Sabrina Soffer: Why did you choose to integrate and represent Elie Wiesel into throughout your presentation personally?
Rabbi Moshe Cohen: Ok so the truth is my dad was sitting in the audience so this is piece about his relationship with his father, so the whole discussion was about how memory informs our understanding. So I wanted to pick a piece about how sons relate to their fathers.
Sabrina Soffer: Obviously, Wiesel was traumatized by the horrors he went through but in what ways do you think Wiesel’s memory impacted his future and how did he get through them?
Rabbi Moshe Cohen: Elie Wiesel spoke about--I believe that his memory of the how things were before the war gave him the strength to withstand the ongoing horrendous factor which found himself. So that's what I mean by memory informing how you--his memory gave him the ability to move forward. Sabrina Soffer: How do you think Elie Wiesel impacts the current world today?
Rabbi Moshe Cohen: Elie Wiesel was an eloquent, brilliant, tortured, Jew. You see, he was a Jew, before anything else, he was a Jew. Elie Wiesel became the conscious of the world. Every word he wrote focused on that the Shoah (Holocaust) wasn’t just another cataclysm. It wasn’t Rwanda, and it wasn’t what happened to the Syrians, it was something unique and there's reasons to why is was unique. It was unique because there was a scientific element, it was unique because the Jews were singled out more than any other people, it was unique because the Jews posed no threat in anyway shape or form to the national German Reich. Theres many reasons to why it was different. He made it not only universal, but personal. He was a great loss, a great great loss.