Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, prolific author and outspoken activist Elie Wiesel died Saturday at the age of 87. Wiesel was perhaps best known for his major role in promoting Holocaust education, and for perpetuating the memory of the Holocaust in the post-World War II era with his memoir “Night,” based on his experience as a teenager in the Auschwitz concentration camp…
Elie Wiesel was noted during his lifetime for using his celebrity appeal to promote Holocaust remembrance, but also to speak out on various political issues, including instances of genocide around the world. In September 2006, for example, he appeared with Hollywood actor George Clooney before the UN Security Council to bring attention to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. In 2007, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity issued a letter criticizing the denial of the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks; it was signed by Wiesel and 52 other Nobel laureates.
Wiesel was concerned about human rights in general, serving on the International Council of the Human Rights Foundation and he spoke out against South African apartheid, Argentina’s policy of “disappearing” people during its Dirty War, and the Bosnian genocide during the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. In 2010, he came out publicly against the Netanyahu government’s decision to deport 400 children of migrant workers from Israel.Weisel was an advocate when it came to a host of Jewish issues, and in particular was stridently pro-Israel. Following a visit to the Soviet Union in 1965, he wrote about the plight of Soviet Jews in a book called “The Jews of Silence,” and spoke out in favor of the struggle to allow them to emigrate; he was also a vocal supporter of the immigration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel. In April 2010, he took out advertisements in four major newspapers, criticizing the Obama administration for pressuring the Netanyahu government to halt construction in Jewish neighborhoods located across the Green Line in East Jerusalem. Wiesel repeated that tactic in 2013 when he took out a full-page ad in The New York Times calling on the U.S. administration to demand the total dismantling of the nuclear infrastructure in Iran because that country had called for Israel’s destruction.
Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and renowned Holocaust survivor, dies at 87 – Israel News
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