Wiesel, Wieseltier, Wiesenthal

How odd to discover that these three men have had such an important influence on me during this past year, the year since the death of my father. None of them is new to me.
I have known of Elie Wiesel probably since the latter sixties, when he wrote his book Jews of Silence, about the confined Jews of the Soviet Union. I had met Elie Wiesel for the first time when we lived in Vancouver. He was invited to speak at a public event held in the synagogue at which I then served as rabbi, and Michele and I hosted him briefly in my office prior to the event.
My second meeting with him took place when I served as Director of Commemoration at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and he was being honored as the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace. I have never read any of the books he wrote, but I have heard and read many of his speeches. I also have a pseudo-familial connection with him seeing as he comes from the same vicinity as my mother, he from Sighet in Romania and my mother from Solotvina, then in Slovakia (today in the Ukraine – who says countries don't keep the territories they conquered in war?), a distance of some four kilometers between them, and they were both transported to Auschwitz on the same day – possibly even on the same train.
Elie Wiesel's themes seem to me to excoriate the loss of innocence in the world. Whether his descriptions of the loss of his own innocence at a very young age, or the failure of Christendom to maintain its own innocence by permitting, if not encouraging, the Holocaust, or possibly even the desertion of innocence by God in those same years. The Holocaust pervades everything that Wiesel says, writes and does. It is as it should be. It was the same for my father, and he verbalized it continuously. It was the same for my mother, she, however, never verbalized it overtly. But Wiesel's use of language is so beautiful, and his speaking of those words evokes in me a pathos that I find hard to describe in words. It is the emotion of immense sadness. It is in his eyes when he speaks. It is in the choice of words he uses. It is in his intonation. His words strike a chord in me, a chord that plays to my own melancholy about the unfairness of history. In a speech of his I read recently, and which I used in a series of lectures I delivered on a recent trip to South Africa, he refers to the oft-used adage that the Holocaust is often referred to as "man's inhumanity to man" – to which he responds with a loud and resounding and booming "No! – the Holocaust was man's inhumanity to Jews!" What a powerful truth. It was because Jews were not considered human that it was so easy for the killers to kill them.
I met Leon Wieseltier in Washington DC at the simchat bat that our family had all gathered to celebrate on the birth of my brother and sister-in-law’s twin daughters. Once again, I had known of him, but had never read anything he had written. This meeting was nothing more than a “hello-hello.” I came across him again in his book “Kaddish” which I read this year. I read it avidly, almost with bated breath. Here too, as in the words of Elie Wiesel, I found great pathos. While I never searched, it seems to me that Wieseltier has never stopped searching. His book is both a frustratingly unsourced and encyclopedic and all-encompassing excavation of the origins of the Kaddish prayer, and at one and the same time, a soul-baring tale of his feelings during his year of mourning for his late father. If I ever meet him again I will want to embrace him and thank him for writing this book. It comforted me many times this year. It wrapped me in solace. I thank him.
I met Simon Wiesenthal many times. The first was at La Guardia airport while Michele and I were waiting for a plane to Rochester via Syracuse. I saw him in the waiting area and remarked about it to Michele, who encouraged me to go and say hello, which I did. When I introduced myself he asked whether I was the son of Rabbi Fogel of Johannesburg. When I replied affirmatively he told me of his visit to Johannesburg at my father’s invitation. We parted and that was that. Many years later when I worked at Yad Vashem, I went out to greet him on one of his visits. When I introduced myself, he said: “Do you remember when we last met?” – and proceeded to recall the date (!) of our meeting and where it took place.
Our paths crossed numerous times after that when I worked in Jerusalem as Multimedia Learning Center Project Manager for the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
I will never forget what he told me when he saw how astonished I was that he had remembered our first meeting. He said that in his line of work he couldn’t afford to only relegate information to paper because there was always the chance that someone would torch his archives, so he commits everything to memory. Astounding!
Thus the three W’s of this year, and their connection with the Holocaust, and thus to my parents and so to me.