Sedona AZ (May 14, 2014) – New York’s famous 92nd Street Y returns to Sedona on Thursday, May 22 when the Sedona International Film Festival hosts Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel. The event will take place at 5:00 p.m. at the festival’s Mary D. Fisher Theatre, live as it is happening in New York.
Don’t miss the opportunity to learn from Elie Wiesel, founder of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity and Nobel laureate, as he speaks with Marvin Kalb, Senior Advisor to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Senior Fellow at Brookings and Murrow Professor Emeritus at Harvard.
Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania, which is now part of Romania. He was fifteen years old when he and his family were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz. His mother and younger sister perished, his two older sisters survived. Elie and his father were later transported to Buchenwald, where his father died shortly before the camp was liberated in April 1945. After the war, Elie Wiesel studied in Paris and later became a journalist. During an interview with the distinguished French writer, Francois Mauriac, he was persuaded to write about his experiences in the death camps. The result was his internationally acclaimed memoir, La Nuit or Night, which has since been translated into more than thirty languages.
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed Elie Wiesel as Chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. In 1980, he became the Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. He is also the Founding President of the Paris-based Universal Academy of Cultures and the Chairman of The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, an organization he and his wife created to fight indifference, intolerance and injustice. Elie Wiesel has received more than 100 honorary degrees from institutions of higher learning.
A devoted supporter of Israel, Elie Wiesel has also defended the cause of Soviet Jews, Nicaragua’s Miskito Indians, Argentina’s Desaparecidos, Cambodian refugees, the Kurds, victims of famine and genocide in Africa, of apartheid in South Africa, and victims of war in the former Yugoslavia. For more than ten years, Elie and his wife Marion have been especially devoted to the cause of Ethiopian-born Israeli youth through the Foundation’s Beit Tzipora Centers for Study and Enrichment.
Elie Wiesel is the author of more than forty books of fiction and non-fiction, including A Beggar in Jerusalem (Prix Médicis winner), The Testament (Prix Livre Inter winner), The Fifth Son (winner of the Grand Prize in Literature from the City of Paris), and two volumes of his memoirs.
For his literary and human rights activities, he has received numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal and the Medal of Liberty Award, and the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor. In 1986, Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Prize for Peace, and soon after, Marion and Elie Wiesel established The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.
This “Live from New York’s 92nd Street Y” event is sponsored by the Cultural Committee of the Jewish Community of Sedona and the Verde Valley with special assistance from the estate of long-time supporter Lou Getoff.
Tickets are $12, or $9 for Film Festival members. Tickets are available in advance at the festival office. Both the theatre and film festival office are located at 2030 W. Hwy. 89A, in West Sedona. Call 928-282-1177 for tickets and information or visit www.SedonaFilmFestival.org .