are no comments yet. Add your comment to start the conversation.

Summarize this article with AI

How does this make you feel?

Loading
Download the Rappler App!