Who is moishe the beadle

This portrait was created to honor the important life of Moishe, who survived two concentration camps (Dangerous labor camps) during the Holocaust while being the only one to survive out of his entire family.

He was brought to a disclosed location where Jews dug up their own graves only to be shot dead. Moishe miraculously lived while being wounded on his leg.

In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, the main character being Elie Weisel is talking about his life experience during WW2 and the Holocaust, Moishe talks about him being saved by God to warn others.

Moishe explained, “I have been saved miraculously. I managed to get back here… to warn you” (5). After surviving all of this terror he still had the encouragement to come back and help his community. Moishe was a Rabbi meaning a Jewish leader who was very religious and knew the Kabbalah language (Special Jewish language). Germans had just handed over the power to Hitler who created camps so Jews could not live with non-Jews, most formally known as the Holocaust.

Moishe’s mission was to come back to his home in Sighet Germany so he could warn his neighbor about his troubles. Nobody listened to him. In one part he talks about Moishe and how everyone thinks he is crazy. Moishe cries, “Jews, listen to me! That’s all I ask of you. No money. No pity. Just listen to me!” (7).

Everyone believed Moishe was crazy because the camps were hidden and unknown about. His life was near the end; he “No longer cared to live” and just wanted to warn others about the catastrophe that was about to happen.

Later on, Moishe was deported back to Poland for being in Sighet illegally. Soon the neighborhood got separated into “Ghettos” (Separate parts) by German Nazis, Gestapo’s (Secret police), and the Hungarian police. Everyone was taken to camps where they arrived at their last “vacation” in Auschwitz, Buna, and many more camps.

Moishe was an activist and upstander against the Nazis (Hitler’s supporters) and Gestapo (Secret police). Although no one listened to him, maybe they will listen to YOU!

The purpose of this memorial is to understand that no matter how crazy a story sounds or how crazy someone is, always listen because they might have a very important message that may even save your life one day. 

A poor Jew, an immigrant to Hungary, who helps out at the synagogue in Sighet. He becomes Eliezer's teacher, but is deported by the authorities because he is a foreigner. He returns to warn the town of terrible things the Germans are doing to Jews, but the town does not take him seriously and thinks he's gone mad.

Detailed answer:

Moishe the Beadle, a minor character in Elie Wiesel’s Night, proved to unexpectedly have significance in the book. He was a poor foreign Jew who resided in Sighet, a Transylvanian town in modern-day Romania. The townspeople of Sighet, composed of Jews, helped those who were underprivileged but they didn’t necessarily develop a fondness for them. However, in the case of Moishe the Beadle, despite the fact that he lived in dire poverty, the townspeople liked him. His incredible awkwardness coupled with his timidness and reserved personality brought joy to people. This was due in part to his actions which never troubled anyone. Wiesel first describes him in favorable terms; “he was poor and lived in utter penury…while [the town] did help the needy, they did not particularly like them. Moishe the Beadle was the exception. He stayed out of people’s way. His presence bothered no one”. However, after fulfilling his prophecy, he is described as “only wanting pity…and was imagining things. Others flatly said that he had gone mad”.

Moishe the Beadle was Elie’s mentor in studying Kabbalah. Together Moishe and Elie would read for hours on end for many days. In the course of that time, Elie became convinced that Moishe would help him enter eternity, into that time when question and answer become one. At first, Elie is optimistic about life, reality to him is like that of any child. One day all foreign Jews in Sighet and that included Moishe were expelled. They were crammed into cattle cars and sent away to Poland. Moishe fled from death. He only returned to Sighet to express his death so that people could ready themselves while there was still time. He wanted to come back to warn people but no one listened to him. On the seventh day of Passover was when the curtain rose, Germans arrested the leaders of the Jewish community. From that moment on everything happened abruptly. Elie and his family along with the Jewish community were put in ghettos.

Moishe the Beadle is the first character introduced in Night, and his values resonate throughout the text, even though he himself disappears after the first few pages. Moishe represents, first and foremost, an earnest commitment to Judaism, and to Jewish mysticism in particular. As Eliezer’s Cabbala teacher, Moishe talks about the riddles of the universe and God’s centrality to the quest for understanding. Moishe’s words frame the conflict of Eliezer’s struggle for faith, which is at the center of Night.

In his statement “I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions,” Moishe conveys two concepts key to Eliezer’s struggle: the idea that God is everywhere, even within every individual, and the idea that faith is based on questions, not answers. Eliezer’s struggle with faith is, for the most part, a struggle of questions. He continually asks where God has gone and questions how such evil could exist in the world. Moishe’s statement tells us that these moments do not reflect Eliezer’s loss of faith; instead they demonstrate his ongoing spiritual commitment. But we also see that at the lowest points of Eliezer’s faith—particularly when he sees the pipel (a youth) hung in Buna—he is full of answers, not questions. At these moments, he has indeed lost the spirit of faith he learned from Moishe, and is truly faithless.

Finally, Moishe may also serve as a stand-in for Wiesel himself, as his presence evokes an overarching purpose of the entire work. As has been stated previously, Night can be read as an attack against silence. So many times in the work, evil is perpetuated by a silent lack of resistance or—as in the case of Moishe’s warnings—by ignoring reports of evil. With Night, Wiesel, like Moishe, bears witness to tragedy in order to warn others, to prevent anything like the Holocaust from ever happening again.

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