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In addition to the Nobel Peace Prize, he was awarded the French Legion of Honor Grand Croix, the Congressional Gold Medal of the United States, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

He was also Yale University’s Humanities and Social Thought Henry Luce Visiting Scholar. Years later, he was also offered French citizenship when Francois Mitterand his close friend became President of France.īetween 19 he worked as a professor at the City University of New York where he taught Judaic Studies. He founded the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity and for his efforts he was granted the Nobel Peace Prize award.Īfter many years of being stateless, he was granted an American passport in 1956. He has become a speaker, writer, and spokesman on these issues and has spoken all over the world speaking in Kosovo, the former Soviet Union, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Many of the works including plays, collections of essays, and novels explore genocide and the Holocaust. He used the income from the sales of the book to support a Yeshiva he set up in Israel in memory of his father.Įlie Wiesel now dedicates his life to ensuring that the Holocaust will not be forgotten. What resulted was the internationally acclaimed memoir “Night,” which went on to become a bestseller, selling millions of copies and being translated into more than 30 languages. It was during this time that Francois Mauriac the French Catholic writer managed to persuade Wiesel to document his experiences. He would then start working as a teacher of Hebrew and translator to supplement his earnings as a journalist. After several years of studying at preparatory schools, he was sent to study at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Nonetheless, he still decided to undertake religious studies. He believed that God had stood by and not been faithful to the Jews in their time of need. Given his experiences at Auschwitz during the Holocaust, his faith had been severely deprecated.

In France, he had a choice of either taking religious or secular studies. His entire family was ultimately transferred to Poland and only Wiesel and two elder siblings would survive the ordeal.įollowing the end of World War II and liberation from Auschwitz in 1945, Elie Wiesel was part of a group of Jewish children orphaned that was sent to study in France. The family’s life changed drastically in the mid-1940s when Hitler ordered that all Jews in Eastern Europe be transferred to death camps in Poland. At home, he lived with a multilingual family that spoke Yiddish, Romanian, Hungarian and German. He wanted him to learn Hebrew so that he could study the works of modern Hebrew authors. While his father Shlomo was an emancipated Jew that was more open to happenings in the world, he also insisted that Wiesel study modern Hebrew. His maternal grandmother who was a Hasidic Jew had a deep impact on the young man and encouraged him to undertake Talmudic studies. They had settled there seeking refuge from the persecution and pogroms against Jews in Ukraine. The author was born in Sighet, Romania in 1928, a small Jewish community that had settled in the area since the mid-17th century. Heffner)Įlie Wiesel is an American political activist, professor, writer, and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Evil and Exile (With: Jon Rothschild,Jody Gladding,Michael de Saint-Cheron)Ĭonversations with Elie Wiesel (With: Richard D.