As we look inward over the course of the High Holy Days, we also seek wisdom that might guide us forward in our lives. The Journal sought life advice from thoughtful people in our community and elsewhere, including a few no longer with us, all of whose words are worth remembering.
Leonard Fein, a veteran Jewish activist and writer, has died at 80.
As the author and renowned Holocaust speaker Elie Wiesel concluded an April 11 roundtable at Chapman University, Justine Volkman, a senior at the school, shed a few tears.
When talking about Elie Wiesel, who turns 85 on Sept. 30, it is far too easy to fall into a list of superlatives. As a child who survived Auschwitz and other concentration camps, Wiesel witnessed more death and more horrors than most human beings ever will. A onetime journalist who wrote for Hebrew- and Yiddish-language newspapers, starting in the 1950s, Wiesel has gone on to publish more books than most writers ever do, including “Night,” which has become the second-most widely read work of Holocaust literature in the world.
Israeli President Shimon Peres will award his Presidential Medal of Distinction to Steven Spielberg, Elie Wiesel and five other recipients.
My daughter, Ilana, then a young college student, asked if she could go with me to the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, on April 22, 1993 (the date was tied to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising’s 50th anniversary). I said: “I will be leaving very early.” She responded: “I’ll be up.”
The madness always calls him back. You only have to glance at Elie Wiesel’s tortured face to know that he is always at risk. Even after the countless novels and the Nobel Peace Prize.
When author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was recently asked if he feared future generations might forget the Holocaust once the last surviving witnesses had perished, he answered that he had quelled his anxiety over this problem with a simple dictum: “To listen to a witness,” he said, “is to become one.”
A dozen officials from The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles flew to Baltimore this week to attend the annual conference of the national body representing 155 federations, where they discussed many of the urgent challenges confronting American and Canadian Jewry.
Elie Wiesel and President Obama are not writing a book together, as reported by an Israeli newspaper.
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