From
Haaretz: Author and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel helped write the speech that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will give to a joint session of Congress Wednesday (complete text here).
Wiesel received a draft of the speech last week in order to add to it and make comments.
Wiesel joined former prime minister Ariel Sharon on the March of the Living at Auschwitz last year, and the two held a long conversation during the trip.
Olmert's speech will include events from his own life as they were intertwined with the history of the State of Israel. He will also speak about the relationship between Israel and the United States. Olmert will not speak from a prepared text. His speech also will refer to the Iranian threat against Israel and Israeli-Palestinian relations, as well as the West Bank convergence plan.
Olmert spent hours working on his speech, poring over drafts written by two Foreign Ministry officials, including attorney Daniel Taub of the Law Division. Olmert's chief of staff, Yoram Turbowicz, and his foreign policy adviser, Shalom Turjeman, were in charge of the final version.
I believe the report. Elie Wiesel once helped me, too, when I made my film "Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die?". I had read his essay, "The Jews of Silence." So I invited him to take a look at a rough cut of my film. He came to my editing room, sat through the picture in silence. I was more than a little bit worried. Had I made some major error that would require a lot of work? At the end, however, Wiesel just said: "Every word is true." And then he left. It gave me confidence to finish the picture and stand behind it when I was attacked by Commentary magazine and some other people. Much later, I learned Wiesel had worked with Samuel Merlin--an Irgun leader who was one of the stars of the film--on a newspaper in Paris after the war. Small world....
