Jewish American Heritage Month: Remembering Elie Wiesel's Contributions to American Jewish Culture
By Joanne W. Rudof, Archivist Emeritus, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies It is forty years since the appointment of Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel as a Henry Luce Scholar at Yale in the academic year 1982-83. Wiesel was personally acquainted with Yale earlier through Professor Geoffrey Hartman, due to Hartman’s focus on literature and Judaic Studies, and the Holocaust Survivor’s Film Project (HSFP), a New Haven grassroots endeavor with which Hartman became involved in 1979. Wiesel actively promoted the HSFP. He urged survivors to share their stories so they and their loved ones would not only be remembered in perpetuity, but would also provide present and future generations with the opportunity to learn about the Holocaust not only from Nazi documents, but from the victims’ perspectives as well. The following are excerpts from Professor Wiesel’s remarks at the inauguration of the Video Archive at the Yale Library in November 1982. “Future generations will be in your debt. No person in the world is as capable of gratitude as a survivor is, for we know that is by sheer luck that any of us is here. We could have been elsewhere. Nobody did anything to survive. We could have been among […]
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