Barack Obama’s mentor Abner Mikva died at the age of 90
Barack Obama lost his mentor Abner Mikva, who died at the age of 90 because of bladder cancer this Monday.
Mikva was a member of the Democratic Party from Illinois. He died this Monday at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. Mikva knew the American President for many years. He was the one who offered Obama a job after his graduation from the law school. In spite the fact that the President declined this proposition, he acknowledged an importance of such step.
"No matter how far we go in life, we owe a profound debt of gratitude to those who gave us those first, firm pushes at the start," he said in a statement. "For me, one of those people was Ab Mikva.
Obama also mentioned that
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He was born in 1926 in a family of Ukrainian immigrants. Mikva’s father often became unemployed, and the family depended up the government allowance for many years. However, the man was able to build a career without a patronage. He became a member of Illinois House, U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Court of Appeals ' bench. Mikva worked at the White house as an advisor of Bill Clinton and, of course, was Barack Obama’s mentor. In 2014 the President awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Barack Obama paid tribute to Elie Wiesel
Another man who was in contact with President Obama died in the last few days. Elie Wiesel peacefully deceased on Saturday after the long illness. Obama was one of the world leaders who paid tribute to this 87-year-old Nobel Laureate, Holocaust survivor, and author.
“Elie Wiesel was a great moral voice of our time and a conscience for our world,” Obama wrote on Twitter. “He was also a dear friend. We will miss him deeply.”
Wiesel spent the subsequent decades fighting for human rights, never shying away from confronting leaders—in 1993, he pushed former president Bill Clinton to take action on human rights violations in the former