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When Elie Wiesel came to my summer camp, and what he taught me about speaking the unspeakable
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(JTA) — It was August 1966, the summer before my senior year of high school, and I was attending a Reform movement summer camp in Wisconsin when Elie Wiesel came for a visit.
Wiesel’s “Night,” a spare, searing memoir of the 11 months he spent in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, had been published in English just a few years before. Now Wiesel would come to a different kind of camp to meet with a bunch of American high-schoolers to get a taste of our experience and offer us a window into his.
The day of his arrival, I saw him from afar walking with the rabbis, a thin, dark-haired man, chest concave — enwrapped, it seemed to me, in a mist of sadness, not fully of this world. I had not yet read Night, but I knew that he had lived through something unimaginable, and I was both drawn to him and vaguely horrified, as if I were about to approach someone bearing a grave, open wound.
That afternoon we sat rapt, packed into the airless Quonset hut that served as our social hall, listening to Wiesel describe what he endured and barely survived some 20 years earlier, when he was the same age as his audience. He spoke in a low voice, devoid of affect. I don’t remember the particulars, but I can still feel the reverberations in my body. You could have heard a pin drop as we strained to understand his Romanian-Yiddish accented English.
I had been asked to write a poem expressing the essence of philosopher Martin Buber’s concept of I and Thou, the idea that one may experience the divine by being wholly present with another. That night I read my poem during the evening service in our outdoor chapel, stars shimmering above the treetops. Wiesel sat quietly at one end of a wooden bench, folded into himself. As the service ended, he approached me, gripped my arm with a ferocious strength and said with quiet intensity, as if to emboss the words on my soul, “Dat vas veddy gud.” Thrilled, I ran off by myself to lie beneath the stars and savor his praise.
I wonder what it must have been like for this European refugee, a survivor destined for greatness as a writer, speaker, teacher, activist and eloquent witness to the destruction of European Jewry, to encounter a group of well-fed, comfortable American teenagers, enjoying our privileged suburban lives, just waking up to the racial injustices in our own country and to the war gathering steam in the jungles of southeast Asia, but mostly oblivious to the suffering in so much of the world, even to the traumas embedded in our own lineages.
For me, meeting him was an initiation, a window into a world of religious piety, human suffering and courageous resilience. I sensed in him a kindred poet-mystic, as perhaps he did in me. At his request I sent him my Buber poem and others. He sent back notes of encouragement, which I keep in a manila folder marked “Historical Materials,” and which I read from time to time, a memento of my younger yearning self, reaching for a connection backward in time, outward to the world, and inward to my own soul. Perhaps Elie Wiesel would have been less surprised than I to find myself, some 40 years later, being ordained as a rabbi.
I have often reflected on the 10 years it took Wiesel to begin to write or speak about the horrors he experienced. Maybe like Moses, he had to spend time in the wilderness tending other flocks before the call to speak for the living and the dead flamed up in him like a burning bush, unquenchable. Perhaps his heart still needed to hold on to the boy he had been before the war, measuring the weight of his anger, shame and grief before he could speak the unspeakable.
How much longer has it taken a shocked humanity to begin to process those devastating years of the Holocaust. Two decades of relative silence gave way to what has become, more than 75 years later, a flood of memoir, film, poetry, fiction, choreography, museums and monuments, mostly created and curated not by those who lived it, but by their children and grandchildren. It has taken lifetimes — generations of slow digestion and gradual openings of heart and mind.
How much time, how much holding does it take for a collective nightmare to be felt through and digested? The prophet Ezekiel, speaking to his own vanquished people in exile nearly 2,500 years ago, offers God’s stunning promise of renewal: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.”
In this time of polycrisis, when images of horror and destruction flash across our computer screens hourly, I wonder how long it will take to revivify our hearts, how many generations to begin to feel, absorb and heal.
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The post When Elie Wiesel came to my summer camp, and what he taught me about speaking the unspeakable appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Iranian Media Claims Obtaining ‘Sensitive’ Israeli Intelligence Materials
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
i24 News – Iranian and Iran-affiliated media claimed on Saturday that the Islamic Republic had obtained a trove of “strategic and sensitive” Israeli intelligence materials related to Israel’s nuclear facilities and defense plans.
“Iran’s intelligence apparatus has obtained a vast quantity of strategic and sensitive information and documents belonging to the Zionist regime,” Iran’s state broadcaster said, referring to Israel in the manner accepted in those Muslim or Arab states that don’t recognize its legitimacy. The statement was also relayed by the Lebanese site Al-Mayadeen, affiliated with the Iran-backed jihadists of Hezbollah.
The reports did not include any details on the documents or how Iran had obtained them.
The intelligence reportedly included “thousands of documents related to that regime’s nuclear plans and facilities,” it added.
According to the reports, “the data haul was extracted during a covert operation and included a vast volume of materials including documents, images, and videos.”
The report comes amid high tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, over which it is in talks with the US administration of President Donald Trump.
Iranian-Israeli tensions reached an all-time high since the October 7 massacre and the subsequent Gaza war, including Iranian rocket fire on Israel and Israeli aerial raids in Iran that devastated much of the regime’s air defenses.
Israel, which regards the prospect of the antisemitic mullah regime obtaining a nuclear weapon as an existential threat, has indicated it could resort to a military strike against Iran’s installations should talks fail to curb uranium enrichment.
The post Iranian Media Claims Obtaining ‘Sensitive’ Israeli Intelligence Materials first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Retrieves Body of Thai Hostage from Gaza
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz looks on, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, in Jerusalem, Nov. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
The Israeli military has retrieved the body of a Thai hostage who had been held in Gaza since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack, Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Saturday.
Nattapong Pinta’s body was held by a Palestinian terrorist group called the Mujahedeen Brigades, and was recovered from the area of Rafah in southern Gaza, Katz said. His family in Thailand has been notified.
Pinta, an agricultural worker, was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, a small Israeli community near the Gaza border where a quarter of the population was killed or taken hostage during the Hamas attack that triggered the devastating war in Gaza.
Israel’s military said Pinta had been abducted alive and killed by his captors, who had also killed and taken to Gaza the bodies of two more Israeli-American hostages that were retrieved earlier this week.
There was no immediate comment from the Mujahedeen Brigades, who have previously denied killing their captives, or from Hamas. The Israeli military said the Brigades were still holding the body of another foreign national. Only 20 of the 55 remaining hostages are believed to still be alive.
The Mujahedeen Brigades also held and killed Israeli hostage Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, according to Israeli authorities. Their bodies were returned during a two-month ceasefire, which collapsed in March after the two sides could not agree on terms for extending it to a second phase.
Israel has since expanded its offensive across the Gaza Strip as US, Qatari and Egyptian-led efforts to secure another ceasefire have faltered.
US-BACKED AID GROUP HALTS DISTRIBUTIONS
The United Nations has warned that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli blockade of the enclave, with the rate of young children suffering from acute malnutrition nearly tripling.
Aid distribution was halted on Friday after the US-and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said overcrowding had made it unsafe to continue operations. It was unclear whether aid had resumed on Saturday.
The GHF began distributing food packages in Gaza at the end of May, overseeing a new model of aid distribution which the United Nations says is neither impartial nor neutral. It says it has provided around 9 million meals so far.
The Israeli military said on Saturday that 350 trucks of humanitarian aid belonging to U.N. and other international relief groups were transferred this week via the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza.
The war erupted after Hamas-led terrorists took 251 hostages and killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, in the October 7, 2023 attack, Israel’s single deadliest day.
The post Israel Retrieves Body of Thai Hostage from Gaza first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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US Mulls Giving Millions to Controversial Gaza Aid Foundation, Sources Say
Palestinians carry aid supplies which they received from the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in the central Gaza Strip, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed/File Photo
The State Department is weighing giving $500 million to the new foundation providing aid to war-shattered Gaza, according to two knowledgeable sources and two former US officials, a move that would involve the US more deeply in a controversial aid effort that has been beset by violence and chaos.
The sources and former US officials, all of whom requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that money for Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) would come from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is being folded into the US State Department.
The plan has met resistance from some US officials concerned with the deadly shootings of Palestinians near aid distribution sites and the competence of the GHF, the two sources said.
The GHF, which has been fiercely criticized by humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations, for an alleged lack of neutrality, began distributing aid last week amid warnings that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli aid blockade, which was lifted on May 19 when limited deliveries were allowed to resume.
The foundation has seen senior personnel quit and had to pause handouts twice this week after crowds overwhelmed its distribution hubs.
The State Department and GHF did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Reuters has been unable to establish who is currently funding the GHF operations, which began in Gaza last week. The GHF uses private US security and logistics companies to transport aid into Gaza for distribution at so-called secure distribution sites.
On Thursday, Reuters reported that a Chicago-based private equity firm, McNally Capital, has an “economic interest” in the for-profit US contractor overseeing the logistics and security of GHF’s aid distribution hubs in the enclave.
While US President Donald Trump’s administration and Israel say they don’t finance the GHF operation, both have been pressing the United Nations and international aid groups to work with it.
The US and Israel argue that aid distributed by a long-established U.N. aid network was diverted to Hamas. Hamas has denied that.
USAID has been all but dismantled. Some 80 percent of its programs have been canceled and its staff face termination as part of President Donald Trump’s drive to align US foreign policy with his “America First” agenda.
One source with knowledge of the matter and one former senior official said the proposal to give the $500 million to GHF has been championed by acting deputy USAID Administrator Ken Jackson, who has helped oversee the agency’s dismemberment.
The source said that Israel requested the funds to underwrite GHF’s operations for 180 days.
The Israeli government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The two sources said that some US officials have concerns with the plan because of the overcrowding that has affected the aid distribution hubs run by GHF’s contractor, and violence nearby.
Those officials also want well-established non-governmental organizations experienced in running aid operations in Gaza and elsewhere to be involved in the operation if the State Department approves the funds for GHF, a position that Israel likely will oppose, the sources said.
The post US Mulls Giving Millions to Controversial Gaza Aid Foundation, Sources Say first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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