“Enter this place, passerby,” Michael Glickman said on January 29, “and meet those who survived the nightmare. Meet them, and learn from them.”
He stood temporarily in near-darkness, on a nearly empty stage. Projected behind him, the face of the late Elie Wiesel, author of those words, loomed in triplicate: Light, shadowed, and almost fully obscured.
Glickman, President and CEO of Manhattan’s Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, was introducing a program at the Museum designed to honor both the memory of Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning champion of Holocaust remembrance who passed away this past July, and International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which had occurred two days prior, on January 27. (The program was co-produced by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene.) Over the next several hours, a parade of cultural luminaries, politicians, artists, survivors of atrocities across the globe, and more would read the entire text of Wiesel’s “Night” aloud.