57 Facts About Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor.

Elie Wiesel authored 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.

Elie Wiesel was a professor of the humanities at Boston University, which created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor.

Elie Wiesel was involved with Jewish causes and human rights causes and helped establish the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC In his political activities, he campaigned for victims of oppression in places like South Africa, Nicaragua, Kosovo, and Sudan.

Elie Wiesel publicly condemned the 1915 Armenian genocide and remained a strong defender of human rights during his lifetime.

Elie Wiesel was described as "the most important Jew in America" by the Los Angeles Times in 2003.

The Nobel Committee stressed that Elie Wiesel's commitment originated in the sufferings of the Jewish people but that he expanded it to embrace all repressed peoples and races.

Elie Wiesel was a founding board member of the New York Human Rights Foundation and remained active in it throughout his life.

Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, Maramures, in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania.

At home, Elie Wiesel's family spoke Yiddish most of the time, but German, Hungarian, and Romanian.

Elie Wiesel has said his father represented reason, while his mother Sarah promoted faith.

Elie Wiesel was instructed that his genealogy traced back to Rabbi Schlomo Yitzhaki, and was a descendant of Rabbi Yeshayahu ben Abraham Horovitz ha-Levi.

Elie Wiesel was 15, and he, with his family, along with the rest of the town's Jewish population, was placed in one of the two confinement ghettos set up in Maramarossziget, the town where he had been born and raised.

In Night, Elie Wiesel recalled the shame he felt when he heard his father being beaten and was unable to help.

Elie Wiesel was tattooed with inmate number "A-7713" on his left arm.

Elie Wiesel joined a smaller group of 90 to 100 boys from Orthodox homes who wanted kosher facilities and a higher level of religious observance; they were cared for in a home in Ambloy under the directorship of Judith Hemmendinger.

Elie Wiesel heard lectures by philosopher Martin Buber and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre and he spent his evenings reading works by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Mann.

Elie Wiesel wrote for Israeli and French newspapers, including Tsien in Kamf.

In 1946, after learning of the Irgun's bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Elie Wiesel made an unsuccessful attempt to join the underground Zionist movement.

Elie Wiesel then was hired as Paris correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, subsequently becoming its roaming international correspondent.

For ten years after the war, Elie Wiesel refused to write about or discuss his experiences during the Holocaust.

Elie Wiesel began to reconsider his decision after a meeting with the French author Francois Mauriac, the 1952 Nobel Laureate in Literature who eventually became Wiesel's close friend.

Elie Wiesel compared Wiesel to "Lazarus rising from the dead", and saw from Wiesel's tormented eyes, "the death of God in the soul of a child".

Elie Wiesel first wrote the 900-page memoir Un di velt hot geshvign in Yiddish, which was published in abridged form in Buenos Aires.

Elie Wiesel rewrote a shortened version of the manuscript in French, La Nuit, in 1955.

At one point film director Orson Welles wanted to make it into a feature film, but Elie Wiesel refused, feeling that his memoir would lose its meaning if it were told without the silences in between his words.

In 1955, Elie Wiesel moved to New York as foreign correspondent for the Israel daily, Yediot Ahronot.

Elie Wiesel played a role in the initial success of The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski by endorsing it before it became known the book was fiction and, in the sense that it was presented as all Kosinski's true experience, a hoax.

Elie Wiesel served as chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust from 1978 to 1986, spearheading the building of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC Sigmund Strochlitz was his close friend and confidant during these years.

In 1982, at the request of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Elie Wiesel agreed to resign from his position as chairman of a planned international conference on the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide.

Elie Wiesel then worked with the Foreign Ministry in its attempts to get the conference either cancelled or to remove all discussion of the Armenian genocide from it, and to those ends he provided the Foreign Ministry with internal documents on the conference's planning and lobbied fellow academics to not attend the conference.

Elie Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for speaking out against violence, repression, and racism.

Elie Wiesel received many other prizes and honors for his work, including the Congressional Gold Medal in 1985, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and The International Center in New York's Award of Excellence.

Elie Wiesel was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996.

Elie Wiesel was a member of the International Advisory Board of NGO Monitor.

Elie Wiesel became a regular speaker on the subject of the Holocaust.

Elie Wiesel defined indifference as being neutral between two sides, which, in this case, amounts to overlooking the victims of the Holocaust.

In early 2006, Elie Wiesel accompanied Oprah Winfrey as she visited Auschwitz, a visit which was broadcast as part of The Oprah Winfrey Show.

On November 30,2006, Elie Wiesel received a knighthood in London in recognition of his work toward raising Holocaust education in the United Kingdom.

In 2007, Elie Wiesel was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Elie Wiesel has repeatedly called Turkey's 90-year-old campaign to downplay its actions during the Armenian genocide a double killing.

In 2009, Wiesel criticized the Vatican for lifting the excommunication of controversial bishop Richard Williamson, a member of the Society of Saint Pius X The excommunication was later reimposed.

In June 2009, Elie Wiesel accompanied US President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel as they toured the Buchenwald concentration camp.

In 2010, Elie Wiesel accepted a five-year appointment as a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Chapman University in Orange County, California.

In July 2009, Elie Wiesel announced his support to the minority Tamils in Sri Lanka.

In 2009, Elie Wiesel returned to Hungary for his first visit since the Holocaust.

Elie Wiesel was active in trying to prevent Iran from making nuclear weapons, stating that, "The words and actions of the leadership of Iran leave no doubt as to their intentions".

Elie Wiesel condemned Hamas for the "use of children as human shields" during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict by running an ad in several large newspapers.

Elie Wiesel often emphasized the Jewish connection to Jerusalem, and criticized the Obama administration for pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to halt East Jerusalem Israeli settlement construction.

Elie Wiesel held the position of Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Boston University from 1976, teaching in both its religion and philosophy departments.

Elie Wiesel became a close friend of the president and chancellor John Silber.

From 1972 to 1976 Elie Wiesel was a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York and member of the American Federation of Teachers.

Elie Wiesel co-instructed Winter Term courses at Eckerd College, St Petersburg, Florida.

Elie Wiesel was attacked in a San Francisco hotel by 22-year-old Holocaust denier Eric Hunt in February 2007, but was not injured.

In May 2011, Elie Wiesel served as the Washington University in St Louis commencement speaker.

Elie Wiesel died on the morning of July 2,2016, at his home in Manhattan, aged 87.

Elie Wiesel had received more than 90 honorary degrees from colleges worldwide.