kosher bookworm: alan jay gerber

Sheloshim tribute to Elie Wiesel

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The untimely passing of Elie Wiesel, z”l, a month ago prompts this week’s sheloshim tribute that is based on several hespeds (eulogies) by those who knew him best. I will focus on the role that Wiesel played, through his book “The Jews of Silence,” in invigorating and inspiring the Soviet Jewry movement which helped to liberate Russian and East European Jewry from communist tyranny.

Among the major personalities affected by Wiesel’s literary inspiration were Rabbi Yosef Mendelevich and Natan Sharansky, both prisoners of communist brutality and torture, and Glenn Richter, one of the leading figures in the Soviet Jewry movement in the United States. 

Richter, a founder and leader of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, said in a tribute titled “How Elie Wiesel Inspired the Free Soviet Jewry Movement,” distributed by the JTA:

“On my bookshelves there are two rows of volumes on the Soviet Jewry movement. Squeezed in among the tomes is a small, well-worn paperback with pages no longer attached, ‘The Jews of Silence’ by Elie Wiesel. This slim volume is, however, a bridge. It crossed him and his readers over from his prior works, hearing the screams of those silenced in the Holocaust, to an eloquent challenge in 1966 to listen to the cry of our silenced but living oppressed brethren in the USSR.”

Richter continues:

“For my contemporaries in high schools and universities in the 1960s, Wiesel’s cri de coeur was the first of three shocks that would galvanize our nascent public student based Soviet Jewry movement into a total wave of action. Wiesel ended ‘The Jews of Silence’ thus: ‘What torments me most is not the Jews of silence I met in Russia, but the silence of the Jews I live among today.’ Not yet the icon he later became, Elie reinforced his written, searing recollection of his visit with Jews in the USSR in talks to our SSSJ members. We connected immediately to Wiesel.”

Richter concluded:

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