Wiesel Celebrates With Moscow Jews

Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel presided Saturday over an emotional, joyous celebration of Simhat Torah, honoring the sacred Jewish scrolls, by several thousand Jews in Moscow’s only synagogue.

Clapping his hands and leading the congregation in several Hebrew songs from the podium, Wiesel beamed with delight.

Friends bear-hugged him, and one bearded man lifted Wiesel off his feet with an especially enthusiastic greeting. Four men, hands on each other’s shoulders, danced in a circle nearby.

Valery Soyfer, a professor of genetics, said he had never seen such a spontaneous display in the synagogue, adding that when other important visitors came “it was very formal and very official.” Wiesel, wearing a yarmulke, carried the Torah through the synagogue and members of the congregation rushed to kiss their fingers and touch them to the sacred work.

“It’s one of the great moments of my life to be with these people whom I consider to be heroes, in every sense of the word, spiritually and morally,” he said afterward.

Speaking in Yiddish to worshipers, the renowned writer said: “Not a day passes that I don’t talk of you, dream of you, sing of you or pray for you. You give us much hope. . . . We owe you a thousand times more than you owe us.”

Meantime, on hilly Arkhipova Street outside the synagogue, as many as 5,000 Jews gathered as they traditionally do for the festival to honor the Torah.

While stern-faced police officers patrolled the area, dozens of young people danced in the street and sang Hebrew songs in one of Moscow’s rare public religious events.

Members of the happy crowd renewed acquaintances, made new friends and displayed their Jewish solidarity on the mild October evening. They stood, often shoulder to shoulder, for several hundred yards in the blocked-off street.

Wiesel said it was his fourth visit to the Soviet Union but his first celebration of Simhat Torah in Moscow.

“It’s probably the most joyous holiday the Jewish people have--we have very little to celebrate. But the outpouring of young people who say they want to identify themselves as Jews is amazing,” he told reporters.

Many members of the crowd said they were not aware of who he was, but others, better informed, realized that a celebrity was in their midst.

Wiesel came to Moscow to arrange for Soviet participation in a Washington conference next year to commemorate the non-Jewish victims of Nazism.

Since he arrived Wednesday, however, he has met with about 300 people, mostly Jews who have been refused permission to leave the country, in a series of private meetings.

Wiesel had said he hoped to meet Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev during his visit, but aides of the writer said that no appointment could be arranged.

The author also had expressed a hope to see Andrei D. Sakharov, now exiled in Gorky, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. Soviet authorities have not allowed Sakharov to have foreign visitors, and Gorky is off-limits to foreigners.