‘A Man Whose Faith Drove Him to Champion Human Rights’: Stone Carving of Elie Wiesel Added to Washington National Cathedral
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The stone carving of Elie Wiesel that has been added to at Washington National Cathedral. |
A stone carving of the late Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel has been added to the Washington National Cathedral’s Human Rights Porch to honor Wiesel’s “legacy as a lifelong human rights defender dedicated to combating indifference and intolerance,” the house of worship announced on Wednesday.
The Human Rights Porch features carvings of historical human rights-defenders, including Mother Teresa, Rosa Parks, Jonathan Daniels and Eleanor Roosevelt. While there are many representations of Jewish biblical figures in the Cathedral, Wiesel is the first person from the modern-day Jewish community to featured in the house of prayer. The hand-carved sculpture was put in place by the Cathedral’s stonemasons and created with the involvement of the Wiesel family.
“My father’s faith was a tremendous part of who he was,” Wiesel’s son, Elisha Wiesel, told The Algemeiner. “I hope those attending the various faith-based services at the National Cathedral will remember him as both a passionately proud American and as a man whose faith drove him to champion human rights and the telling of stories that need to be told. Our family is deeply appreciative to the Cathedral for making him part of their institutional consciousness.”
The announcement was made in conjunction with the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Elie Wiesel Foundation
for Humanity.
Born in Romania in 1928, Wiesel was a survivor of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. His father, mother and sister were killed in the camps, and he detailed the horrors of the Holocaust in his autobiographical novel “Night.” He authored 57 books, was a vocal advocate for human rights causes around the world, and served as a professor at Boston University, which created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor. He was the founding chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, and received numerous prestigious awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal. He died in 2016 of natural causes.
The Very Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith, dean of Washington National Cathedral, said, “From the depths of cruelty inflicted on him, his family, and so many millions of Jews and others during the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel went on to dedicate his life to the pursuit of human rights, and to heed the lessons of history. We are humbled to welcome his likeness to the Cathedral, and pray that his example and legacy will be a blessing and an inspiration to all who enter.”
“Throughout his life, Elie devoted himself tirelessly to preserving the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and working to ensure that other communities do not suffer the same fate,” said Marion Wiesel, Wiesel’s widow and vice president of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. “Not only does his presence in the National Cathedral memorialize his life and honor his commitment to human rights; it also ensures that new generations will learn from his teachings and carry the lessons of his life forward into the future.”
The Wiesel carving was sculpted by North Carolina artist Chas Fagan, a member of the US Commission on Fine Arts whose other works include the official White House portrait of First Lady Barbara Bush; statues of Ronald Reagan and Billy Graham at the US Capitol; and a statue of Pope John Paul II at the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington.
A dedication of the bust will take place in fall 2021 as part of a program the Cathedral will launch — in cooperation with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity — to celebrate Wiesel’s legacy.
The cathedral is part of the Episcopal Church but aims to be “a house of prayer for all people and a sacred space for the nation to gather,” it said in a statement.
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We Episcopalians believe in a loving, liberating, and life-giving God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As constituent members of the Anglican Communion in the United States, we are descendants of and partners with the Church of England and the Scottish Episcopal Church, and are part of the third largest group of Christians in the world.
We believe in following the teachings of Jesus Christ, whose life, death, and resurrection saved the world.
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The Role of the Churches in Nazi Germany
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This article originally appeared in
Churches throughout Europe were mostly silent while Jews were persecuted, deported and murdered by the Nazis. Churches, especially those in Nazi Germany, sought to act, as institutions tend to do, in their own best interests -- narrowly defined, short-sighted interests.
The list of "bystanders" -- those who declined to challenge the Third Reich in any way -- that emerges from any study of the Holocaust is long and depressing. Few organizations, in or outside Nazi Germany, did much to resist Nazism or aid its victims.
[I]t has become abundantly clear that [the Churches'] failure to respond to the horrid events...was not due to ignorance; they knew what was happening. Ultimately, the Churches' lapses during the Nazi era were lapses of vision and determination.
Assisting European Jews was not a high priority of the Allied governments as they sought to defeat Hitler militarily. The courageous acts of individual rescuers and resistance members proved to be the exception, not the norm.
To a great extent, this inertia defined the organized Christian community as well. Churches throughout Europe were mostly silent while Jews were persecuted, deported and murdered. In Nazi Germany in September 1935, there were a few Christians in the Protestant Confessing Church who demanded that their Church take a public stand in defense of the Jews. Their efforts, however, were overruled by Church leaders who wanted to avoid any conflict with the Nazi regime. Internationally, some Church leaders in Europe and North America did condemn the Nazis' measures against the Jews, and there were many debates about how Christians outside Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied territory should best respond to Hitler's brutal policies. These discussions, however, tended to become focused more on secondary strategic considerations -- like maintaining good relations with colleagues in the German Churches -- than on the central humanitarian issues that were really at stake.
READ MORE:
https://www.adl.org/news/op-ed/role-of-churches-nazi-germany