***
I first met Elie Wiesel about 15 years ago around my in-laws’ Shavuot dinner table. As the years went by, I got to know this amazing giant, a man of immeasurable wisdom, vision and conscience.Three years ago, he invited me for a meeting before one of the three annual lectures he was supposed to give that evening at Boston University. It was the first after a long break, during which he had been recuperating from open-heart surgery, an experience that would later become the topic for another one of his dozens of thought-provoking books.We met in Wiesel’s spacious office on the BU campus and chatted about the future of journalism – Wiesel worked as a reporter for a number of years after the war – the art of storytelling and of course Israeli politics. I mostly listened. Wiesel was an amazing storyteller.I shared with him how a few months earlier our first son was born and we decided to also name him “Eli” – short for Eliezer – after my great-grandfather Eliezer Welgrin who was born in 1902 in Sosnewic, a small Polish town not far from Krakow. Before the war, 30,000 of Sosnewi’s 130,000 residents were Jewish. Elie Wiesel’s first name was also short for Eliezer.My great-grandfather Eliezer became a leather merchant and made a decent living providing for his wife and two children, Henry and Rene, my late grandmother. In 1943 though, Eliezer was deported and murdered in Buchenwald, the same concentration camp where Wiesel lost his father and was eventually liberated in April 1945.Wiesel smiled. Our lives, he explained, were cycles that started with our ancestors and continued through our descendants. As our sages told us, he said, we need to remember our roots and history so we can know where we need to go.Elie Wiesel told the world a story it did not want to hear.He shined a light on a horrific and painful past so we could learn how to prevent such atrocities from happening again.He may no longer be with us, but Elie Wiesel’s legacy lives on as a reminder of a tragic past but at the same time, as a beacon of hope that humanity can always strive to be better.***
This week, The Jerusalem Post joined Snapchat. For those of you who don’t know, Snapchat is one of the hottest image messaging mobile apps today and reportedly has 150 million daily users, making it bigger than Twitter.Like many news organizations, the Post is learning how to use Snapchat on the fly. On Tuesday, one of our reporters snapped – yes, that is the term – from a rally calling on the government to recognize the Armenian Genocide. On Wednesday, Lahav Harkov snapped from the Knesset gallery as MKs fought below over newly proposed legislation to remove incitement from Facebook.While tweets on Twitter are limited to 140 characters, on Snapchat, videos are limited to 10 seconds. Snaps then disappear after 24 hours. No links are allowed so a user cannot easily move from Snapchat to a website.Nevertheless, it is an important tool, one that we plan to use at the Post to reach a younger demographic, to take our storytelling to a new level and to provide you – our readers – with an insider’s view of Israel beyond the daily and hyper news cycle.So, if you haven’t joined yet, download Snapchat. You’ll find us under the username TheJpost.Shabbat Shalom.