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102-517: Eliezer " Elie " Wiesel ( / ˈ ɛ l i v iː ˈ z ɛ l / EL -ee vee- ZEL or / ˈ iː l aɪ ˈ v iː s əl / EE -ly VEE -səl ; Yiddish : אליעזר "אלי" װיזל , romanized :  Eliezer "Eli" Vizl ; September 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016) was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate , and Holocaust survivor . He authored 57 books , written mostly in French and English, including Night ,

204-460: A trial against God , under the accusation that He has been oppressive towards the Jewish people. Wiesel also played a role in the initial success of The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski by endorsing it before it became known the book was fiction and, in the sense that it was presented as all Kosinski's true experience, a hoax . Wiesel published two volumes of memoirs. The first, All Rivers Run to

306-506: A French orphanage. They eventually emigrated to North America, with Beatrice moving to Montreal , Quebec, Canada. Tzipora, Shlomo, and Sarah did not survive the Holocaust . In March 1944, Germany occupied Hungary, thus extending the Holocaust into Northern Transylvania as well. Wiesel was 15, and he, with his family, along with the rest of the town's Jewish population, was placed in one of

408-591: A champion who carried our pain, our guilt, and our responsibility on his shoulders for generations." In 2007, Wiesel was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize 's Lifetime Achievement Award. That same year, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity issued a letter condemning Armenian genocide denial , a letter that was signed by 53 Nobel laureates including Wiesel. Wiesel repeatedly called Turkey's 90-year-old campaign to downplay its actions during

510-534: A collection of narrative poems on themes from the Hebrew Bible and the Haggadah . The advent of the printing press in the 16th century enabled the large-scale production of works, at a cheaper cost, some of which have survived. One particularly popular work was Elia Levita 's Bovo-Bukh ( בָּבָֿא-בּוך ), composed around 1507–08 and printed several times, beginning in 1541 (under the title Bovo d'Antona ). Levita,

612-621: A considerable number of Jews from other parts of Romania. By 2002, the town had 20 remaining Jews. Towards the end of World War II, the city was taken back from Hungarian and German troops by Romanian and Soviet forces in October 1944. The Paris Peace Treaties of 1947 voided the Vienna Awards, and reaffirmed the Trianon borders. In 1948, the new Communist regime nationalized the city's factories, three publishing houses and banks. In 1950, with

714-485: A lesser extent, the United Kingdom. This has resulted in some difficulty in communication between Yiddish speakers from Israel and those from other countries. There is significant phonological variation among the various Yiddish dialects . The description that follows is of a modern Standard Yiddish that was devised during the early 20th century and is frequently encountered in pedagogical contexts. Uvular As in

816-568: A meeting with the French author François Mauriac , the 1952 Nobel Laureate in Literature who eventually became Wiesel's close friend. Mauriac was a devout Christian who had fought in the French Resistance during the war. He compared Wiesel to " Lazarus rising from the dead", and saw from Wiesel's tormented eyes, "the death of God in the soul of a child". Mauriac persuaded him to begin writing about his harrowing experiences. Wiesel first wrote

918-567: A speech at the opening ceremony of the new building of Yad Vashem , the Israeli Holocaust History Museum: I know what people say – it is so easy. Those that were there won't agree with that statement. The statement is: it was man's inhumanity to man. NO! It was man's inhumanity to Jews! Jews were not killed because they were human beings. In the eyes of the killers they were not human beings! They were Jews! In early 2006, Wiesel accompanied Oprah Winfrey as she visited Auschwitz ,

1020-565: A visit which was broadcast as part of The Oprah Winfrey Show . On November 30, 2006, Wiesel received a knighthood in London in recognition of his work toward raising Holocaust education in the United Kingdom. In September 2006, he appeared before the UN Security Council with actor George Clooney to call attention to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur . When Wiesel died, Clooney wrote, "We had

1122-523: A wood processing factory ( Combinatul de Industrializare a Lemnului ). Turning out furniture and other wood products, the enterprise had over 6,000 employees and played an important part in the city's economic development. After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, it gradually fell upon hard times, with nine private firms employing some 3,500 in 2012. A second important employer during the Communist period

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1224-478: A work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps . In his political activities Wiesel became a regular speaker on the subject of the Holocaust and remained a strong defender of human rights during his lifetime. He also advocated for many other causes like the state of Israel and against Hamas and victims of oppression including Soviet and Ethiopian Jews ,

1326-626: Is Avroham ben Schemuel Pikartei, who published a paraphrase on the Book of Job in 1557. Women in the Ashkenazi community were traditionally not literate in Hebrew but did read and write Yiddish. A body of literature therefore developed for which women were a primary audience. This included secular works, such as the Bovo-Bukh , and religious writing specifically for women, such as the צאנה וראינה Tseno Ureno and

1428-475: Is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews . It originated in 9th century Central Europe , and provided the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with many elements taken from Hebrew (notably Mishnaic ) and to some extent Aramaic . Most varieties of Yiddish include elements of Slavic languages and the vocabulary contains traces of Romance languages . Yiddish has traditionally been written using

1530-606: Is above politics. It is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture—and not a single time in the Koran ;... It belongs to the Jewish people and is much more than a city". Wiesel held the position of Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Boston University from 1976, teaching in both its religion and philosophy departments. He became a close friend of the president and chancellor John Silber . The university created

1632-480: Is also used in the adjectival sense, synonymously with "Ashkenazi Jewish", to designate attributes of Yiddishkeit ("Ashkenazi culture"; for example, Yiddish cooking and "Yiddish music" – klezmer ). Hebrew Judeo-Aramaic Judeo-Arabic Other Jewish diaspora languages Jewish folklore Jewish poetry By the 10th century, a distinctive Jewish culture had formed in Central Europe. By

1734-671: Is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant." He received many other prizes and honors for his work, including the Congressional Gold Medal in 1985, the Presidential Medal of Freedom , and The International Center in New York's Award of Excellence. He was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996. Wiesel co-founded Moment magazine with Leonard Fein in 1975. They founded

1836-493: Is printed in Hebrew script.) According to a study by the German media association Internationale Medienhilfe (IMH), more than 40 printed Yiddish newspapers and magazines were published worldwide in 2024, and the trend is rising. The Western Yiddish dialect—sometimes pejoratively labeled Mauscheldeutsch , i. e. "Moses German" —declined in the 18th century, as the Age of Enlightenment and

1938-506: Is pronounced [haɡˈdɔmɜ] . The vowel phonemes of Standard Yiddish are: In addition, the sonorants /l/ and /n/ can function as syllable nuclei : [m] and [ŋ] appear as syllable nuclei as well, but only as allophones of /n/ , after bilabial consonants and dorsal consonants , respectively. The syllabic sonorants are always unstressed. Stressed vowels in the Yiddish dialects may be understood by considering their common origins in

2040-588: Is reflected in some Ashkenazi personal names (e.g., Kalonymos and Yiddish Todres ). Hebrew, on the other hand, was regarded as a holy language reserved for ritual and spiritual purposes and not for common use. The established view is that, as with other Jewish languages , Jews speaking distinct languages learned new co-territorial vernaculars, which they then Judaized. In the case of Yiddish, this scenario sees it as emerging when speakers of Zarphatic (Judeo-French) and other Judeo-Romance languages began to acquire varieties of Middle High German , and from these groups

2142-798: Is situated along the Tisa river on the border with Ukraine , across from the Ukrainian town of Solotvyno . Neighboring communities include: Sarasău , Săpânța , Câmpulung la Tisa , Ocna Șugatag , Giulești , Vadu Izei , Rona de Jos and Bocicoiu Mare communities in Romania, Bila Cerkva community and the Solotvyno township in Ukraine ( Zakarpattia Oblast ). The city administers five villages: Iapa ( Kabolapatak ), Lazu Baciului ( Bácsiláz ), Șugău ( Sugó ), Valea Cufundoasă ( Mélypatak ) and Valea Hotarului ( Határvölgy ). At

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2244-493: Is uncertain). An additional distinctive semicursive typeface was, and still is, used for rabbinical commentary on religious texts when Hebrew and Yiddish appear on the same page. This is commonly termed Rashi script , from the name of the most renowned early author, whose commentary is usually printed using this script. (Rashi is also the typeface normally used when the Sephardic counterpart to Yiddish, Judaeo-Spanish or Ladino ,

2346-554: The Haskalah led to a view of Yiddish as a corrupt dialect. The 19th century Prussian-Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz , for example, wrote that "the language of the Jews [in Poland] ... degenerat[ed] into a ridiculous jargon, a mixture of German, Polish, and Talmudical elements, an unpleasant stammering, rendered still more repulsive by forced attempts at wit." A Maskil (one who takes part in

2448-417: The 2021 census , Sighetu Marmației had a population of 32,793. At the 2011 census , the city had 37,640 inhabitants; of those, 82.2% were Romanians , 13% Hungarians , 2.3% Ukrainians , and Roma . According to the 1910 census, the city had 21,370 inhabitants; these consisted of 17,542 (82.1%) Hungarian speakers, 2,002 (9.4%) Romanian, 1,257 (5.9%) German , and 32 Ruthenian speakers. The number of Jews

2550-608: The Armenian genocide a double killing. In 2009, Wiesel criticized the Vatican for lifting the excommunication of controversial bishop Richard Williamson , a member of the Society of Saint Pius X . The excommunication was later reimposed. In June 2009, Wiesel accompanied US President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel as they toured the Buchenwald concentration camp . Wiesel

2652-650: The Haskalah ) would write about and promote acclimatization to the outside world. Jewish children began attending secular schools where the primary language spoken and taught was German, not Yiddish. Yiddish grates on our ears and distorts. This jargon is incapable in fact of expressing sublime thoughts. It is our obligation to cast off these old rags, a heritage of the dark Middle Ages. –  Osip Aronovich Rabinovich , in an article titled "Russia – Our Native Land: Just as We Breathe Its Air, We Must Speak Its Language" in

2754-536: The Hebrew alphabet . Prior to World War II , there were 11–13 million speakers. Eighty-five percent of the approximately six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers, leading to a massive decline in the use of the language. Assimilation following World War II and aliyah (immigration to Israel) further decreased the use of Yiddish among survivors after adapting to Hebrew in Israel. However,

2856-620: The High Holy Days ) and בֵּיתֿ הַכְּנֶסֶתֿ , 'synagogue' (read in Yiddish as beis hakneses ) – had been included. The niqqud appears as though it might have been added by a second scribe, in which case it may need to be dated separately and may not be indicative of the pronunciation of the rhyme at the time of its initial annotation. Over the course of the 14th and 15th centuries, songs and poems in Yiddish, and macaronic pieces in Hebrew and German, began to appear. These were collected in

2958-747: The Irgun 's bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Wiesel made an unsuccessful attempt to join the underground Zionist movement. In 1948, he translated articles from Hebrew into Yiddish for Irgun periodicals, but never became a member of the organization. In 1949, he traveled to Israel as a correspondent for the French newspaper L'arche . He then was hired as Paris correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth , subsequently becoming its roaming international correspondent. Never shall I forget that night,

3060-568: The Middle High German diphthong ei and long vowel î to /aɪ/ , Yiddish has maintained the distinction between them; and likewise, the Standard German /ɔʏ/ corresponds to both the MHG diphthong öu and the long vowel iu , which in Yiddish have merged with their unrounded counterparts ei and î , respectively. Lastly, the Standard German /aʊ/ corresponds to both the MHG diphthong ou and

3162-525: The Odessan journal Рассвет (dawn), 1861. Owing to both assimilation to German and the revival of Hebrew , Western Yiddish survived only as a language of "intimate family circles or of closely knit trade groups". In eastern Europe, the response to these forces took the opposite direction, with Yiddish becoming the cohesive force in a secular culture (see the Yiddishist movement ). Notable Yiddish writers of

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3264-480: The Slavic languages with which Yiddish was long in contact (Russian, Belarusian , Polish , and Ukrainian ), but unlike German, voiceless stops have little to no aspiration ; unlike many such languages, voiced stops are not devoiced in final position. Moreover, Yiddish has regressive voicing assimilation , so that, for example, זאָגט /zɔɡt/ ('says') is pronounced [zɔkt] and הקדמה /hakˈdɔmɜ/ ('foreword')

3366-601: The Sorbonne . He heard lectures by philosopher Martin Buber and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre and he spent his evenings reading works by Fyodor Dostoyevsky , Franz Kafka , and Thomas Mann . By the time he was 19, he had begun working as a journalist, writing in French, while also teaching Hebrew and working as a choirmaster. He wrote for Israeli and French newspapers, including Tsien in Kamf (in Yiddish ). In 1946, after learning of

3468-463: The Torah . Wiesel said his father represented reason, while his mother Sarah promoted faith. Wiesel was instructed that his genealogy traced back to Rabbi Schlomo Yitzhaki (Rashi) , and was a descendant of Rabbi Yeshayahu ben Abraham Horovitz ha-Levi . Wiesel had three siblings—older sisters Beatrice and Hilda, and younger sister Tzipora. Beatrice and Hilda survived the war, and were reunited with Wiesel at

3570-801: The apartheid in South Africa , the Bosnian genocide , Sudan , the Kurds and the Armenian genocide , Argentina 's Desaparecidos or Nicaragua's Miskito people . He was a professor of the humanities at Boston University , which created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor. He was involved with Jewish causes and human rights causes and helped establish the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Wiesel

3672-458: The counties replaced by regions , Sighet lost its status as an administrative center and became part of the Maramureș Region  [ ro ] . In 1960, the building of neighborhoods with apartment blocks began. The same year, the town's name became Sighetul Marmației ; the final “l” was dropped in 1968, when the city became once again part of Maramureș County. 1962 saw the opening of

3774-554: The high medieval period , their area of settlement, centered on the Rhineland ( Mainz ) and the Palatinate (notably Worms and Speyer ), came to be known as Ashkenaz , originally a term used of Scythia , and later of various areas of Eastern Europe and Anatolia. In the medieval Hebrew of Rashi (d. 1105), Ashkenaz becomes a term for Germany, and אשכּנזי Ashkenazi for the Jews settling in this area. Ashkenaz bordered on

3876-543: The Œuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE) had established a rehabilitation center. Wiesel joined a smaller group of 90 to 100 boys from Orthodox homes who wanted kosher facilities and a higher level of religious observance; they were cared for in a home in Ambloy under the directorship of Judith Hemmendinger . This home was later moved to Taverny and operated until 1947. Afterwards, Wiesel traveled to Paris where he learned French and studied literature, philosophy and psychology at

3978-431: The תחנות Tkhines . One of the best-known early woman authors was Glückel of Hameln , whose memoirs are still in print. The segmentation of the Yiddish readership, between women who read מאַמע־לשון mame-loshn but not לשון־קדש loshn-koydesh , and men who read both, was significant enough that distinctive typefaces were used for each. The name commonly given to the semicursive form used exclusively for Yiddish

4080-452: The 10th century the area became part of Kingdom of Hungary . The first mention of a settlement dates back to the 11th century, and the city as such was first mentioned in 1326. In 1352, it was a free royal town and the capital of Máramaros comitatus , just outside Transylvania . After the defeat at the Battle of Mohács and the death of Louis II of Hungary , in the ensuing struggle for

4182-629: The 1925 founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, YIVO . In Vilnius , there was debate over which language should take primacy, Hebrew or Yiddish. Yiddish changed significantly during the 20th century. Michael Wex writes, "As increasing numbers of Yiddish speakers moved from the Slavic-speaking East to Western Europe and the Americas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were so quick to jettison Slavic vocabulary that

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4284-629: The 900-page memoir Un di velt hot geshvign ( And the World Remained Silent ) in Yiddish , which was published in abridged form in Buenos Aires . Wiesel rewrote a shortened version of the manuscript in French, La Nuit , in 1955. It was translated into English as Night in 1960. The book sold few copies after its initial publication, but still attracted interest from reviewers, leading to television interviews with Wiesel and meetings with writers such as Saul Bellow . As its profile rose, Night

4386-605: The Armenian genocide from it, and to those ends he provided the Foreign Ministry with internal documents on the conference's planning and lobbied fellow academics to not attend the conference. During his lifetime, Wiesel had deflected questions on the topic of the Israeli settlements, claiming to abstain from commenting on Israel's internal debates. According to Hussein Ibish , despite this position, Wiesel had gone on record as supporting

4488-580: The Ashkenazi community took shape. Exactly what German substrate underlies the earliest form of Yiddish is disputed. The Jewish community in the Rhineland would have encountered the Middle High German dialects from which the Rhenish German dialects of the modern period would emerge. Jewish communities of the high medieval period would have been speaking their own versions of these German dialects, mixed with linguistic elements that they themselves brought into

4590-610: The Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor. From 1972 to 1976 Wiesel was a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York and member of the American Federation of Teachers . In 1982 he served as the first Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in Humanities and Social Thought at Yale University . He also co-instructed Winter Term (January) courses at Eckerd College , St. Petersburg, Florida . From 1997 to 1999 he

4692-540: The Foundation $ 15 million and Wiesel and his wife much of their own personal savings. In 1982, at the request of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Wiesel agreed to resign from his position as chairman of a planned international conference on the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide . Wiesel then worked with the Foreign Ministry in its attempts to get the conference either canceled or to remove all discussion of

4794-535: The Great Cross award he had received from the Hungarian government. Wiesel was active in trying to prevent Iran from making nuclear weapons, stating that, "The words and actions of the leadership of Iran leave no doubt as to their intentions". He also condemned Hamas for the "use of children as human shields" during the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict by running an ad in several large newspapers. The Times refused to run

4896-474: The Holocaust from a highly personal perspective. As a result, some historians credited Wiesel with giving the term Holocaust its present meaning, although he did not feel that the word adequately described that historical event. In 1975, he co-founded the magazine Moment with writer Leonard Fein . The 1979 book and play The Trial of God are said to have been based on his real-life Auschwitz experience of witnessing three Jews who, close to death, conduct

4998-553: The Holocaust was happening. He defined indifference as being neutral between two sides, which, in this case, amounts to overlooking the victims of the Holocaust. Throughout the speech, he expressed the view that a little bit of attention, either positive or negative, is better than no attention at all. In 2003, he discovered and publicized the fact that at least 280,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews , along with other groups, were massacred in Romanian-run death camps . In 2005, he gave

5100-596: The Holocaust. During this visit, Wiesel participated in a conference at the Upper House Chamber of the Hungarian Parliament , met Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai and President László Sólyom , and made a speech to the approximately 10,000 participants of an anti-racist gathering held in Faith Hall . However, in 2012, he protested against "the whitewashing" of Hungary's involvement in the Holocaust , and he gave up

5202-499: The Hungarian throne, the kingdom was divided into Royal Hungary of Habsburg Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor and the Eastern Hungarian Kingdom of John Zápolya the Voivode of Transylvania . In 1570 the Principality of Transylvania was formed which included Máramaros County . Transylvania, including Maramureș, became an autonomous principality within the Ottoman Empire from 1541. In 1711, King Charles III returned Máramaros County to his Hungarian domain. During World War I ,

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5304-421: The Israel daily, Yediot Ahronot . In 1969, he married Austrian Marion Erster Rose, who also translated many of his books. They had one son, Shlomo Elisha Wiesel , named after Wiesel's father. In the U.S., he eventually wrote over 40 books, most of them non-fiction Holocaust literature , and novels. As an author, he was awarded a number of literary prizes and is considered among the most important in describing

5406-425: The Jewish Cemetery as well as the Holocaust Museum located in the childhood home of Elie Wiesel. On 3 August 2018, Wiesel's birthplace was vandalized. After the establishment of the Romanian communist regime , the Securitate ran the Sighet Prison during the 1950s and 1960s as a place for the detention and political repression of public figures who had been declared " class enemies ." The most prominent of these

5508-492: The Proto-Yiddish sound system. Yiddish linguistic scholarship uses a system developed by Max Weinreich in 1960 to indicate the descendent diaphonemes of the Proto-Yiddish stressed vowels. Each Proto-Yiddish vowel is given a unique two-digit identifier, and its reflexes use it as a subscript, for example Southeastern o 11 is the vowel /o/, descended from Proto-Yiddish */a/. The first digit indicates Proto-Yiddish quality (1-=*[a], 2-=*[e], 3-=*[i], 4-=*[o], 5-=*[u]), and

5610-421: The Sea , was published in 1994 and covered his life up to the year 1969. The second, titled And the Sea is Never Full and published in 1999, covered the years from 1969 to 1999. Wiesel and his wife, Marion, started the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity in 1986. He served as chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust (later renamed the US Holocaust Memorial Council) from 1978 to 1986, spearheading

5712-417: The advertisement, saying, "The opinion being expressed is too strong, and too forcefully made, and will cause concern amongst a significant number of Times readers." Wiesel often emphasized the Jewish connection to Jerusalem , and criticized the Obama administration for pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to halt East Jerusalem Israeli settlement construction. He stated that "Jerusalem

5814-452: The area in the spring of 1919, during the Hungarian–Romanian War . The Allied Powers accepted the Romanian demands and Transylvania including Máramaros County was formally ceded to the Kingdom of Romania in the Treaty of Trianon in June 1920. In 1919, six Romanian schools opened in Sighet: a boys' high school , a girls' high school, a boys' elementary school, a co-ed commercial gymnasium , and two commercial high schools (one for boys,

5916-422: The area inhabited by another distinctive Jewish cultural group, the Sephardi Jews , who ranged into southern France . Ashkenazi culture later spread into Eastern Europe with large-scale population migrations. Nothing is known with certainty about the vernacular of the earliest Jews in Germany, but several theories have been put forward. As noted above, the first language of the Ashkenazim may have been Aramaic ,

6018-516: The building of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Sigmund Strochlitz was his close friend and confidant during these years. The Holocaust Memorial Museum gives the Elie Wiesel Award to "internationally prominent individuals whose actions have advanced the Museum's vision of a world where people confront hatred , prevent genocide , and promote human dignity ". The Foundation had invested its endowment in money manager Bernard L. Madoff 's investment Ponzi scheme , costing

6120-448: The city was briefly occupied by Russian forces between 3 - 7 October 1914. 1918 saw the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy . On November 22, 1918, in an assembly of Romanians from Maramureș took place in the town's central square, electing a national council and deciding to send a delegation to the Great National Assembly of Alba Iulia , which voted the union of Transylvania with Romania . The Romanian Army took control of

6222-403: The desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never. —Elie Wiesel, from Night . For ten years after the war, Wiesel refused to write about or discuss his experiences during the Holocaust. He began to reconsider his decision after

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6324-487: The earliest named Yiddish author, may also have written פּאַריז און װיענע Pariz un Viene ( Paris and Vienna ). Another Yiddish retelling of a chivalric romance, װידװילט Vidvilt (often referred to as "Widuwilt" by Germanizing scholars), presumably also dates from the 15th century, although the manuscripts are from the 16th. It is also known as Kinig Artus Hof , an adaptation of the Middle High German romance Wigalois by Wirnt von Grafenberg . Another significant writer

6426-480: The end of the high medieval period. It is first recorded in 1272, with the oldest surviving literary document in Yiddish, a blessing found in the Worms machzor (a Hebrew prayer book). This brief rhyme is decoratively embedded in an otherwise purely Hebrew text. Nonetheless, it indicates that the Yiddish of that day was a more or less regular Middle High German written in the Hebrew alphabet into which Hebrew words – מַחֲזוֹר , makhazor (prayerbook for

6528-445: The extensive inclusion of words of Slavic origin. Western Yiddish is divided into Southwestern (Swiss–Alsatian–Southern German), Midwestern (Central German), and Northwestern (Netherlandic–Northern German) dialects. Yiddish is used in a number of Haredi Jewish communities worldwide; it is the first language of the home, school, and in many social settings among many Haredi Jews, and is used in most Hasidic yeshivas . The term "Yiddish"

6630-427: The first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of

6732-406: The gas chambers. Wiesel and his father were later deported to the concentration camp at Buchenwald . Until that transfer, he admitted to Oprah Winfrey , his primary motivation for trying to survive Auschwitz was knowing that his father was still alive: "I knew that if I died, he would die." After they were taken to Buchenwald, his father died before the camp was liberated. In Night , Wiesel recalled

6834-482: The idea of expanding Jewish settlements into the Palestinian territories conquered by Israel during the 6 Day War; such settlements are considered illegal by the international community. Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for speaking out against violence, repression, and racism. The Norwegian Nobel Committee described Wiesel as "one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression, and racism continue to characterize

6936-431: The language's origins, with points of contention being the characterization of its Germanic base, the source of its Hebrew/Aramaic adstrata , and the means and location of this fusion. Some theorists argue that the fusion occurred with a Bavarian dialect base. The two main candidates for the germinal matrix of Yiddish, the Rhineland and Bavaria, are not necessarily incompatible. There may have been parallel developments in

7038-418: The late 15th century by Menahem ben Naphtali Oldendorf. During the same period, a tradition seems to have emerged of the Jewish community's adapting its own versions of German secular literature. The earliest Yiddish epic poem of this sort is the Dukus Horant , which survives in the famous Cambridge Codex T.-S.10.K.22. This 14th-century manuscript was discovered in the Cairo Geniza in 1896, and also contains

7140-439: The late 19th and early 20th centuries are Sholem Yankev Abramovitch, writing as Mendele Mocher Sforim ; Sholem Rabinovitsh, widely known as Sholem Aleichem , whose stories about טבֿיה דער מילכיקער ( Tevye der milkhiker , " Tevye the Dairyman") inspired the Broadway musical and film Fiddler on the Roof ; and Isaac Leib Peretz . In the early 20th century, especially after the Socialist October Revolution in Russia, Yiddish

7242-456: The legend, the place name comes from the Hungarian expression "mára már rossz" (too bad by now), referring to that the local tribes moved to Moldavia . Inhabitants simply call to the city Sighet and similar abbreviations in their mother tongue. Inhabited since the Hallstatt period , the populated area lies in the Tisza Valley, an important route as being the only access to the otherwise mountainous, sparsely populated region. After 895 in

7344-522: The limitations of its origins. There were few Yiddish words for animals and birds. It had virtually no military vocabulary. Such voids were filled by borrowing from German , Polish and Russian . Yiddish was particularly good at borrowing: from Arabic , from Hebrew , from Aramaic and from anything with which it intersected. On the other hand, it contributed to English – American . [sic] Its chief virtue lay in its internal subtlety, particularly in its characterization of human types and emotions. It

7446-512: The long vowel û , but in Yiddish, they have not merged. Although Standard Yiddish does not distinguish between those two diphthongs and renders both as /ɔɪ/ , the distinction becomes apparent when the two diphthongs undergo Germanic umlaut , such as in forming plurals: The vowel length distinctions of German do not exist in the Northeastern (Lithuanian) varieties of Yiddish, which form the phonetic basis for Standard Yiddish. In those varieties,

7548-494: The magazine to provide a voice for American Jews. He was also a member of the International Advisory Board of NGO Monitor . A staunch opponent of the death penalty , Wiesel stated that he thought that even Adolf Eichmann should not have been executed. In April 1999, Wiesel delivered the speech "The Perils of Indifference" in Washington D.C., criticizing the people and countries who chose to be indifferent while

7650-479: The mid-1950s. In Weinreich's view, this Old Yiddish substrate later bifurcated into two distinct versions of the language, Western and Eastern Yiddish. They retained the Semitic vocabulary and constructions needed for religious purposes and created a Judeo-German form of speech, sometimes not accepted as a fully autonomous language. Yiddish was a rich, living language, the chattering tongue of an urban population. It had

7752-455: The minority Tamils in Sri Lanka. He said that, "Wherever minorities are being persecuted, we must raise our voices to protest ... The Tamil people are being disenfranchised and victimized by the Sri Lanka authorities. This injustice must stop. The Tamil people must be allowed to live in peace and flourish in their homeland." In 2009, Wiesel returned to Hungary for his first visit since

7854-586: The most frequently used designation in the literature until the 18th century. In the late 19th and into the 20th century, the language was more commonly called "Jewish", especially in non-Jewish contexts, but "Yiddish" is again the most common designation today. Modern Yiddish has two major forms : Eastern and Western. Eastern Yiddish is far more common today. It includes Southeastern (Ukrainian–Romanian), Mideastern (Polish–Galician–Eastern Hungarian) and Northeastern (Lithuanian–Belarusian) dialects. Eastern Yiddish differs from Western both by its far greater size and by

7956-577: The most prominent Yiddish writers of the time—the founders of modern Yiddish literature, who were still living in Slavic-speaking countries—revised the printed editions of their oeuvres to eliminate obsolete and 'unnecessary' Slavisms." The vocabulary used in Israel absorbed many Modern Hebrew words, and there was a similar but smaller increase in the English component of Yiddish in the United States and, to

8058-456: The number of Yiddish-speakers is increasing in Hasidic communities. In 2014, YIVO stated that "most people who speak Yiddish in their daily lives are Hasidim and other Haredim ", whose population was estimated at the time to be between 500,000 and 1 million. A 2021 estimate from Rutgers University was that there were 250,000 American speakers, 250,000 Israeli speakers, and 100,000 in the rest of

8160-645: The other for girls). The Maramureș ethnographic museum opened in the cultural palace in 1926. During the interwar period , over twenty newspapers appeared in the town, as well as a number of literary reviews. In August 1940, the Second Vienna Award , arbitrated by Germany and Italy , reassigned the territory of Northern Transylvania from Romania to Hungary . As a result, Sighetu Marmației came under Hungarian administration during World War II . A first deportation of Jews from Sighet took place in 1941. The second occurred after Passover 1944, so that by April,

8262-659: The region, including many Hebrew and Aramaic words, but there is also Romance. In Max Weinreich 's model, Jewish speakers of Old French or Old Italian who were literate in either liturgical Hebrew or Aramaic , or both, migrated through Southern Europe to settle in the Rhine Valley in an area known as Lotharingia (later known in Yiddish as Loter ) extending over parts of Germany and France. There, they encountered and were influenced by Jewish speakers of High German languages and several other German dialects. Both Weinreich and Solomon Birnbaum developed this model further in

8364-471: The second refers to quantity or diphthongization (−1=short, −2=long, −3=short but lengthened early in the history of Yiddish, −4=diphthong, −5=special length occurring only in Proto-Yiddish vowel 25). Vowels 23, 33, 43 and 53 have the same reflexes as 22, 32, 42 and 52 in all Yiddish dialects, but they developed distinct values in Middle High German ; Katz (1987) argues that they should be collapsed with

8466-414: The shame he felt when he heard his father being beaten and was unable to help. Wiesel was tattooed with inmate number "A-7713" on his left arm. The camp was liberated by the U.S. Third Army on April 11, 1945, when they were just prepared to be evacuated from Buchenwald. After World War II ended and Wiesel was freed, he joined a transport of 1,000 child survivors of Buchenwald to Ecouis , France, where

8568-410: The time, but also German, Hungarian , and Romanian . Wiesel's mother, Sarah, was the daughter of Dodye Feig, a Vizhnitz Hasid and farmer from the nearby village of Bocskó . Dodye was active and trusted within the community. Wiesel's father, Shlomo, instilled a strong sense of humanism in his son, encouraging him to learn Hebrew and to read literature, whereas his mother encouraged him to study

8670-489: The town's ghetto contained close to 13,000 Jews from Sighet itself and the neighboring places of Dragomirești , Ocna Șugatag , and Vișeu de Sus . Between May 16 and 22, the ghetto was liquidated in four transports, its inhabitants sent to Auschwitz concentration camp . Among the deportees was Sighet native and future Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel . In 1947, there were some 2,300 Jews in Sighet, including survivors and

8772-600: The two confinement ghettos set up in Máramarossziget ( Sighet ), the town where he had been born and raised. In May 1944, the Hungarian authorities, under German pressure, began to deport the Jewish community to the Auschwitz concentration camp , where up to 90 percent of the people were murdered on arrival. Immediately after they were sent to Auschwitz, his mother and his younger sister were murdered. Wiesel and his father were selected to perform labor so long as they remained able-bodied, after which they were to be murdered in

8874-619: The two regions, seeding the Western and Eastern dialects of Modern Yiddish. Dovid Katz proposes that Yiddish emerged from contact between speakers of High German and Aramaic-speaking Jews from the Middle East. The lines of development proposed by the different theories do not necessarily rule out the others (at least not entirely); an article in The Forward argues that "in the end, a new 'standard theory' of Yiddish's origins will probably be based on

8976-617: The vernacular of the Jews in Roman-era Judea and ancient and early medieval Mesopotamia . The widespread use of Aramaic among the large non-Jewish Syrian trading population of the Roman provinces, including those in Europe, would have reinforced the use of Aramaic among Jews engaged in trade. In Roman times, many of the Jews living in Rome and Southern Italy appear to have been Greek -speakers, and this

9078-744: The vowel qualities in most long/short vowel pairs diverged and so the phonemic distinction has remained. There are consonantal differences between German and Yiddish. Yiddish deaffricates the Middle High German voiceless labiodental affricate /pf/ to /f/ initially (as in פֿונט funt , but this pronunciation is also quasi-standard throughout northern and central Germany); /pf/ surfaces as an unshifted /p/ medially or finally (as in עפּל /ɛpl/ and קאָפּ /kɔp/ ). Additionally, final voiced stops appear in Standard Yiddish but not Northern Standard German. Sighet Sighetu Marmației

9180-608: The work of Weinreich and his challengers alike." Paul Wexler proposed a model in 1991 that took Yiddish, by which he means primarily eastern Yiddish, not to be genetically grounded in a Germanic language at all, but rather as " Judeo-Sorbian " (a proposed West Slavic language ) that had been relexified by High German. In more recent work, Wexler has argued that Eastern Yiddish is unrelated genetically to Western Yiddish. Wexler's model has been met with little academic support, and strong critical challenges, especially among historical linguists. Yiddish orthography developed towards

9282-586: The world (for a total of 600,000). The earliest surviving references date from the 12th century and call the language לשון־אַשכּנז ‎ ( loshn-ashknaz , "language of Ashkenaz") or טײַטש ‎ ( taytsh ), a variant of tiutsch , the contemporary name for Middle High German . Colloquially, the language is sometimes called מאַמע־לשון ‎ ( mame-loshn , lit. "mother tongue"), distinguishing it from לשון־קודש ‎ ( loshn koydesh , "holy tongue"), meaning Hebrew and Aramaic. The term "Yiddish", short for Yidish Taitsh ("Jewish German"), did not become

9384-467: The world" and called him a "messenger to mankind". It also stressed that Wiesel's commitment originated in the sufferings of the Jewish people but that he expanded it to embrace all repressed peoples and races. In his acceptance speech he delivered a message "of peace, atonement, and human dignity". He explained his feelings: "Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity

9486-461: The −2 series, leaving only 13 in the −3 series. In vocabulary of Germanic origin, the differences between Standard German and Yiddish pronunciation are mainly in the vowels and diphthongs . All varieties of Yiddish lack the German front rounded vowels /œ, øː/ and /ʏ, yː/ , having merged them with /ɛ, e:/ and /ɪ, i:/ , respectively. Diphthongs have also undergone divergent developments in German and Yiddish. Where Standard German has merged

9588-513: Was ווײַבערטײַטש ( vaybertaytsh , 'women's taytsh ' , shown in the heading and fourth column in the Shemot Devarim ), with square Hebrew letters (shown in the third column) being reserved for text in that language and Aramaic. This distinction was retained in general typographic practice through to the early 19th century, with Yiddish books being set in vaybertaytsh (also termed מעשייט mesheyt or מאַשקעט mashket —the construction

9690-609: Was 7,981; they were included in the Hungarian and German language groups. There were 5,850 Greek Catholics and 4,901 Roman Catholics. According to a 1920 estimate, the city had 23,691 inhabitants, 11,026 being Jews, 6,552 Hungarians, 4,964 Romanians, 149 Germans, and 1,000 of other ethnicities. The 1930 census numbered 27,270 inhabitants, 10,526 of them being Jews, 9,658 Romanians, 5,424 Hungarians, 1,221 Ukrainians, and 441 of other ethnicities. The municipality's name derives from Hungarian name which means "island in Máramaros ". According to

9792-644: Was Ingeborg Rennert Visiting professor of Judaic Studies at Barnard College of Columbia University . In 1969 he married Marion Erster Rose, who originally was from Austria and also translated many of his books. They had one son, Shlomo Elisha Wiesel , named after Wiesel's father. The family lived in Greenwich, Connecticut . Yiddish language Yiddish ( ייִדיש , יידיש or אידיש , yidish or idish , pronounced [ˈ(j)ɪdɪʃ] , lit.   ' Jewish ' ; ייִדיש-טײַטש , historically also Yidish-Taytsh , lit.   ' Judeo-German ' )

9894-578: Was a textile factory. In May 2014, a commemoration was held in honour of the 70th anniversary of the deportations in May 1944. Events included a Klezmer concert, Sabbath services in the one remaining synagogue, a memorial service at the Holocaust Monument at the site of the deportations, as well as an exhibit on life in Sighet prior to the deportations. The exhibit contained contributions by survivors and their families. Additionally, visits were organized to

9996-553: Was an adviser at the Gatestone Institute . In 2010, Wiesel accepted a five-year appointment as a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Chapman University in Orange County, California . In that role, he made a one-week visit to Chapman annually to meet with students and offer his perspective on subjects ranging from Holocaust history to religion, languages, literature, law and music. In July 2009, Wiesel announced his support to

10098-661: Was awarded various prestigious awards including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He was a founding board member of the New York Human Rights Foundation and remained active in it throughout his life. Eliezer Wiesel was born in Sighet (now Sighetu Marmației), Maramureș , in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania . His parents were Sarah Feig and Shlomo Wiesel. At home, Wiesel's family spoke Yiddish most of

10200-470: Was emerging as a major Eastern European language. Its rich literature was more widely published than ever, Yiddish theatre and Yiddish cinema were booming, and for a time it achieved the status of one of the official languages of the short-lived Galician Soviet Socialist Republic . Educational autonomy for Jews in several countries (notably Poland ) after World War I led to an increase in formal Yiddish-language education, more uniform orthography, and to

10302-439: Was eventually translated into 30 languages with ten million copies sold in the United States. At one point film director Orson Welles wanted to make it into a feature film, but Wiesel refused, feeling that his memoir would lose its meaning if it were told without the silences in between his words. Oprah Winfrey made it a spotlight selection for her book club in 2006. In 1955, Wiesel moved to New York as foreign correspondent for

10404-498: Was the language of street wisdom, of the clever underdog, of pathos, resignation and suffering, all of which it palliated by humor, intense irony and superstition. Isaac Bashevis Singer , its greatest practitioner, pointed out that it is the only language never spoken by men in power. –  Paul Johnson , A History of the Jews (1988) Later linguistic research has refined the Weinreich model or provided alternative approaches to

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