Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel remembered at private service

The Romanian-born Wiesel lived by the credo expressed in “Night”, his landmark story of the Holocaust – “to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time”.

Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 and the Nobel committee called him “a messenger to mankind”.

“In the darkness of the Holocaust in which our brothers and sisters – 6 million – were murdered, Elie Wiesel was a ray of light and greatness of humanity who believed in the good in man”, Netanyahu said in a statement.

Wiesel was vice chairman of the council of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

A procession exits the Fifth Avenue Synagogue during the funeral for Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wieselon on July 3, 2016 in NY.

Wiesel, who survived the infamous Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, was perhaps the most prolific of Holocaust survivors who wrote about his experiences. Like Wiesel, he was 87.

“He carried a message universally, he carried the Jewish pain, the message of Jewish tragedy to the world but he took it way beyond. And I personally have a lost a very special friend”, said Abraham Foxman, a friend of Wiesel.

“What was most meaningful to him was teaching the innumerable students who attended his university classes”, Marion Wiesel said.

Wiesel is best known for his groundbreaking work Night, a book describes the horrors he experienced as a Jewish survivor of the Nazi death camps of the Holocaust during World War II. “Now he can challenge the Almighty much closer and maybe he’ll get some answers, which he asked, but never got the answers to”.