Elie Wiesel Foundation

Save the date : December 9th, 8pm in New York

Forty years ago, Elie Wiesel stood before the world in Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize and insist that every person has a responsibility to act. On December 9, the eve of that anniversary, The Elie Wiesel Foundation will bring that conviction to The Town Hall in New York City with One Light, Many Flames, a Chanukah concert celebrating the diversity of Israel and the Jewish people, and supporting young people who will carry his legacy forward.

The evening will feature The Idan Raichel Project, Ravid Kahalani, Eden Golan and Yuval Raphael, with special guests Shaggy and Matisyahu and Nuseir Yassin as emcee. Bringing Jewish audiences and non-Jewish allies together, the concert will turn a milestone of remembrance into an investment in education, connection and the next generation.

Proceeds will benefit The Foundation’s Beit Tzipora Centers in Israel. They will also expand educational exchanges that connect American students reading Night with young Israelis whose lives are part of Elie and Marion Wiesel’s enduring legacy.

“Forty years ago, I sat in Oslo and watched the hope on my father’s face as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and reminded the world that we must always take sides because neutrality helps the oppressor. Today, that mandate is more urgent than ever. Through the ‘One Light, Many Flames’ concert and our work through Beit Tzipora, we aren’t just preserving my parents’ memory. We are putting it into action, celebrating the vibrant diversity of our people, and ensuring that the next generation has the moral courage to stand up and be counted,” said Elisha Wiesel, Chair of The Elie Wiesel Foundation.

You can find more information on the link: givebutter.com/one-light-many-flames

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Elie Wiesel Foundation

Save the date : December 9th, 8pm in New York

Forty years ago, Elie Wiesel stood before the world in Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize and insist that every person has a responsibility to act. On December 9, the eve of that anniversary, The Elie Wiesel Foundation will bring that conviction to The Town Hall in New York City with One Light, Many Flames, a Chanukah concert celebrating the diversity of Israel and the Jewish people, and supporting young people who will carry his legacy forward.

The evening will feature The Idan Raichel Project, Ravid Kahalani, Eden Golan and Yuval Raphael, with special guests Shaggy and Matisyahu and Nuseir Yassin as emcee. Bringing Jewish audiences and non-Jewish allies together, the concert will turn a milestone of remembrance into an investment in education, connection and the next generation.

Proceeds will benefit The Foundation’s Beit Tzipora Centers in Israel. They will also expand educational exchanges that connect American students reading Night with young Israelis whose lives are part of Elie and Marion Wiesel’s enduring legacy.

“Forty years ago, I sat in Oslo and watched the hope on my father’s face as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and reminded the world that we must always take sides because neutrality helps the oppressor. Today, that mandate is more urgent than ever. Through the ‘One Light, Many Flames’ concert and our work through Beit Tzipora, we aren’t just preserving my parents’ memory. We are putting it into action, celebrating the vibrant diversity of our people, and ensuring that the next generation has the moral courage to stand up and be counted,” said Elisha Wiesel, Chair of The Elie Wiesel Foundation.

From the pages of Night to a conversation across continents, that legacy is already bringing students together through a modern-day pen pal program. Last year, New Jersey middle school readers of Night were introduced by video to Ethiopian-Israeli students at Beit Tzipora in Israel.

The American students encountered Elie Wiesel first through his testimony. Then, through the exchange, they discovered what he and Marion went on to build—and met young people benefiting from that work today.

Those conversations make the diversity of Israeli society personal. Students get to know one another through questions, experiences and everyday life, building relationships across countries and communities. Popular misconceptions of Israel as white, colonialist, etc are directly challenged before they can take root. Concert proceeds will help the Foundation bring these exchanges to more students.

For more than three decades, the Beit Tzipora Centers in Ashkelon and Kiryat Malachi have helped young Ethiopian Israelis build pathways to success in school, military service and beyond. Named for Elie Wiesel’s younger sister, Tzipora, who was murdered in Auschwitz, the centers serve nearly 600 students annually.

The concert brings the same spirit of connection to the stage. The concert comes at a time when Israel and Jewish identity are often reduced to political arguments and simple narratives. Our lineup therefore celebrates the many cultures, histories and musical traditions that shape Israel and the Jewish people, inviting audiences from different backgrounds to take part in a shared evening of music and purpose.

Held during Chanukah, One Light, Many Flames draws on the belief that one person can make a difference, and that the light one person kindles can inspire others to act.

Elie Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1986. Forty years later, the Foundation’s invitation is both a celebration and a call to participation: come together, encounter the diverse voices of Israel to whom Elie and Marion were so deeply committed, and help the next generation carry their legacy into the future.

You can find more information on the link: givebutter.com/one-light-many-flames

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Elie Wiesel Foundation

3 years ago today
More than 1,000 people
were k*lled in Israel in a single day.

Hamas terr*rists r*ped victims in broad daylight
And took over 250 people hostage,
including Jews and Arabs

The next day
people started calling those same Hamas terr*rists
"freedom fighters"

Others would tear down posters in the street
of the hostages
Trying to erase the pain and horrors Israelis were dealing with

Elie Wiesel spent his life
warning us about what happens
when the world stops seeing human suffering
And starts dehumanizing Jews

He wanted us to
Keep remembering the past.

To protect our future

So today,
we remember October 7th, 2023

We remember the people
who were k*lled.
The atrocities that were committed
the families whose lives changed forever.

And how people tried to erase our pain

It is our duty to protect their memory,

Because remembering the dead
also means protecting the humanity and dignity of the living.

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Elie Wiesel Foundation

In 1966, Elie Wiesel went behind the Iron Curtain to see whether Jewish life was disappearing.

The Soviet government had spent decades suppressing Jewish religious and cultural life. Young Jews had little access to Hebrew, Jewish education, books, or organized Jewish life.

Wiesel arrived in Moscow on the sixth day of Sukkot but what he found was the opposite of what he might have expected.

As Sukkot gave way to Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, tens of thousands of young Soviet Jews gathered outside Moscow's Central Synagogue. They sang. They danced. Some barely knew the prayers or even what was written in the Torah they were kissing. Wiesel describes one young man who didn't really know why he'd come.
At one point students held burning newspapers like torches and began chanting in Hebrew and Russian:

“The people of Israel live! Am Yisrael Chai!”

For Wiesel, that was the revelation. The Soviet system had deprived these young people of Jewish education, but it had failed to erase their Jewish identity. He returned home convinced that Soviet Jewish life wasn't dying, on the contrary it was awakening.

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Elie Wiesel Foundation

What happens when you lose
your own birth date?

Elie Wiesel was born in 1928,
in Sighet, Romania.

But the tragedies he faced in his lifetime
Kept affecting his date of birth on official documents

When Elie was 12,
Jews from his hometown were being deported.

German officers took his citizenship papers
and tore them up.

Three years later,
Elie and his family were deported to Auschwitz.

He was 15.
But when he arrived,
another prisoner advised him to say he's 18.

Because at 15,
he could be sent to his death.

But if he lied about his age,
He had a chance to survive

Camp officials kept changing his identity.

His name was no more Elie
It was A-7713

After the war
Elie transited across orphanages,
administrators occasionally approximated ages for young survivors

Which could lead to clerical errors in official documents

But Elie knew it was important to mark his birthday each year
despite how hard the Nazis tried to take it away from him

Today, we mark September 30 as Elie Wiesel’s birthday.
Behind that date is a lifetime spent making sure
people, stories and memories could not simply be erased.

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Elie Wiesel Foundation

During Sukkot, the Torah asks of Jews to leave the security of their homes and spend the holiday in a temporary, fragile structure... specifically so they can rejoice!

Why? Why do we need precarity to feel joy?

Sukkot is there to remind us that joy cannot depend entirely on everything around us being stable, permanent, comfortable and under control.

Elie Wiesel reflected on how difficult it is to rejoice when life gives you every reason not to, and how he saw Jews preserve song, faith, and celebration even during the darkest moments of the Holocaust.

Jewish joy is a duty, it's a commandment. As Wiesel put it in his 1996 lecture Joy in Hasidism: “One must force oneself, let the heart burst, but let it be open to joy.”

It isn’t necessarily the blind belief that everything is good. But it is refusing to let everything that is bad take away your capacity for joy.

Maybe that’s why Sukkot asks us to celebrate not inside the safest structure we can build, but inside a sukkah.

Sometimes, joy cannot only be felt, it has to be invoked. So that the whole family, and the entire Jewish community, can live it together.

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Elie Wiesel Foundation

Why do we ask for forgiveness right after the Ne’ilah?
At the end of Yom Kippur?

Right after the end of the fast
After we've asked to be forgiven for all of our sins of the past year,
We daven ma'ariv and ask once more
“Please, God, forgive us for our sins.”

But why?

As Elie Wiesel questions:
"What kind of sins?
When did you sin? "

"You didn’t leave the synagogue.
You are still there.
So when did you sin?"

But then Elie also provides us with the answer:
"if you ask the question, you are already a sinner."

"For what is a sin?
Arrogance, gaavah, pride, vanity."

"You think you have no sins?
That is a sin."

Even when Yom Kippur ends,
the work of forgiveness does not.

And it begins again with the humility to admit
That it will never end

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Elie Wiesel Foundation

“Since I know, how can I not transform that knowledge into responsibility?”
This question from Elie Wiesel unveils the true meaning of Teshuvah

Because there is a common misconception about Teshuvah

What it asks of us is not to feel guilty for our sins...

It asks us to go past the guilt...
So we can find responsibility.

To become aware of our faults...
So we can change our actions

Teshuvah in Hebrew means returning.
Returning to the right path
Returning to G-d
In spite of our mistakes

It asks us to look at ourselves
without excuses.
To go beyond the feelings of regret
and accept our past mistakes

So we can learn from them.

So we can ask for forgiveness from those we hurt yesterday

And take ownership
of our choices tomorrow.

Teshuvah does not change the past.
But it gives us the power to change the future.

Teshuvah is about first admitting
"I was wrong."

And then asking
How can I make things right?
Not just today, but also tomorrow.

So now the only question left for us is:
What do we do next?

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Elie Wiesel Foundation

Why do we read the Book of Jonah on Yom Kippur?

Jonah arrives in Nineveh with what seems to be a final sentence from G-d:
the city has sinned too much and will be destroyed.

But then something magical happens, the people change.

And because they change, the outcome changes too: the city is spared.

This means that a verdict can exist, and still not be the last word.

That we have the power to change the future, when we choose to change ourselves.

The people of Nineveh are not told that what they did was fine.
They are told that what they do next matters.

And this is why Elie Wiesel describes Yom Kippur as a holiday of hope:
“Fate is not inexorable. Decisions are never irrevocable.”

Your mistakes are real.
Their consequences may be real too.
But they do not have to become your identity.

Judaism does not ask us to pretend the past never happened.

It asks us whether we are willing to make the next decision differently.

Nineveh could change.
Jonah could turn around.
And so can we.

That is the hope that lies at the heart of the holiday of Yom Kippur:
As long as we are alive, the future is unwritten.

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Elie Wiesel Foundation

On Yom Kippur in Auschwitz, inmates were faced with a terrible question.

"Should they fast when already famished?”

Elie Wiesel recounts meeting a man in the camps with a chilling take on the question.

That man was Pinhas,
a fellow prisoner who worked alongside Elie WIesel.
They became close comrades and friends.

The day before Yom Kippur,
Pinhas told Elie:
“I shall not fast.”

Pinhas was a religious scholar.
But Auschwitz had made him question G-d.

He had accepted G-d's will
for as long as he could.
But now, he refused.

Because in Auschwitz,
people were already starving
every single day.

Yom Kippur is the day
G-d decides
who lives and who dies.

But here,
that decision seemed to belong
to the executioners.

So Pinhas chose to rebel.
He would not fast.

Then Yom Kippur came.
The prisoners gathered to pray.
And Pinhas disappeared.

The next day,
Wiesel saw him again.

He looked weaker.
Then Pinhas smiled.
“You know, I fasted.”
Wiesel was stunned.

Pinhas had not fasted
for G-d.
He had fasted
against G-d.

Before the war,
some Jews rebelled against G-d
by eating on Yom Kippur.
In Auschwitz,
fasting became the rebellion.

Weeks later,
Pinhas was taken in a selection.
Before they parted,
he asked Wiesel to recite Kaddish for him.

Wiesel asked why.
Pinhas answered:
“Here the only way of accusing G-d
is to praise Him.”

Auschwitz had turned
the world upside down.
A world where even faith
could become an act of defiance.

Wiesel later reflected on what it meant to be the victim of such a world:
“For if here below
anybody was innocent and righteous,
surely it was us.”

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