Remembering Elie Wiesel: A soul on fire and a life dedicated to justice - opinion

ByIRWIN COTLERJULY 23, 2026 19:00Yad Vashem marked the 10th anniversary of Professor Elie Wiesel’s death with a screening of a film on his life and legacy. The remembrance began with opening words from Yad Vashem chairman, Dani Dayan, followed by moving commentary from his son, Elisha Wiesel, who flew in for the occasion; former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, who referenced Wiesel’s heroic contribution to the struggle for Soviet Jewry; Professor Dina Porat, who chronicled his singular voice in le devoir de memoire; and a panel discussion, which was as evocative as it was poignant in its storytelling.The thread that ran through the speakers’ remarks was not only the importance of bearing witness, but the imperative of being a messenger of humanity and the Jewish people.Elie Wiesel’s passing was, as I said in his shloshim at the time (30-day mourning period), and remains today, a personal and profound loss. Elie Wiesel making a fist 370 (credit: Reuters)It is akin to the passing of one of the legendary “Lamed Vavniks,” the 36 righteous people living in the world. Their just lives, at any given moment, redeem humanity.At the time of his passing, I spoke of, and recall more deeply now, the person who was my teacher, mentor, role model, and friend of 50 years – in a word, the most remarkable and inspirational human being I have ever encountered and had the honor to work with in common cause.Indeed, Elie’s life’s work – his life itself – remains a source of learning and inspiration for us all.In remembering Elie, we remember and celebrate the life of a tzadik, a just and righteous person, who has come to symbolize and embody the conscience of humanity – not only by and for Jews, but by and for humanity as a whole. Accordingly, when the Nobel Prize Committee awarded Elie the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, the choice was greeted with international acclaim.It was difficult to imagine any other person in the world who had so commanded the respect of political leaders and the people themselves, who had become our collective moral compass in a world devoid of moral leadership, our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper in a world of amoral international bystanders.Elie wrote, as the title of one of his works suggests, as a “soul on fire.”That flame not only animated the literary imagination – and had he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the acclaim would have been no less – but it ignited the struggle for peace and justice worldwide.His eloquence was all the more remarkable because, as he would often put it, the Holocaust was beyond vocabulary.Yet the man who felt that Auschwitz and Buchenwald were beyond communication and comprehension not only conveyed the particularity of horrors too terrible to be believed but not too terrible to have happened.Lessons learned from ElieHe also transmitted the universality of the messages, the lessons, that we continue to ignore at our peril:• In 1962, I read Night for the first time, on the eve of my first-ever visit to Auschwitz. I was shocked and outraged when our guide referenced all the nationalities murdered at Auschwitz but omitted the word “Jew.”As Elie would say, “It was not man’s inhumanity to man. It was man’s inhumanity to Jews.”• As a student, I became involved in the struggle for Soviet Jewry upon reading Elie Wiesel’s classic 1966 work, The Jews of Silence. That book served as a wake-up call for the struggle for Soviet Jewry, referring not just to the Jews silenced in the Soviet Union, but to the silence of Jews in the free world who were not standing up to that injustice; and where his clarion call mobilized generations in that struggle, and where we had our first of lifelong encounters.• As a law professor, I was profoundly influenced by Elie’s writings, suffused as they were with the pursuit of justice.• As a human rights lawyer, I was inspired by his passion and commitment to tikkun olam (repair of the world) – not as an idle slogan, but a commitment to action for the betterment of the human condition – in the best sense of the word.• As counsel to prisoners of conscience, Elie’s voice and testimony were our most powerful allies.• As an MP, he was for me, as for parliamentarians worldwide, an inspiration in our work.• As a citoyen du monde (citizen of the world), whenever I would feel despair about the human condition, what we could do about it, or feel overwhelmed by evil – or the indifference that would accompany it – I would remember Elie Wiesel’s words on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.They resonate no less powerfully 40 years later: “There’s so much injustice and suffering crying for our attention: victims of hunger, of racism, and of political persecutions … prisoners in so many lands governed by the Left and the Right … more people oppressed than free.”But then, always, the call to action. In Elie’s words:There’s much to be done, there’s much that can be done. One person of integrity can make a difference – a difference of life and death.As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame.What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.As Elie would remind me again and again, we must never be bystanders to injustice; never abandon the victim to stand alone.It is this that inspired the founding of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, where Elie was the honorary chair. Its agenda is anchored in, and inspired by, Elie’s teaching and action. 'Never Again' todayIndeed, the best remembrance, and the best tribute we can pay to Elie, is to commit to action, such as that which found expression in the “Never Again Declaration.”It was adopted at the International Legal Symposium at Jagiellonian University in May 2016, co-chaired by the Raoul Wallenberg Human Rights Centre and the March of the Living, and where Elie acted as our honorary chair, one of his last public acts.The closing excerpt of this “Never Again Declaration” inspired by Elie Wiesel is as follows:That “never again will we be indifferent to incitement and hate. Never again will we be silent in the face of evil. Never again will we indulge racism and antisemitism. Never again will we ignore the plight of the vulnerable.“Never again will we be indifferent to mass atrocity and impunity. But we will speak up and act against indifference, against racism, against hate, against antisemitism, against mass atrocity, and against the crime of crimes whose name we should even shudder to mention: genocide.”His words, and the profundity of his message, are more needed than ever amidst today’s global drumbeat of evil.On this 10th anniversary, I miss his mentorship, his guidance, and his inspiration more than ever – and the world is bereft of his irreplaceable conscience of humanity.May we continue to be inspired by his memory, and may that memory serve always as a blessing for us all.Follow us on Google