Tributes to Nobel Laureate and Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel was remembered on Sunday at a private service in Manhattan, as family and friends gathered at Fifth Avenue Synagogue and praised the endurance and eloquence of the Nobel Peace Prize winner and mourned him as one of the last first-hand witnesses to the Nazis' atrocities.

"This is really the double tragedy of it, not only the loss of someone who was so rare and unusual but the fact that those ranks are thinning out," Rabbi Perry Berkowitz, president of the American Jewish Heritage Organisation and a former assistant to Wiesel, said before the service at Fifth Avenue Synagogue.