U.S. Holocaust Museum To Give Angela Merkel Elie Wiesel Award
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum will bestow its highest honor, the Elie Wiesel Award, on German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her work advancing Holocaust awareness.
“Chancellor Merkel has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to making the preservation of Holocaust memory a priority for Germany,” said Tom Bernstein, who chairs the council governing the museum, in a release Thursday. “The Museum has partnered with the German government and institutions on many initiatives, and those partnerships have only grown deeper and more fruitful under Chancellor Merkel.”
Merkel was instrumental in 2011 in overcoming the reluctance among the 11 nations that run the International Tracing Service, the Germany-based documentation center of Nazi atrocities, to opening up its archives.
She will receive the award on April 24 during the museum’s National Tribute Dinner, which takes place on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, in Washington, D.C. Merkel will accept the honor by video from Germany.
The honor was named for Wiesel, the Holocaust memoirist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who helped found the museum.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO