When Elie Wiesel won the Nobel peace Prize in 1986, the first person he embraced after leaving the podium had traveled to Oslo from New London.

The friendship between Wiesel and Sigmund Strochlitz, a fellow survivor of the Holocaust and the founder and owner of Whaling City Ford, helped create a community in the city that knew and loved the famed writer and activist, and now mourns his death.

Wiesel, who died Saturday at 87, worked with Strochlitz to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, travel the world on behalf of oppressed people and develop the National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

The Romanian-born Wiesel visited New London often to give lectures, visit Strochlitz and his family and, in 2006, speak at his friend's funeral.

People who met Wiesel on these visits, and in other parts of his life, remember intensely the experience of being near him.

"When people talk about Elie, they think about ... his presence as a speaker," said Romana Primus, Strochlitz's daughter. "But I think that the most wonderful and 'Elie' attribute was his ability to listen and to hear people."

Watching him with students, from the United States to Oslo, Primus said, was "magic."

"He really listened," she said.

Strochlitz and Wiesel had both been imprisoned at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Their shared experience in the concentration camps and the Jewish cultural traditions that linked their childhoods created a strong bond.

At Strochlitz's funeral Wiesel said there was "never a false note in our relationship" and said that after his friend's death, "all of us feel an immense sense of loneliness."

Wiesel and Strochlitz spoke almost every day, Primus said.

"They had something special," Primus said. "They had a deep commitment to what they should do with their experience."

Wiesel, who became a U.S. citizen in 1963, was memorialized Sunday at a private service in Manhattan. 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 firsthand witnesses to the Nazis' atrocities.

Wiesel shared the harrowing story of his internment at Auschwitz as a teenager through his classic memoir "Night," one of the most widely read and discussed books of the 20th century.

Though "Night" was only the first of dozens of books Wiesel wrote in his life, it is the most common text for young people learning about the Holocaust, said Jerome E. Fischer, the executive director of the Jewish Federation of Eastern Connecticut.

"'Night' is the book that about every high school that we deal with uses ... to talk about the Holocaust," Fischer said. "His book, in this country at least, and I think around the world was seminal in bringing the reality of the Holocaust to the general public."

Fischer remembered the excitement in New London when Wiesel would be attending a Shabbat dinner or speaking at Connecticut College, where he received an honorary degree in 1990.

"New London was very fortunate that Elie Wiesel had a special place in his heart for us," he said. "It meant a great deal for our city, our community, Congregation Beth-El and Connecticut College."

As much as his central mission in life was to bear witness for the Holocaust, Fischer said, he also strove to preserve Jewish cultures and traditions.

"He loved teaching," Fischer said. "He was always telling stories."

Sharon Portnoff, a professor of religious studies at Connecticut College who specializes in modern Jewish thought and Holocaust theology, was named this spring as the Elie Wiesel Professor of Judaic Studies, an endowed position established in 1990.

Portnoff also studied with Wiesel at Boston University, and remembered stopping by his office once to discuss philosophy. During the discussion Wiesel told her a story about a time as a child he was blessed by a rabbi passing through town. Before she left, Portnoff asked for her own blessing.

She left the office in a trance.

"It seemed like time stopped, and I walked out of the office," she said. "I went outside, and I had no idea what he had said."

When she tried hard to remember, she was able to bring back his words.

"May you become what you are," was Wiesel's blessing, Portnoff said.

"I think that really goes back to his sense of what human beings are capable of," she said. "And that was what I strove to do."

Portnoff said Wiesel's "Night" continues to resonate with students reading his account of the Holocaust for a second time, usually after reading it first in high school.

"You must re-read it, because you'll understand something different now," Portnoff said she tells her students. "I think that really speaks to the importance and brilliance of the book. It can communicate without traumatizing."

Wiesel told his stories only because he wanted to make an impact on the world, Portnoff said.

"He wanted, through stories, to touch listeners directly," she said.  "He hoped ... to make the listeners of his stories into witnesses."

Primus said she learned from Wiesel not just how to tell stories, but how to listen to the stories other people tell.

"He was a world-famous person," Primus said, "but when you talked to him, he was so genuinely interested in you as a person that it's intoxicating."

"When he spoke to people, he brought with him all that he had heard and listened to," she said. "He had an ability to ask questions when he was talking to people ... and he really wanted the answer. He wanted to know."

Primus said she knows Wiesel's words will continue to teach people even after his death. But, she said, she's not sure if the message is being heard.

"I look around the world, and I see that it's increasingly polarized," she said. "That's exactly what he was working so hard against."

m.shanahan@theday.com

From the archives: Coverage of in The Day of Elie Wiesel accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, December 1986 and the friendship between Wiesel and New London businessman Sigmund Strochlitz.