All 500 advanced student and faculty tickets for Nobel Prize-winning author Elie Wiesel's speech on "The Assault on Memory" were gone by noon yesterday, but 200 more tickets will be distributed before the speech Sunday.
Tickets, which are being distributed for free, became available to professors and students yesterday at 9 a.m.
The speech, which will take place at 8:30 p.m. in Spaulding Auditorium, is the keynote address for the Holocaust Conference, titled "Lessons and Legacies III: Memory, Memorialization and Denial."
"There are limited seats so we had to divide up the tickets as fairly as we could," said Kim Watson, Rockefeller Center program manager.
Although advance tickets are gone, 200 more tickets will be made available to the general public beginning at 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, the night of the speech.
In addition, 200 tickets were set aside for conference participants, Watson said. Spaulding sits 900 people.
When Spaulding fills up, organizers will open Loews Auditorium as an off-site satellite location, where the speech will be shown via closed circuit television, Watson said
"You will not need a ticket to get into this showing," she said. "If Loews becomes filled, we are prepared to open possibly a third site, but we will not open it up until Loews fills up."
This weekend's conference is part of a series sponsored by the Holocaust Education Foundation and features presentations by scholars from all over the world.
Wiesel, in addition to receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, is known for his crusades for human rights. He has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States Congressional Gold Medal and the Medal of Liberty Award for his efforts.
