“We knew they hated us,” Elisha Wiesel told a crowd of more than 150 who gathered at 92NY on Manhattan’s Upper East Side November 8 for “Kristallnacht Unbroken: An Evening with Elisha Wiesel. “Hitler’s speeches, the Nuremberg Laws, they made that clear. How could Kristallnacht have come as a surprise? Is it because all of a sudden, words suddenly became the actions they had threatened to become so long?”
On November 9-10 in 1938, Nazis killed Jews, destroyed synagogues and stores by setting them ablaze and bashed in windows of stores.
“So how could October 7th have come as a surprise,” Wiesel said. “The Hamas rockets had abated somewhat. Iron Dome was working. The Abraham Accords were working …”
Wiesel noted that Iran was flush with cash and the people of Israel were divided.
“Did we not see that that these were the signals that Hamas was waiting for before opening the gates of Hell,” he said. “We knew they hated us and yet we were still surprised because we do not want to believe that evil like this can exist.”
Wiesel sat next to an empty chair, the one his father, Holocaust survivor, author, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie used to sit in.
A recording from a 1988 speech his father gave commemorating Kristallnacht at the Y, was played where in part, he asked of the Holocaust: “Why did it happen? Was universal conscience asleep? … And where was God, a shomerYisrael, the guardian of the people of Israel.”
Wiesel said he was adding a new question to add to those his father asked: “Once we know that evil exists, how should we respond to it?”
Wiesel noted that the Nazis made Jews pay for the damage they did on Kristallnacht. He said he cries when the story of Moses concludes, knowing that he never made it to enter the Promised Land. He said the Torah says that seeing Cain’s anger at his sacrifice, being rejected, God said it he did better, he would be accepted.
He said 18 years ago, those in Gaza had an opportunity to have great things.
“When Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, the hope truly was that with the help of the U.S., the European Union and the U.N. and Russia, Gaza would become a thriving demilitarized country, powered by tourism, economically tied, to Israel, a new chance,” Wiesel said. “But that dream proved sadly too far out of reach for the people of Gaza. They could not conquer their worst instincts. Like Cain, they saw Israel successful, and they voted their worst instinct into power. Those instincts in the form of Hamas, then seized complete power through a coup … blood still stains the homes of the Southern kibbutzim…”
But he said there is also hope and life is not a zero-sum game. He noted that an Israeli technology investor who brough high tech jobs to Gaza, and whose daughter was murdered on October 7, said that when Hamas is defeated, he would open another office, and would hire 25 Gazan employees.
Wiesel said his father saw Israel as the only guarantee against a second Holocaust and told the audience that “hate is a stain that is hard to wash out.”
Wiesel said the IDF seeks to avoid civilian casualties and anyone who calls for entire cities to be destroyed is committing a “Chilul Hashem” or desecration of God’s name. He also said President Joe Biden “had a genuine love for my father and has a genuine love for the Jewish people.”
Those calling for ceasefire, he said, should be asked: “What do you think will happen if Israel allows a ceasefire that allows Hamas to re-arm?”
He lambasted colleges who have taught students to “trust feelings over rational thought.”
Asked what reaction his father would have had to the U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres, who said the Hamas attack did not happen in a vacuum, he told the Journal: “I think my father would have asked Mr. Guterres if it was also not in a vacuum when the Arab nations chose to wage war rather than accept a Palestinian state in 1948? And in 2000? And 2008? Mr. Guterres is guilty of both-sides-ing a history that clearly shows Israel is interested in building, not destroying.”
Wiesel also told the Journal that the claim of genocide against Israel “fails primarily on intent. The Hams charter calls for Israel’s destruction, Israel’s charter calls for peace and coexistence.”
He told the crowd it is a pattern that enemies of the Jews charge them with the crimes they perpetrate.
Wiesel read an excerpt from his diary, from July 26, 1995, when he and his father visited Sighet, Elie’s birthplace.
“At first I didn’t understand why start the tour in a cemetery?” he said. “But I understood then, it was to get used the feeling of death which surrounded us. You expect it in a cemetery. It belongs. It settles into you. It is once I start walking the streets of Sighet outside the cemetery and realize that death is in the air too, that your heart starts to pound, and you start to feel whatever it is one is meant to feel in Sighet.”
He and his father walked to the spot where he was taken on a cattle train.
“This is where the Jewish community of Sighet ended,” reading from his father’s work.
Wiesel noted that the goal of the Nazis was for him to never exist, and his father told him if he started to cry, he would cry forever.
Wiesel said he felt in a similar way in recent days and saw a video where a prominent rabbi in Israel who said not to come to him for a bracha, or blessing, but to go to an Israeli soldier for one. Wiesel called upon God for several blessings, to safeguard the IDF, including his nephew, to free the hostages, help all Israeli citizens, as well as the grieving families of loved ones dead or missing.
He also called on God to protect innocent Gazans and enable them to flee south and take an active role in building society when Hamas is gone.
Rabbi David Ingber, founder of the Renewal congregation Romemu, and senior director of Jewish Life and the Bronfman Center at 92NY told the crowd that Elie Wiesel spoke at the building about 180 times and called it his little yeshiva.
Asked what advice he had for those troubled by harrowing images and fears of what will happen in the future, Ingber told the Journal that “we should remember we are not isolated. We are one people. Just as they are fighting in Israel, we are deployed here to do what we can by working with one another and we must not be divided.”
