BUCHAREST—The home of Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was vandalized on Friday night by unidentified individuals who spray painted antisemitic graffiti on the external walls.
The discovery of the graffiti – scrawled in bright pink paint – has prompted an investigation by local authorities, who condemned the incident. Among the messages daubed on the small structure in the town of Sighet, in northwestern Romania, was, “Nazi Jew lying in hell with Hitler” and “Public toilet, antisemite pedophile.”
Policer confirmed that it was an antisemitic incident.
The house where Wiesel was born is today a museum.
Wiesel died in 2016 at the age of 87. A Nobel prize laureate for literature, he was honored last year by locals in his hometown. They marched from the museum, which was built where Wiesel was born and grew up, to the train station where in 1944 he boarded with his family a train to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland.
Police are investigating the incident, which they consider an anti-Semitic hate crime, but have no suspects in custody, the news site Sighet247 reported Saturday.
In June, Maximillian Marco Katz, founding director of MCA Romania-The Center for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism, said Romania has adequate laws for fighting antisemitism, but enforcement in lacking. He cited several recent cases, including the failure by authorities to prosecute Gheorghe Funar, a former mayor of the city of Cluj who last year said in a filmed speech that the “Romanians are victims of Jews within” who perpetrated “the greatest Holocaust in human history.”
A police officer told Katz he “did not see who was damaged” by the former mayor’s speech and that he therefore is dropping the investigation, Katz said.
Elie Wiesel’s only child, Elisha, declared : “Antisemitism exists in Europe. This is not an isolated incident. What is happening to my father’s home is a small indication of what is happening on a continental level. Both Holocaust memory and Jews are under attack.”
Elisha Wiesel called on the Romanian government to add his father’s most famous work, his memoir “Night” – about his experiences in the Nazi death camp Auschwitz – as mandatory reading in the country’s national curriculum.
World Jewish Congress (WJC) President Ronald S. Lauder said: “The World Jewish Congress unequivocally deplores the despicable and deliberate anti-Semitic act targeting the Elie Wiesel Memorial House. This was a clear gesture of hate that spits in the face of the Jewish community and the memory of the six million victims of the Holocaust.”
“Over the course of his life and legacy, Elie Wiesel stood as a moral compass to the world, teaching that the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. We must not stay silent or remain indifferent as the childhood home of the man who illuminated this message is desecrated in a callous act of enmity. This was an attack not just against the Jewish community, but against the very principles of morality and humanity for which Wiesel stood and dedicated his life to teaching.”
“It is essential that this incident be treated with severity it deserves, to send a clear message that such acts will not be tolerated,” Lauder said.
Dr. Aurel Vainer, President of the Board of Leadership of the Federation of the Jewish Communities of Romania, said in a statement: “The efficiency with which authorities have acted to erase the anti-Semitic messages from the facade of the memorial house is meritorious and worthy of being underlined, but we draw attention to the fact that the anti-Semitic acts and feelings are harder to erase than a barbaric inscription on a wall… It is imperative for these manifestations to be condemned also by the civil society, because only this way we can continue to defend Romania from cruel and violent anti-Semitic acts, as the ones happening not long ago against Jews in other European states.”