Shameful: Eli Wiesel’s Son Says Anti-Trump Immigration Marchers Are Part of His Father’s “Legacy”

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Elisha Wiesel, chief information officer at Goldman Sachs, said one or two employees have approached him so far about what President Donald Trump’s smart immigration order might mean for them.

Wiesel, 44, the son of Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, says that he understands their concern. He spoke in an interview Sunday at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, where he was attending a reading of “Night,” his father’s account of his experiences in Nazi concentration camps. Across the street in Battery Park, thousands of people had gathered to protest Trump’s order.

“What all the marchers are doing — that’s just as much a part of his legacy as ‘Night,’ ” Wiesel said of his father, who died in July at 87.

Elie Wiesel was born in Romania. After being liberated from Buchenwald in 1945, he studied at the Sorbonne, coming to the U.S. in 1955 on a journalist visa.

“He would tell me he had to keep on renewing the visa,” Elisha Wiesel said. Then his father broke both his legs in a cab accident. In the hospital with a full body cast, he missed an appointment to renew the visa.

“He went to the embassy and this very nice guy there said, ‘You know, you can become a citizen. Everybody can do it,’ ” Wiesel said. “And my father became, for the first time since the war, someone with a state. He’d been stateless.”

The stories of people being detained at airports were painful for Wiesel in light of his father’s experiences. “Every time we’d come back to JFK, his eyes would tear up a little when a customs official would stamp his passport and say welcome home.”

Wiesel said his father loved America but had no illusions.

“He knew America wasn’t perfect. He asked why weren’t more people protesting the Holocaust when it was happening,” Wiesel said. His father had many concerns about the way the Obama administration “let what’s happened in Syria happen — all these refugees having to go through Europe because their homes are destroyed.”

“In the same way he was dismayed at the lack of action over Syria, I think he would have been very disappointed at the direction this country seems to be turning,” Wiesel said.

To close the evening, Wiesel read his father’s 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

(c) 2017, Bloomberg · Amanda Gordon / Photo: Joshua Schwimmer

{Matzav.com}


14 COMMENTS

  1. His father knew what it means Jews being hated…
    That’s exactly what radical Islam is..
    go ahead side with the terrorists like so many of the Jews did with the German natzei’s….

    Or Wake Up!!!

  2. Not true!!
    Hey Elisha, was it also his position to delete Jews when honoring Holocaust Memory Day?

    You’re just a student of liberal Los Angeles teachings.

  3. Unfortunately another McCainwho projects his situation on to others and equates what was done to him to what we’re doing to these people jews were treated the way they were treated because of a blind hatred they are being treated a certain way because of the way they act

  4. Why is it shameful? Why does this website think that being frum means we have to be right wing conservative in everything?

    There have been basically NO terrorist attacks from theee countries, and what he does to others he can do to us.

    • Matzav is also entitled to their opinion. By the way the son theres no ‘zeicher’ of the warm yiddishkeit. completely assimilated, while father was a chasidishe yeshivah bocher still had traces of yiras shomayim

  5. Dear Matzav: Is this a news site or rag magazine? What kind of a Torah website calls someone who is not doing anything halachically wrong but is merely just the man’s opinion “shameful”?

    Just report the news Matzav..Or just get some Daas Torah before shaming someone in an open forum!

    • Matzav is also entitled to their opinion. By the way the son theres no ‘zeicher’ of the warm yiddishkeit. completely assimilated, while father was a chasidishe yeshivah bocher still had traces of yiras shomayim

  6. If young Mr. Wiesel is “very disappointed at the direction this country seems to be turning”, he is free to leave at any time he wishes.

  7. Hey, Give Elisha Wiesel who is cio at Goldman Sachs some credit
    He’s aware of the revolving door corruption between the administration and his former corporate colleagues

    • There was no revolving door of corruption in the Trump administration. You were projecting the JOBAMA admin where everyone he has proposed is an Israel hating wall st Cadillac communist.

  8. Being a conservative does not necessarily equal being a Ben Torah. But being a supporter of PC liberal-fascism does mean going against Torah, either intentionally or through being a useful idiot(a term attributed to Lenin to describe certain naive early supporters of communism who would then themselves be destroyed by the victorious regime). The contemporary mainstream islamic culture harbors terrorism and promotes Jew hating, so you can’t be both a pro islamist and oheiv isroel. In general, all liberal agendas come in clusters as designed by Sal Alinsky, which means that all liberal policies are packaged to include everything from global warming to islamonazism to toeiva to illegals to socialism to atheism. Supporting one agenda means ultimately supporting them all. So Matzav happens to be right: it is shameful to use Holocaust to assist those who’d like to cause another holocaust. It’s even more shameful that the above self evident truths don’t find an automatic support even among some who are considered frum.

  9. “And my father became, for the first time since the war, someone with a state. He’d been stateless.”
    Why? Why not with the state of Israel?
    Two prime ministers, Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu, had offered him the presidency of Israel, which he had declined.
    I am from the same “shtetl” (Sighet), but my state is Israel.

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