Biography of Professor Wiesel

Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in the town of Sighet, now part of Romania. During World War II, he, with his family and other Jews from the area, were deported to the German concentration and extermination camps, where his parents and little sister perished. Wiesel and his two older sisters survived. Liberated from Buchenwald in 1945 by advancing Allied troops, he was taken to Paris where he studied at the Sorbonne and worked as a journalist.

In 1958, he published his first book, La Nuit, a memoir of his experiences in the concentration camps. He has since authored nearly thirty books some of which use these events as their basic material. In his many lectures, Wiesel has concerned himself with the situation of the Jews and other groups who have suffered persecution and death because of their religion, race or national origin. He has been outspoken on the plight of Soviet Jewry, on Ethiopian Jewry and on behalf of the State of Israel today.

Wiesel has made his home in New York City, and is now a United States citizen. He has been a visiting scholar at Yale University, a Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at the City College of New York, and since 1976 has been Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University where he teaches "Literature of Memory." Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council from 1980 - 1986, Wiesel serves on numerous boards of trustees and advisors.

The recipient of more than 100 honorary degrees, and more than 120 other honors, Professor Wiesel has also received many awards for his writings which include such nonfiction works as the autobiographical Night (1960), Dawn (1961), The Jews of Silence (1966), Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of the Hasidic Masters (1972), Somewhere a Master: Further Hasidic Portraits and Legends (1982), Sages and Dreamers, Portraits and Legends from the Bible, the Talmud, and the Hasidic Tradition (1991), and Wise Men and Their Tales: Portraits of Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Masters (2003), as well as essays such as the collections, One Generation After (1970), A Jew Today (1978), From the Kingdom of Memory (1990), and After the Darkness (2002). He has written a children’s book, King Solomon and his Magic Ring (1999), plays, a cantata, and many novels, including The Town Beyond the Wall (1964), The Gates of the Forest (1966), A Beggar in Jerusalem (1970), Twilight (1988), The Forgotten (1992), The Judges (2002, and Les temps des déracinés (2003). The first volume of his memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea, was published by Knopf in 1995, and the second volume, And the Sea is Never Full, in 1999. More than fifty books have been written about him. In 1995, he was included as one of fifty great Americans in the special fiftieth edition of Who’s Who In America. In 1985, President Reagan presented him with the Congressional Gold Medal, and in 1992, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bush. In 1986, Professor Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.