The Elie Wiesel Foundation

10/09/2026

Sharing powerful words from our Chairman, Elisha Wiesel.

My father, Elie Wiesel, received the Nobel Peace Prize for ensuring the Holocaust wouldn’t be forgotten. By honoring Navi Pillay, who accused Israel of genocide, the committee has betrayed his legacy.

10/07/2026

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.

10/06/2026

This weekend, Britain’s Green Party voted to adopt a motion declaring “Zionism is racism.”

Twenty-five years ago, Elie Wiesel confronted the same idea in the lead-up to the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban.

Wiesel was invited to take part in the conference.

He initially accepted.

Then he read the material being prepared for it, and withdrew.

Because what was supposed to be a gathering against racism had become consumed by hostility toward Israel and, especially at the parallel NGO forum, became openly antisemitic. Wiesel warned that a conference created to fight hatred was becoming a “conference of hatred.”

Wiesel later recalled telling UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan that Durban would become an embarrassment to the United Nations. After the conference, Annan sent him a simple message:

“Elie, you were right.”

Three years later, Annan publicly acknowledged that the United Nations’ record on antisemitism had fallen short of its own ideals.

For that reason, it is shameful that 25 years later, the UN is still commemorating Durban.

And when Britain’s Green Party votes to declare that “Zionism is racism,” it's a disgrace.

Because a movement that claims to fight hatred loses all credibility when it makes room for another form of hatred, called antisemitism.

09/30/2026

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 N***s 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.

09/30/2026

"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."

09/29/2026

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.

09/28/2026

"Where we are born should never determine how freely we get to live."

Yeonmi Park’s story shows us what it means to grow up without freedom, at the mercy of your own government. She reminds us that for North Koreans the only way is to have a decent life is to escape.
This echoes the words of Elie Wiesel during his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, when he said:
“When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.”

Freedom should be available to everyone, everywhere. In North Korea, and across the world.

09/25/2026

Sometimes the people who change our lives are complete strangers.

Thirty-seven years ago, Bashar found an abandoned baby on a rainy street and saved her life. He never asked who she was. He just knew she deserved to live. Decades later, that baby came back to find him.

The world loves labels. But Bashar reminds us that before we're Jewish or Arab, before we're Muslim or Christian, we're human.

This is the universality Elie Wiesel has always championed, the sense of kinship between all humans that will bring our world together.

09/24/2026

What happens when people stop making room for ideas they disagree with?
The Memorial to the N**i Book Burning in Berlin reminds us how dangerous that can become.

For Elie Wiesel, these were not abstract ideals, but principles that shaped how we live with one another:
“We have no right to limit freedom. We have no right to limit respect.”

We don't have to agree with everyone.
But we all have blind spots.
Sometimes, listening to a different perspective can show us something we couldn't see ourselves.

Because when we silence voices we disagree with, we don't just silence them.
We may also lose the chance to learn from them.

09/23/2026

When countries come together, and choose cooperation over division, then the world can heal. World Hunger, poverty, geopolitical conflicts, there are no issues that can't be solved when international diplomacy becomes focused on solutions.

As Elie Wiesel pointed out: indifference is never neutral, and meaningful change begins when we choose responsibility, solidarity and action.