Biography | The Elie Wiesel Living Archive at 92Y

Introduction

Elie Wiesel was born on the fall holiday of Simchat Torah in 1928 (5689) in Sighet, Transylvania, a town in the Yiddish-speaking Hasidic enclave of the Carpathian Mountains. He was the third of four children born to Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel, the former a community activist and shop owner, the latter a housewife and helper in her husband’s business. Both came from large families, and many of their siblings resided either in Sighet or in towns close by. His father’s mother, Nissel Wiesel, widowed in World War I, lived alone but only a few steps from her son’s house and family. It was after her husband, Eliezer, that Elie was named. His mother’s father, Reb Dodye Feig, a well-known and respected Vizhnitzer Hasid, lived in a nearby town. He was a fount of Hasidic stories and melodies, a model of devotion, and a preeminent teacher for the young boy. Like those among whom he was raised, he received the traditional cheder and yeshiva education of an Eastern European Jewish boy,

His was clearly a life destined for study. Descended from a long line of great rabbis, including Rashi, the Shl”a Hakodesh, and the Tosafot Yom Tov, Wiesel details the step-by-step process of Torah education that left a lasting mark. As he recounts, learning the aleph-beis, the Hebrew alphabet, opened the door to the study of Torah: an early cheder teacher “would say to us with tenderness: ‘The Torah, my children, what is it? A treasure chest filled with gold and precious stones. To open it you will need a key. I will give it to you, make good use of it. The key, my children, what is it? The alphabet. So repeat after me, with me, aloud, louder: Aleph, bet, gimmel! Once more, and again, my children, repeat with force, with pride: Aleph, bet, gimmel. In that way the key will forever be part of your memory, of your future.”

And indeed the aleph-beis remained a lifelong passion, appearing in many teachings and stories (including Wiesel’s 1986 Nobel Lecture). His study of Talmud brought equal delight. “The moment the problems posed in the [Talmudic] commentaries of the Maharsha or the Maharam were unraveled,” he later recalled, “their swift clarity dazzled us. To emerge suddenly from the entanglement of a Talmudic thought would always bring me intense joy.” Seen in this light, it is natural that Professor Wiesel’s first writings at the age of 12 or 13 took the form of commentary on the Torah. Though Torah study occupied a central position, his curiosity, cleverness, and musical aptitude also led to other pursuits, including violin lessons, playing chess, and learning modern Hebrew.

Despite the outbreak of World War II shortly before he turned 11 years old, the Wiesels kept to the rounds of daily life, like most Jewish families that had Hungarian citizenship. At the age of 13 in 1941, he celebrated becoming a bar mitzvah, with the son of the Borsha Rebbe, no less, helping him put on tefillin for the first time.

In a sense, the presence of the local Hasidic Rebbes and their offspring in the Wiesels’ life was a matter of course. It was to the synagogue of the Borsha Rebbe that Eliezer accompanied his grandfather for Rosh Hashanah prayers; it was to the Vizhnitz Rebbe that Eliezer’s mother brought him for a blessing; it was the soulful violin playing of the Krechnev Rebbe that he listened to on Purim; it was the Kalever Rebbe’s renowned melodies that his grandfather would without pause sing for him —it was this extraordinary Hasidic milieu that gave Professor Wiesel’s devotion and vocation the Hasidic cast that it retained throughout his life. His books and lectures focusing on Hasidic masters and themes grew directly out of his rich childhood experience; his delicate renditions of Hasidic melodies sprouted from the same inspired source. Once based in the United

States, he would deepen and expand his range of Hasidic connection, especially by praying regularly in a Gerrer shtiebl in Manhattan and by drawing close to the Lubavitcher Rebbe in Brooklyn. Yet his self-proclaimed identity as a Hasid of Vizhnitz remained a fixture of his life and observance, a badge of honor that, in what he said and how he sang, traveled with him to the furthest ends of the globe.

Back in Hungary: the Wiesel family continued with a more or less normal life until the spring of 1944, when the Nazis occupied the country; it was, Professor Wiesel writes, what the prophet Jeremiah would have called a day of malediction. Events quickly spiraled downward. Along with the other Sighet Jews, the Wiesels were soon imprisoned in a ghetto, and then, in mid-May, were summarily deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. “The last holiday,” notes Professor Wiesel, “that we had at home was Pesach; Shavuot, we were already elsewhere… .”

Yet even while facing the terrible danger and privation that defined life and death in the camp, Prof. Wiesel continued to study: “I had other teachers inside the kingdom of night… I remember one teacher I had in Auschwitz. I don’t remember his name. I don’t even remember his face. I only remember his neck and his voice… I was in the back … And every day while we were carrying stones, he used to teach me Talmud… And day after day we would learn by heart.” In Auschwitz too began his friendship with the young Rabbi Menashe Klein, who would in the war’s aftermath become a great Torah sage and head of a yeshiva. In coping with the devastation and later confronting its ruins, Rabbi Klein embodied the power of Torah to persevere: “Never give in, never give up: that had been his motto … [our ancestors] rebuilt their sanctuaries, reopened their schools, helped one another resist the wicked. May we be worthy of their strength and faith …” The friendship with Rabbi Klein also led to the building of a Jerusalem yeshiva, Beis Shlomo, dedicated to the memory of Professor Wiesel’s father. This project held a special place in his heart: “This house of study and prayer means more to me than any laurels I could receive, for my parents’ dream had been for me to become a rosh yeshiva (head of a yeshiva).”

Sustained during his wartime ordeal by such teachers and mentors, the losses he suffered were nonetheless massive: his mother and youngest sister, Tsipora, were murdered soon after arrival at Birkenau; his grandparents and most relatives suffered a similar fate; his father, Professor Wiesel’s companion and support through much of the ordeal, perished in Buchenwald some ten weeks before the camp was liberated. Elie and his two older sisters survived the war.

Postwar Study and the Vocation of Testimony

Having been sent with other child survivors to France for postwar rehabilitation, Wiesel, orphaned and stateless, returned to a life of Torah learning and prayer similar to his prewar life in Sighet. In this spirit, he notes that he picked up his study of Talmud at exactly the page on which he had been forced by deportation to leave it off. He soon also began studying French language, literature, and philosophy. At this stage, both his Torah learning and study of secular subjects were nurtured by his brilliant if eccentric mentor, Rabbi Shushani (aka Rabbi Mordechai Rosenbaum), whose guidance encouraged an unusual depth and synthesis of knowledge and analysis—an approach to study that marked Prof. Wiesel’s own thereafter.

Around the same time in the late 1940s, his pathway to the world of letters was being paved by his work as a Yiddish-language journalist. Indeed, Wiesel’s first book was published in Yiddish in 1956, under the title And the World Remained Silent. This is the original version of Wiesel’s acclaimed memoir, Night, which he adapted into French in 1958, and which was subsequently translated into more than a dozen languages. The memoir focuses on the efforts made by Wiesel and his father to endure the hell of the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Gleiwitz, and Buchenwald concentration camps. As authoritative as Night surely is, Wiesel went on to narrate these haunting episodes numbers of times, including in the early essay, “The Death of My Father” [1961] and the later full-length memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea [1995]), each time probing afresh the implications to be drawn.

The Witness as Writer

When he relocated to the United States in 1956, Wiesel continued to write journalism in Yiddish and Hebrew, even while claiming French as his main literary language. Over the next fifteen years, he produced French-language novels (including Dawn [1960], The Gates of the Forest [1964], and A Beggar in Jerusalem [1968]); collections of essays (Legends of Our Time [1968] and One Generation After [1970]); and a drama (Zalmen, or the Madness of God [1968]), most of which dealt with the struggle of the survivor in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Other related themes--faith, protest, silence, friendship, loyalty, and the convulsive dimensions of moral and mystical madness--reveal the inward features of the survivor’s quest.

As set out by Wiesel, this struggle often shared features with the austere universe of moral dilemma, which was a trademark of the French existentialists. But his approach also drew deeply from the well of Jewish tradition, splicing ethical inquiry with Jewish lore, law, and mysticism. This combination of questioning and devotion brought forth portraits from the world Wiesel had left behind as well as the one he had adopted. The moral failures of the war years also led him to emphasize the pivotal nature of testimony. As Wiesel stated in this vein, “The only role I sought is that of a witness.” So, from early on, he dramatized the plight of oppressed Jewish communities and individuals; a book-length plea on behalf of Soviet Jews, poignantly titled The Jews of Silence [1966], served as a model of its kind.

The “silence” in the book’s title referred not to the Soviet Jews but rather to the Jews of the free world who generally shied away from speaking out on behalf of their imprisoned brothers and sisters. In contrast, Professor Wiesel found Soviet Jews to be remarkably vocal, bound and determined whatever the risks to claim their Jewish heritage. The most dramatic expression of this proud defiance came in the overflowing crowd of thousands who, in the shadow of the Kremlin, participated at Moscow’s main synagogue in the Simchat Torah celebration. Professor Wiesel’s account of the celebration took center stage in his book. But it didn’t stop there. As his advocacy on behalf of Soviet Jewry grew in intensity with the passage of time, he repeated the account on many occasions. At his 92Y lecture in 2006, he distilled the nature of its lasting importance: “When the time comes, and I will have to appear before the celestial tribunal, and they will ask, ‘What did you do with your life?’ I will say, ‘I was there in Moscow. I saw them dancing on Simchat Torah.’”

Publication of books in a similar vein continued in the decades following, with a few important shifts of emphasis. These were likely influenced by major changes in Professor Wiesel’s personal life: his marriage in 1969 to Marion Rose (who subsequently became the primary translator of his work into English), and the birth in 1972 of his son, Shlomo Elisha. In a number of novels (for example, The Oath [1973], The Testament [1980], The Fifth Son [1983], and The Forgotten [1989]), the struggle of the children of survivors came to share center stage with that of the survivors themselves. His 1984 keynote address at the first international gathering of children of survivors outlines the special vocation they have been given: “And now we are making you responsible for a world you did not create, a world we have created for you with words, a world others destroyed against you and against us. And now you are being summoned to do something with pieces of words, with fragments of our vision, with remnants of our broken, dispersed memories.” He concludes with a broad vision of inclusion: “Do you know what we see in you, in all of you? We see in you our heirs, our allies, our younger brothers and sisters. But in a strange way to all of us all of you are our children.”

Teaching Torah

Beginning in 1966-67, Wiesel also began, in a lecture series at The 92nd Street Y in New York City, to craft portraits of seminal personages in Jewish tradition, particularly those of the Bible, Talmud, and Hasidism. Continuing for almost five decades, the 92NY lectures served as the basis for many of his books devoted to study of Torah subjects (for example, Souls on Fire [1972], Messengers of God [1975], Sages and Dreamers [1991], Wise Men and Their Tales [2003], and Rashi: A Portrait [2009]). The 92nd Street Y, New York served as a place of Torah study, “a kind of yeshiva. It is here,” as he put it succinctly, “that I try to share with audiences young and not so young, Jews and non-Jews, what I have received from my teachers and theirs.”

Rabbi Shaul Lieberman was the teacher whose influence was unparalleled. Beginning in 1966, Rabbi Lieberman, a revered scholar of ancient Jewish life and texts, took Wiesel under his wing and nurtured his development as a full-fledged commentator on the “sea and world” of Torah. Professor Wiesel felt an immense debt: “For seventeen unforgettable years,” he shared with the 92NY lecture audience two years after his teacher’s passing in 1983, “[Rabbi Lieberman] has been guiding me through the dazzling streets and rivers of the Talmudic sea and world. And whatever I try to offer I received from him. He taught me the joy of learning. He taught me the obligation of sharing that joy. If ever one may say that a student is missing his teacher, I will say it.” Their twice weekly study sessions took place from 1966 to 1983—almost exactly paralleling the first decade-and-a half of his 92Y lectures. Clearly, Rabbi Lieberman exerted a mentoring influence not only on his student but on the form, nature and content of Professor Wiesel’s 92NY lectures--an influence which, as the above testimonial reminds us, did not end with Rabbi Lieberman’s demise.

Global Intervention

Transmitting over almost five decades the lessons of his mentors, Wiesel’s also directed his teaching to the world at large. His vast corpus of writings, together with a fierce pace of public lectures and commemorative activity (including chairing the committee responsible for the development of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), have played a major role in shaping the global idiom of Holocaust commemoration. Yet

Wiesel also linked Holocaust remembrance to human rights vigilance, a stance that mandates protest and intervention on behalf of threatened groups worldwide. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of these efforts. The prize money was in turn channeled into pedagogic, literary, and humanitarian activities under the auspices of the New York City-based, “Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity”; Marion Wiesel has played a leading role in guiding the Foundation’s multi-faceted program.

A Teacher of Memory

A teacher through his writing and his world-wide public lecturing, Professor Wiesel also served, from 1972 on, as a professor at a number of universities and colleges in the United States, including the City University of New York, Yale University, Eckerd College, Chapman University and, for over thirty-five years, Boston University. Course topics ranged widely, bearing titles such as “Responses to Jewish Persecution,” or “The Literature of Faith and Rebellion.” Yet, with readings drawn from literature, philosophy, history, Jewish tradition, and comparative religion, every course came under the general rubric of “The Literature of Memory”--a heading that reflects the essential role memory plays in all of his endeavors. As his stirring 92Y lecture on “The Solitude of God” states at the outset, “The key is memory.”

Lover of Israel

Wiesel first visited Israel in 1949. Yet long before this, Jerusalem stood at the center of his spiritual map; as a child, he notes, he knew the streets of Jerusalem better than those of his own town. Over years and decades, in writings, lectures, and visits made during times of peace as well as times of war, he expressed his abiding passion for Israel and Jerusalem. In his 1978 92Y lecture, “Modern Tales,” for example, he speaks of Jerusalem standing at the center of what it means to be a Jew: “And somehow we [Jews] always learn the same things, because whatever we learn was given to us, if not in Jerusalem, then through Jerusalem. A Jew today, a Jew always sings of Jerusalem, a Jew today celebrates Jerusalem, celebrates because of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the secret and the name of his celebration, and perhaps of his Jewishness. A Jew today cannot but join the eternal Jew who is waiting for him in Jerusalem.”

Though Professor Wiesel made his home outside of Israel, he expressed his intense bond to the Jewish homeland through diverse channels. These included conducting public advocacy on behalf of Israel’s security; serving as chair or board member of numerous Israeli cultural organizations; and, on a more personal level, the above-mentioned Jerusalem yeshiva dedicated to his father’s memory. The final book published during his lifetime, a memoir entitled Open Heart [2012], begins by describing one of his regular visits to Israel in order to celebrate the holiday of Shavuot; it ends with gratitude: “I have already been the beneficiary of so many miracles, which I know I owe to my ancestors … I am infinitely grateful to them.” After battling a number of illnesses for many years, yet active with family, friends, students, and colleagues until the last weeks of his life, Elie Wiesel passed away on 26 Sivan 5776 (July 2, 2016 in the Gregorian calendar).

His legacy continues to grow and expand, by way of efforts led by his wife, Marion, and his son, Elisha.

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