Posted on October 12, 2010 at 2:18 pm
We Appeal to Students at Boston University
Robert A. Brown, President of Boston University: “Elie Wiesel is a man of integrity and would not stoop to fabrication.”
With this statement, Dr. Brown replied to my September 23rd email message and postal letter to him, and to those copied, which I am publishing here.
Robert A. Brown
Office of the President
1 Silber Way, 8th Floor
Boston Ma 02215
September 23, 2010
Re: Prof. Elie Wiesel
Dear President Brown:
I recognize that Boston University has a long and admirable tradition of support for the humanities. One of your most prominent, most politically conspicuous faculty members is Elie Wiesel, who is associated in the public mind with a host of worthy, even noble causes, including being the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Particularly because of the honored position Professor Wiesel holds at BU, the questions that are being raised about his Holocaust testimony bother me, and I think if you were aware of them they would bother you, too. First is the lack of evidence that he has an Auschwitz tattoo, though he repeatedly claims to have one. As recently as last March, at Dayton University in Ohio, a student asked if he still has his concentration camp number, and he said, “I still have it on my arm.” However, his own 1996 video, in which his bare forearms are exposed to the camera, reveals no tattoo on his left arm, where it should be.
This, along with archival documents primarily from Buchenwald that show a Lazar Wiesel born in 1913, not 1928, who was there with his brother Abram, put his entire account of his concentration camp experiences of 1944-45 into question. No documentation for Shlomo Wiesel/Vizel, Elie’s father, or of a Lazar/Eliezer Wiesel with Elie Wiesel’s birth date of Sept. 30th, has been revealed.
Still other questions being raised concern his authorship of the original Yiddish version of Night. The brief description he gives of when, where and how he wrote And the World Remained Silent contain contradictions and improbabilities. In addition, there are major factual differences between key passages in Night, the English derivative of the original Yiddish language book, and Prof. Wiesel’s memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea. To mention just one—in the former, his foot is operated on before the evacuation to Buchenwald in January 1945, while in the latter it becomes his knee that is operated on! These are just a few of the red flags that are raised when studying Prof. Wiesel’s testimony with a critical eye.
I realize it is not my responsibility, but rather yours, to maintain the integrity of your faculty. However, I feel an obligation to bring this information to your attention because it is information that is gaining the attention of the world, and more importantly of your students, through various venues and investigations, and may reflect poorly on your great university.
Respectfully yours,
Carolyn Yeager
PO Box 439016
San Ysidro, CA 92143
Email: [email protected]
Web: http://www.eliewieseltattoo.com/
cc: David K. Campbell, Provost
Virginia Sapiro, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences
Daniel Dahlstrom, Chair, Department of Humanities
Aaron Garrett, Assoc. Chair, Dept. of Humanities
Walter Hopp, Director, Undergraduate Studies, Dept. of Humanities
David Roochnik, Director, Graduate Studies, Dept. of Humanities
Members of the Board of Trustees
Robert A. Knox, Chairman
John P. Howe III, Vice Chairman
Jonathan R. Cole
Richard C. Godfrey
Robert J. Hildreth
Eric S. Lander
Alan M. Leventhal
J. Kenneth Menges, Jr.
Christine A. Poon
Adam. W. Sweeting
On September 27, I received a polite reply, which did not indicate whether Dr. Brown had looked at any of the pages I linked to on the Elie Wiesel Cons The World website.
Dear Ms. Yeager:
Thank you for your e-mail message of September 23, in which you express concerns about the accuracy of Dr. Wiesel’s testimony. I have no doubt that he is a survivor of the Holocaust and he has, thoughout his adult life, been a most eloquent witness to its atrocities. He is a man of integrity and would not stoop to fabrication.
Sincerely,
Robert A. Brown
We wanted to give the Boston University administration fair warning of what we are up to, and an opportunity to address the “Wiesel question” themselves.
Having done that, and after sending them a further reply suggesting that they look into the matter, and with no further response, we now turn to the students at BU. We have sent a message to student organizations, student publications and the local Boston media in a major effort to inform, encourage and assist students on campus to ask for answers to these questions. We believe there are individuals and organizations at BU who truly care about the ethical integrity of their university and its faculty, and who want to know the facts about all things, no matter how sensitive—not just accept what they are being taught by a timid, establishment faculty.
We suggest there is a simple request that Boston University students can make of Prof. Wiesel that their administrators are apparently unwilling to make. They can ask him to show his tattoo. He says he is a humble representative of the survivors of the concentration camps. Many Auschwitz survivors prove their presence in that camp by pointing to the number tattooed on their left forearm. Why not Elie Wiesel? Is he not one of them?
We’re urging students at BU, and all our readers as well, to write or call the following persons asking for their cooperation in a search for honest answers. Thank you for your activism.
Department of Philosophy
745 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 516
Boston, Massachusetts 02215
Phone:617.353.2571 | Fax:617.353.6805
Department e-mail:[email protected]
Department Chair: Professor Daniel Dahlstrom
Phone: 617.353.4583 | E-mail: [email protected]
Associate Chair: Professor Aaron Garrett
Phone: 617.358.3617 | E-mail: [email protected]
Director of Undergraduate Studies: Professor Walter Hopp
Phone: 617.358.4228 | E-mail: [email protected]
Director of Graduate Studies: Professor David Roochnik
Phone: 617.353.4579 | E-mail: [email protected]
Director of Graduate Admissions: Professor Allen Speight
Phone: 617.353.3067 | E-mail: [email protected]
Administrator: Matthew Roselli
Phone: 617.353.2572 | E-mail: [email protected]
Senior Program Coordinator: Lesley Moreau
Phone: 617.353.2571 | E-mail: [email protected]
Elie Wiesel: University Professor, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Religion
E-mail: [email protected]
The full Dept. of Philosophy faculty addresses can be found on our Boston University Project page.
* * *
The Daily Free Press 648 Beacon St. Boston, MA 02215
Tel.: (617)236-4433 Fax.: (617)236-4414
The Daily Free Press welcomes comments and corrections from readers. To write a letter to the editor, send fewer than 500 words to [email protected] . Please include your phone number so that you can be contacted.
Neal J. Riley– Editor-in-Chief ([email protected])
Josh Cain – Managing Editor ([email protected])
Saba Hamedy – Campus Editor([email protected])
Chelsea Feinstein – Editorial Page Editor ([email protected])
WTBU Boston University’s student radio station broadcasting online.
General Manager – [email protected]
News Editor – [email protected]
Programming Editor – [email protected]
Categories Featured | Tags: Boston University, BU Dept. of Philosophy, Robert A. Brown
Leave a Reply
By submitting a comment here you grant Elie Wiesel Cons the World a perpetual license to reproduce your words and name/web site in attribution. Inappropriate or irrelevant comments will be removed at an admin's discretion.
10 Comments to We Appeal to Students at Boston University
by Female Gentile
On October 14, 2010 at 12:33 am
Very courageous act – Well done. Be prepared, I suspect for the Jewish onslaught – denials, harassment, attempts to get your site removed… this is what happens when people try to bring the truth into the light of day.
You might have heard of Eric Hunt. He is a former student who has also questioned the integrity of Wiesel’s various “stories” and in fact approached him on one occasion to question him on these facts. The result was a spell in prison for assault (he had merely taken his arm to catch his attention).
Have you thought of distributing a revised letter (via email) further afield to other universities both in the USA and abroad. I only came across your site by accident and I am certain there are many people who are unaware of Wiesel’s chequered story telling past.
by Jen McGreedy
On October 20, 2010 at 9:14 am
I was in a classroom with Professor Wiesel when a student asked to see his tattoo. He showed us, the entire class. I saw it, we all saw it with our own eyes. Enough of your defamation.
by Carolyn
On October 21, 2010 at 8:07 am
Well Jen, the problem is that your word is simply not good enough. Your entire class would have to confirm altogether that what you say is true. What class, what classroom, when, and what did the tattoo look like? Where on his arm was it? Have you ever heard of the word “proof?” You are actually confirming the unreliability of witness testimony and the willingness of biased persons to lie.
by SevenUp
On October 24, 2010 at 11:22 am
I believe that you should have responded to R. Brown’s email as follows ….
Dear Dr. Brown,
This is a line from page 6 of Elie Wiesel’s book ‘Night’ ..
“Babies were thrown into the air and the machine gunners used them as targets.”
This is preposterous, without a shred of evidence or corroboration, and physically impossible. Do you believe an honorable man would write such a grotesque lie?
He also claims that the Nazis killed the Jews at Auschwitz by throwing them, alive, into burning pits, one for adults and one for children. This also is preposterous, without a shred of evidence, and physically impossible. No serious person believes these lies. Do you?
Now, is he also lying about the tattoo?
Yours truly,
SevenUp
Look, we already know Wiesel is a degenerate liar, and I think you should cite the two examples above at every opportunity.
by Carolyn
On October 25, 2010 at 12:13 pm
Hello SevenUp,
I’m glad you wrote this. It would be a good reply, but in fact, I did not reply to Dr. Brown’s email at all because he pretty much closed the book on any dialogue. I doubt I would have gotten any answers to those questions. Furthermore, I’m sure he has never read Night and will not read it. He doesn’t want to know what wer’re presenting on this website because there is nothing he will [because he can’t] do about it. It should be clear to all that in his position as President of BU, he is not as powerful as Elie Wiesel and those who surround and protect him.
Not everyone “knows” that Wiesel is a liar, as you put it. It’s hard to get most people to respond to these things written in his book Night that are preposterous and don’t even conform to the equally preposterous official claims that prisoners at Birkenau were killed in homicidal gas chambers. Right now, Elie Wiesel is teaching a course for the Dept. of Religion about his own “non-fiction” books, but I don’t think he’s including Night. The course description says “his memoirs.” The book Night has made him millions, but I don’t think he wants to teach from it. It would be too embarrassing.
What do you think he is saying in this class? We can imagine, can’t we, that his students swallow whatever he tells them, are impressed that they are being taught by the great icon himself, and want to get a good grade!
Request: Will a student from one of Wiesel’s two Literature of Memory classes please write to us here and give us your opinion of the class and just what books Prof. Wiesel is using. We would greatly appreciate it.
Lastly, I’m writing an article about BU’s Dept. of Religion and will post it soon. Stay tuned.
P.S. I think you should send that letter to President Brown at BU. You have his email addess. Of course, you can’t sign it SevenUp, you have to use a real name. I encourage everyone to write to the administration and faculty at BU about Wiesel, politely, but in this kind of strong terms.
by PrincetonGirl05
On November 21, 2010 at 9:39 pm
this site is such crap, probably started by someone without an education. low life.
by Carolyn
On November 23, 2010 at 4:45 pm
It appears that this comment was written by such a person.
by Severus
On December 2, 2010 at 12:08 am
Carolyn,
Your letter and efforts thus far are indefatigable. I believe you have just about single-handedly destroyed the false image of “sacrosanct Elie Wiesel” by exposing his false identity. I suspect he may rush out and get his arm tattooed in a panic, but it will be revealed to be too “new” to be genuine.
Don’t put it past him.
Prepare for the worst, but hope for the best, and good luck to you and everyone else involved in this. We shall put a post about your efforts and reward offer on the VSS site to assist you.
Ever forward!
Sev
Trackbacks