Elie Wiesel is one of the most enduring and formative voices of the Holocaust survivor community.
His 1956 memoir “Night” is standard reading in school districts across the country and world, detailing his time spent as a prisoner at Auschwitz and Buchenwald during World War II.
Unfortunately, Wiesel passed away in 2016. Like many Holocaust survivors, he is no longer around to tell his story first-hand.
But that doesn’t mean his story is done being told.
In fact, his son, Elisha Wiesel, is one person who has taken up the mantle. And as Wiesel said in an interview with Baltimore Jewish Times, for much of his youth he was not exactly on that path.
“I could not have been a more difficult kid. When I went off to college, I had a mohawk, I had an earring with a cross. All I was interested in was playing my electric guitar and chasing girls,” he said. “I wasn’t open to being a loving son. I was really selfish.”
Elie Wiesel was not deterred, however.
“Despite that, my father was just always warm. He was just an incredibly loving and patient father who put up with way more than he should have. I can’t praise him enough,” Elisha Wiesel said.
For Yom HaShoah this year, Wiesel spoke at Beth Tfiloh in Baltimore. Following a screening of “Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire,” the legendary author’s son sat and discussed his father’s legacy, the Holocaust and contemporary issues, too. He said that he was taken aback by the Beth Tfiloh community.
“I was really blown away. I was blown away by the nature of the audience, the questions we got afterwards, talking to Rabbi [Chai] Posner — it was just incredible. It was a great experience [and] very uplifting,” Wiesel said.
The “Soul on Fire” documentary explores the man that Wiesel was beyond his seminal works that most know him for.
Elisha Wiesel said that his father wasn’t just kind and loving, he was open to new experiences, too.
“When I was a kid, if he didn’t want to play soccer, but I wanted to play soccer, he’d play with me and my friends,” Wiesel said. “When he was asked to throw the first pitch at Game Three of the 1986 World Series, he was open to my teaching him how to throw a baseball.”
Throughout his life, Elisha Wiesel had various aspirations, although that didn’t always include working to further his father’s legacy. Today, he operates a hedge fund, chairs the Elie Wiesel Foundation and does various events like the one at Beth Tfiloh. He said it wasn’t until recently that he decided to pick up where his father left off when he passed.
“It was relatively late in life, when my father really started getting sick. He passed in 2016, but in the few years preceding that, his health was [deteriorating],” Wiesel said. “I had almost always thought of my father as always going to be there. Of course, he was always going to be fighting to save the world. It was just that I never even thought about the fact that one day he might be gone. It wasn’t until I saw him really starting to decline that it began to dawn on me that maybe I need to think about my own role in this going forward.”
When it comes to making his father proud, Wiesel said his biggest accomplishment is making sure his legendary father got to know his grandkids.
“There’s one thing I always know I’ve got in my corner, and that’s that I gave my father grandchildren in his lifetime with enough time to enjoy them,” Wiesel said.
The event at Beth Tfiloh is one of many reminders of how proud Wiesel should be of his father and the fact that he has opted to continue the work that his dad started. There are little moments that reinforce this all the time. At BT, a woman approached him and said that she met Elie Wiesel in the 1970s at a meeting supporting Soviet Jewry. Not long after that meeting, she was held in Moscow and interrogated by the KGB — but she remained brave.
“She said, ‘you know, I remember how upset and nervous I was, and then I thought about your father and that conversation, and how it really gave me the strength to get through that interview,’” Wiesel said.
