Elie Wiesel ( born Eliezer Wiesel Eliezer Vizel) was an American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Prize winner, and Holocaust survivor who was born in Romania on September 30, 1928.
He died on July 2, 2016. He wrote 57 books, most of which were in French and English. One of them, Night, was about his time as a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Personal Life of Elie Wiesel
He married Marion Erster Rose in 1969. She was from Austria and translated many of his books. Shlomo Elisha Wiesel, their only child, was named after Wiesel’s father. Greenwich, Connecticut, was home for the family.
Eric Hunt, who was 22, attacked Wiesel in a San Francisco hotel in February 2007. Wiesel was not hurt. The next month, Hunt was arrested and charged with a number of crimes.
In May 2011, Wiesel spoke at the graduation ceremony for Washington University in St. Louis.
Wiesel at the Time 100 in 2012
In February 2012, without permission, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints baptized Simon Wiesenthal’s parents after they had died.
After his own name was put forward for proxy baptism, Wiesel spoke out against the illegal practice of baptizing Jews after they have died and asked Latter-day Saint presidential candidate Mitt Romney to condemn it. Romney’s campaign refused to say anything and told people with questions to ask church leaders.
What Was the Main Reason for Her Death?
Wiesel died at his home in Manhattan early on July 2, 2016, at the age of 87. On July 3, he was laid to rest at the Sharon Gardens Cemetery in Valhalla, New York, after a private funeral service at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue.
In a speech on the Senate floor the next week, Utah senator Orrin Hatch paid tribute to Wiesel by saying that “With Elie’s death, we’ve lost a shining example of kindness and hope. We’ve lost a champion of human rights and a leader in writing about the Holocaust.”
Anti-Semitic writing was found on the house where Wiesel was born in 2018.
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Career In Teaching
Wiesel spoke at the World Economic Forum in 2008.
From 1976 to 1985, Wiesel was the Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Boston University, where he taught in both the religion and philosophy departments.
He became a close friend of John Silber, who was president and chancellor. In honor of him, the university made the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies. Wiesel taught at the City University of New York and was a member of the American Federation of Teachers from 1972 to 1976.
In 1982, he was the first Henry Luce Visiting Scholar at Yale University in Humanities and Social Thought.
He also helped teach classes at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, during the January Winter Term. He was the Ingeborg Rennert Visiting Professor of Judaic Studies at Columbia University’s Barnard College from 1997 to 1999.
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Holocaust-Era Imprisonment and Orphanages
Photo of Buchenwald concentration camp taken on April 16, 1945, five days after the camp was freed. Wiesel is situated next to the bunk post in the second row from the bottom, seventh from the left.
Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944, bringing the Holocaust to Northern Transylvania as well.
Wiesel was 15 when he and his family were forced into one of the two confinement ghettos established in Máramarossziget (Sighet), the town where he was born and raised, along with the rest of the town’s Jewish residents.
Under German pressure, the Hungarian government started deporting the Jewish population to Auschwitz concentration camp in May 1944, where up to 90% of the prisoners were murdered upon arrival.
His mother and younger sister were killed right away after they were sent to Auschwitz.
Wiesel and his father were chosen to work as long as they were still healthy, after which they would be put to death in the gas chambers. Later, Wiesel and his father were transported to Buchenwald, a concentration camp.