Elie Wiesel (1928 - 2016)

It is with profound sadness that the officers, board and staff of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research mourn the passing of Elie Weisel, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and world renowned author, and human rights activist.

Prof. Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania. At the age of fifteen he and his family were deported to Auschwitz, where his mother and younger sister perished. His two older sisters survived. Elie and his father were later transported to Buchenwald, where his father died shortly before it was liberated in April 1945.

Wiesel is the author of sixty books, and his first, Night, a memoir of his experiences in the death camps, has sold over 10 million copies and been translated into 30 languages. Other books include A Beggar in Jerusalem (Prix Médicis), The Testament (Prix Livre Inter), The Fifth Son (Grand Prize in Literature, City of Paris), and two memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea and And the Sea is Never Full.

In 1978, Wiesel was appointed Chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. In 1980, he became the Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. He was President of The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which he and his wife Marion created in 1986 to fight indifference, intolerance and injustice. A devoted supporter of Israel, he has also defended the cause of Soviet Jews, Nicaragua’s Miskito Indians, Argentina’s Desaparecidos, Cambodian refugees, the Kurds, victims of famine and genocide in Africa, victims of apartheid in South Africa, and victims of war in the former Yugoslavia. He and his wife Marion have been especially devoted to the cause of Ethiopian-born Israeli youth through the Foundation’s Beit Tzipora Centers for Study and Enrichment.

Wiesel was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University (1976-2016), served as Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at the City University of New York (1972-1976), and was the first Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in Humanities and Social Thought at Yale University (1982-1983).

Wiesel’s numerous awards include the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal, the National Humanities Medal, the Medal of Liberty, and the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor. In 1986, Wiesel won the Nobel Prize for Peace. He is survived by his wife, Marion, and their son, Shlomo Elisha.

Wiesel was a long-time friend of YIVO and frequently visited the archives to conduct research. In 2011, he was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at YIVO’s 10th Annual Heritage Dinner. As Event Chair Fanya Gottesfeld Heller noted, “Wiesel’s dedication to tikkun olam (repairing the world) has touched so many lives, and inspired millions.”