Elie Wiesel - Jewish Quotes

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I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.

Elie Wiesel
Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.

Elie Wiesel
His cold eyes stared at me. At last, he said wearily: "I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.

Elie Wiesel
If I moved away from the theme of the Holocaust it was to protect it. I didn't want to abuse words; I didn't want to repeat words. I want to surround the subject with a fence of kedushah, of sacredness. To me the sanctuary of Jewish history is there; therefore I wrote other things in order not to write about that.

Elie Wiesel
The sincere Christian knows that what died in Auschwitz was not the Jewish people but Christianity.

Elie Wiesel
Close your eyes and listen. Listen to the silent screams of terrified mothers, the prayers of anguished old men and women. Listen to the tears of children. Jewish children, a beautiful little girl among them, with golden hair, whose vulnerable tenderness has never left me. Look and listen as they walk towards dark flames so gigantic that the planet itself seemed in danger.

Elie Wiesel
It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory.

Elie Wiesel
We thought it would be enough to tell of the tidal wave of hatred which broke over the Jewish people for men everywhere to decide once and for all to put an end to hatred of anyone who is "different" — whether black or white, Jew or Arab, Christian or Moslem — anyone whose orientation differs politically, philosophically, sexually.

Elie Wiesel
God of forgiveness, do not forgive those murderers of Jewish children here.
At Auschwitz

Elie Wiesel
Some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come. As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.

Elie Wiesel
I think the Messianic concept, which is the Jewish offering to mankind, is a great victory. What does it mean? It means that history has a sense, a meaning, a direction; it goes somewhere, and necessarily in a good direction--the Messiah.

Elie Wiesel
The Jewish tradition of learning-is learning. Adam chose knowledge instead of immortality.

Elie Wiesel
The only place where I felt at home, on familiar ground, was the Jewish cemetery. And yet I had never set foot in it before. Children had been forbidden to enter.

Elie Wiesel