(Bloomberg) -- A bust of Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor, author and Nobel laureate, gazes down at his only son from the shelf overhead.

The statuette is a model of the stone carving of Wiesel that graces the Human Rights Porch of the Washington National Cathedral.

For the son, Elisha Wiesel, it’s also something more: a reminder, as if one was really needed, of a responsibility so heavy that it once felt like a millstone.

Elisha Wiesel — coder, hedge-funder, 25-year veteran of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. — wants to be clear: He doesn’t speak for his late father, the witness who seared the horrors of the Holocaust into the world’s collective memory, starting with Night, his 1960 memoir about life in the Nazi death camps.

But now more than ever, Elisha Wiesel is adding his own voice to his father’s warning against silence in the face of suffering and hatred. He says it’s his duty to speak out at this perilous moment for Jews everywhere.

“I have been immersed in my father’s thoughts and words and deeds for so long,” Wiesel, 51, says. “I felt like, boy, if I can’t find a way to have my voice heard, given who my father is, I really didn’t try hard enough.”

Since Hamas’ initial attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Wiesel (pronounced Vee-zel) has maintained a brisk schedule of public appearances and private meetings with figures in politics, business, philanthropy and academia. 

As the Israeli counter-barrage has killed civilians in the Gaza Strip at an historic pace, he’s pushed back against calls for Israel to stand down against Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls Gaza and is considered a terrorist organization by the US and European Union.

At this point, Wiesel is exhausted. In between everything else, he’s running a brand-new hedge fund (he says his father never really understood what he did for a living) and leading the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. He’s also raising two teenagers with his wife, Lynn Bartner-Wiesel.

Tiring Mission

It’s a Wednesday evening, and Wiesel has plonked onto the teal-green couch in his family’s eclectic, art- and book-filled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. 

Trim, bald and bearded, wearing a pink tie over a pink shirt, the cuffs neatly turned up, he bears only a passing resemblance to his famous father. His face is softer. But behind rimless glasses, the dark eyes burn with a similar intensity.

Wiesel says that for many American Jews, Oct. 7 felt like Sept. 11 – a collective trauma that stirred fear, anguish and fury. Many are wondering what’s next. They feel unmoored, even betrayed, by the silence of friends and colleagues, he says. 

Antisemitism and virulent rhetoric of all kinds — omens of the extremism and violence that his father warned against — are surging here and around the world. Why don’t more people speak out? Where is Wall Street, the industry where he spent his entire career, Wiesel asks.

“It’s tiring to get up every single day and face people that are either ignorant on the issue, or have been poisoned on the issue, or just don’t care anymore,” Wiesel says. “It is exhausting to have to defend yourself in the court of public opinion over and over and over, just because there are so many people who hate you.”

In New York City, offenses against Jews made up the bulk of hate crimes investigated by the police department during the last two months.

Just the other night, Wiesel stepped into New York’s Pennsylvania Station to catch a train upstate for a family ski getaway. He was in the middle of a phone conversation with a trustee at Yale, his alma mater, about antisemitism on US campuses, when hundreds of pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protesters flooded into the busy station.

“Free Palestine!” they chanted.

Wiesel draped himself in an Israeli flag he happened to be bringing to his vacation home.

“From Hamas!” he chanted back, as several masked protesters surrounded him. Police eventually asked Wiesel to remove the flag, lest the confrontation escalate. He complied.

For a long time, Wiesel resisted his father’s legacy and its eloquent plea against the evil of indifference. He can’t remember the first time he saw the number – A7713 – tattooed on his father’s left forearm. He remembers an old photograph. And curling up on his father’s lap, asking what happened to his paternal grandparents.

Something terrible, Elie Wiesel told his son. You’ll learn more when you’re older.

And he remembers his father taking him to Auschwitz, in Poland, when all his friends were going to Palm Beach.

Teenage Elisha played video games, blasted heavy-metal guitar and chased girls. At one point, he sported a purple mohawk.

“I was so sick of people seeing my father when they saw me that I don’t think I handled it well,” Wiesel says. “I was probably a little bit of a jerk to a lot of people.”

Read More: Elie Wiesel, Auschwitz Survivor Who Wrote for Dead, Dies, 87

After collecting a computer-science degree from Yale, Wiesel joined J. Aron, the commodities division of Goldman Sachs. He felt he was finally in his element. 

He helped develop proprietary pricing software with computer scientist and game developer Michael Dubno, along with Goldman’s Marty Chavez and Armen Avanessians. 

He worked for Gary Cohn and Lloyd Blankfein, who went on to lead Goldman Sachs.

Elie Wiesel, the voice of millions of Holocaust victims, died in 2016, at age 87. He’d asked two things of his son: To marry a Jew, so his grandchildren would be Jewish; and, upon his death, for his son to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish. Elisha Wiesel kept both promises.

When David Solomon succeeded Blankfein in 2019, Wiesel – by then chief information officer — decided to move on. “It was time,” he says.

His father’s death, after a long battle with cancer, had him reevaluating his priorities. Having children himself kindled a sense of his own mortality.

“You realize, like, what do you want for them?” Wiesel says of his children. “What do you want to build for them?”

Faith also stole in. He used to characterize himself a “three-day-a-year Jew,” one who only attends synagogue on the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. Slowly, he was taken by what his wife Lynn half-jokingly refers to as “creeping Judaism.”

After so many years cloistered inside Goldman, suddenly a new world of possibilities opened. 

“It was almost like a hungry man walking into the supermarket,” Wiesel says.

He became a certified Emergency Medical Technician. He joined the National Ski Patrol. He worked on the 2020 presidential campaign of Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and founder of Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News.

Earlier this year, with backing from hedge-fund billionaire Cliff Asness, Wiesel co-founded ClearAlpha Technologies, a hedge fund based in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Then: Oct. 7. Shattered, desperate to help in some way, Wiesel wondered if he should enlist in the Israeli Defense Forces. He called a cousin in Israel.

“You need to stay where you are,” his cousin told him. “You were blessed with a voice. You were blessed with a platform from your father.” And so, in the months since, Wiesel has stepped up to his legacy as never before.

Wiesel says he was probably 12 when he read Night for the first time. The slim volume, about 100 pages long, has been translated into more than 30 languages. 

In the very first sentence appears Moishe the Beadle, caretaker of a synagogue in Sighet, the Romanian village where Elie Wiesel grew up. Moishe asks young Elie why he prays. Elie struggles to answer and poses the same question to Moishe.

“I pray to the God within me for the strength to ask Him the real questions,” Moishe replies.

Moishe later escapes the Nazis and returns to warn fellow villagers. No one believes him.

Elie Wiesel, who never stopped asking questions about the atrocities of the Holocaust, said he felt duty-bound to tell what he saw. He said he needed to give meaning to his survival and prevent the world from being lulled into forgetfulness.

All these years later, Elisha Wiesel worries that too many seem to have forgotten.

So, to those in corporate America and on Wall Street who have remained largely silent before and since Oct. 7, Wiesel says this: “It’s not too late.”

Of financial players seeking fortunes in places like Qatar — which has channeled billions to Hamas, while sheltering its political leaders in Doha – Wiesel asks whether it’s not time to rethink that.

To Ivy League students who support Hamas and rage against Israel, Wiesel offers his father’s urgent advice: Don’t assume you have the answers. Ask the questions. Educate yourselves. Learn history. 

Just don’t ask him what Elie Wiesel would say today. “We’re not going to give answers,” his son says.

(Adds hate crimes in New York in 15th paragraph. A previous version corrected the spelling of a Goldman partner’s name.)

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