Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel was remembered at a funeral service on the Upper East Side Sunday as an eloquent witness to inhumanity who kept alive the memory of 6 million Jews exterminated by the Nazis.

“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,” said Rabbi Perry Berkowitz, a former Wiesel assistant who is now president of the American Jewish Heritage Organization, before the private service at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue.

Billionaire Ronald Lauder and the celebrity rabbi Shmuley Boteach were among about 150 people who attended the funeral for Wiesel, who died Saturday at age 87. His family was also present.
TV newsman Ted Koppel delivered a eulogy in which he likened the Nobel laureate to a figure in the works of painter Marc Chagall.

“Elie floated above everyday reality rather like one of Chagall’s fiddlers perched on a rooftop,” Koppel said, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Koppel, who in 2013 publicly interviewed Wiesel at the 92nd Street Y, added that the writer recently spent three hours having lunch with Donald Trump.

Although his wife, Marion, turned down the invite, Wiesel agreed to the sit-down simply “because he asked me to,” Koppel said,

After the service, Wiesel’s casket was loaded into a hearse, where it was kissed by the synagogue’s cantor, Joseph Malovany before being driven for burial at the Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, Westchester County.

Wiesel authored the classic 1955 memoir “Night,” based on his experiences as a teenager at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for being “one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression and racism continue to characterize the world.”

Abraham Foxman, former national director of the Anti-Defamation League, recalled a series of recent conversation he had with Wiesel in Yiddish.

“We talked about forgiveness. We talked about God. He was struggling with it,” Foxman said.

“Well, now he’s a little closer. Now he can challenge the Almighty much closer, and maybe he’ll get some answers, which he asked but never got the answers to.”

A public memorial is planned, according to the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.