Elie Wiesel never made Israel his home, but Israelis considered the author and Nobel Peace Prize laureate as one of their own anyway. “In the early years of the state, Holocaust survivors were resented by native-born Israelis for their supposed passivity during the war. Elie Wiesel’s mission to centralize Holocaust memory in Jewish identity didn’t find a place in the Israeli ethos,” Halevi said. Family and friends carry Elie Wiesel's coffin during a private service for the Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue in New York on July 3, 2016. “Eli Wiesel died as a hero in Israel, but it took him many years to become an Israeli hero,’’ said Yossi Klein Halevi, an Israeli American author and a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

Source: Los Angeles Times July 04, 2016 01:30 UTC