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Why did the people in Sighet not believe Moishe the Beadle?

As the Holocaust got underway, people all over Europe were reluctant to believe that something so awful was happening. Most people didn't want to believe that man was capable of such inhumanity to man. The initial reports of what was happening in the ghettoes and in the camps were so horrific that most simply chose not to believe them. Furthermore, most people were unwilling to accept that Europeans, civilized, cultured and intelligent, were complicit in allowing this to happen in the twentieth century. Sadly, those who were unwilling to believe the truth were often the first to be deported to the ghettoes or the camps.

The people in Sighet were educated, rational adults. The very idea of government-sanctioned mass murder was beyond their ability to comprehend, much less accept. In order to understand the horror of Hitler's master plan, it was necessary for those outside the Third Reich to see the inside of the camps. Even then, it was almost beyond human comprehension. My first husband's grandfather helped liberate two of the camps during WWII. He would not talk about it except to say that the people who were held there were "pitiful, so pitiful." It drove him to alcoholism.

I think there are a variety of reasons.  For one, Moshe the Beedle was a foreigner.  He is respected, but he is not revered as Elie's father was, so therefore they took everything he said with a grain of salt.  He is not one of "them".

For another thing, tales cruelty and barbarism such that he brought back to them are hard to swallow.  No one wants to believe that humanity is capable of such things.  Why do you think there is such a large faction of people who still today refute the existence of a Holocaust?  It is hard to believe that heartless behavior such as that the Nazis displayed during WWII toward the Jews is possible.

Just to add to Post #4, in addition to the far-reaching, general reasons for the Jews' refusal to heed warnings before the Holocaust, I think Wiesel specifically includes Moche to demonstrate that Jews were unwilling to listen to anyone who bore unpleasant, seemingly far-away news. Moche is an eye-witness to the Nazi's cruelty, yet the Jews of Sighet write him off.  With Wiesel's description of Moche in Chapter 1, it is somewhat understandable why they would not listen to Moche even though he had firsthand information.  He is "clownlike" and seems to spend all his time with his head on heavenly ideas, not on earthly, practical matters.  If one is trying to deny that something as horrible as deportation and genocide is coming, it would be easy to disregard the "rants" of someone like Moche.