The Elie-Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, founded by a Holocaust survivor and led by prominent Israeli human rights activists, is injecting its first round of grant making towards initiatives advocating and protecting China’s ethnic Uyghur minority. 

The grantees in Uyghur advocacy include World Uyghur Congress, Uyghur Human Rights Project, World Jewish Watch ($250,000) and Ana Care & Education ($50,000).  

The grant advisory committee included Mark Hetfield, president and CEO of HIAS, a Jewish American nonprofit organisation that provides humanitarian aid and assistance to refugees; Nadine Epstein, editor-in-chief and CEO of Moment magazine; Gulhumar Haitiwaji, activist and daughter of camp survivor Gulbahar Haitiwaj; and Natan Sharansky, former Soviet dissident, Israeli politician and human rights activist. 

Elisha Wiesel, the chairman of the foundation and son of Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, gave his thoughts to eJewishPhilanthropy on why the Uyghurs were chosen. 

“It is hard to listen to the stories of these survivors without feeling highly motivated to act and amplify their story. Against seemingly impossible odds, my father faced the biggest bully on the planet during the Cold War — the Soviet Union — and over a 25-year period helped build the Soviet Jewry movement,” he said.  

“I believe we honour his memory by challenging the Chinese Communist Party to end their mistreatment of the Uyghurs.” 

The Uyghurs are prominently based in the north-western Xinjiang province of China and persecuted by authorities for their Muslim beliefs. In July 2021, the US government declared that Uyghur repression was tantamount to “genocide”  

The US government says that over a million Uyghurs have been imprisoned since 2017. The ethnic minority group have suffered imprisonment, torture, forced sterilisation, forced labour and restrictions on expressing religion. 

According to Human Rights Watch, Uyghurs undergo mass surveillance on a scale not seen outside China. Any trace of religious messages, even reading the Quran, on phone make Uyghurs susceptible to police interrogation. 

An investigation conducted by Human Rights Watch found that in a nine-month period from 2017 to 2018, police conducted nearly 11 million searches of a total of 1.2 million mobile phones in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital city of 3.5 million residents.  

Elie Wiesel and his wife, Marion, established The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity soon after he was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize for Peace. The foundation previously  founded two centers in Israel with an aim to carve a path for Ethiopian-Israeli students to participate fully in Israeli society.