[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 82 (Friday, May 1, 2020)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E418]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              THE 72ND ANNIVERSARY OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. A. DONALD McEACHIN

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                          Friday, May 1, 2020

  Mr. McEACHIN. Madam Speaker, l rise today to include in the Record a 
statement from Rabbi Dr. Israel Zoberman, founder and spiritual leader 
of Temple Lev Tikvah in Virginia Beach, and the representative of the 
Jewish Community at the City of Chesapeake's civic occasions.

       As the State of Israel celebrates its 72nd anniversary in 
     its eighth decade, we miss the prophetic voice and heroic 
     presence of Amos Oz (1939-2018), one of Israel's premier 
     authors whose books were translated into forty-four 
     languages. His life mirrored the history of the reborn Jewish 
     state out of the monumental Holocaust that consumed a third 
     of the Jewish people. He was the very embodiment of an 
     inspiring Israel and its acknowledged representative to the 
     world, with foreign leaders seeking his perspective on events 
     involving Israel. He fought in both the 1967 and 1973 wars.
       Oz was honored with significant international literary 
     awards, though the Nobel Prize somehow eluded him while being 
     a perennial nominee. He served as Professor of Hebrew 
     Literature at Ben-Gurion University in Be'er-Sheva though he 
     was courted by Jerusalem's Hebrew University from which he 
     graduated. Oz was a great humanist and a distinguished member 
     of the Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism. He 
     was born in Jerusalem during the British Mandate to Fania and 
     Dr. Arye Klausner, a gifted linguist of sixteen languages. 
     They immigrated to then-Palestine from Eastern Europe. Oz's 
     great-uncle was Professor Yosef Klausner, the Hebrew 
     University's renowned scholar of the Second Temple period.
       Following Fania's suicide at age thirty-eight, Oz opted at 
     age fifteen to leave his Jerusalem home by himself and move 
     to Kibbutz Hulda where he changed his surname Klausner to the 
     Hebrew Oz which connotes courage. It befitted the kibbutz's 
     pioneering Labor ideology and its break with the European 
     experience to which his parents were attached, particularly 
     its culture. It was a turning point for Oz who was raised on 
     Zeev Jabotinsky's Revisionist ideology of manifest Jewish 
     power. He consequently began identifying with the ``new Jew'' 
     finding fulfillment in returning to till the ancient 
     homeland, in contrast to the perceived Diaspora Jew 
     represented in his own family.
       There is an intriguing early religious chapter in the 
     author's life attending an Orthodox elementary school while 
     his family was secular and even anti-religious. He was 
     exposed to working class students who regarded him as an 
     outsider, a rejection he later experienced in the kibbutz. 
     His second-grade teacher, who deeply impacted him, was the 
     famous poetess Zelda, whom Oz described as his first love.
       In his book, A Tale of Love and Darkness, Oz recalled the 
     dramatic vote at the United Nations on November 29, 1947 to 
     partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, which the 
     Arabs refused to accept. His father, Arye, was moved to tears 
     lying next to him in bed telling Amos that he would never be 
     exposed to anti-Semitic attacks the way he and Grandpa 
     Alexander were in Poland with their pants forcibly removed by 
     hooligan students at his high school. Oz witnessed the 
     unforgettable night of the critical vote with his 
     neighborhood gathering to listen to the one available radio. 
     His family's small apartment was home to about twenty people 
     during the 1948 War in Jerusalem, all enduring hardship with 
     some losing dear ones.
       Oz, an iconic Israeli figure, was a peace activist and a 
     ardent supporter of a two-state solution to the Israeli-
     Palestinian conflict, regarding it as vital to Israel's best 
     interests politically as well as ethically, no less than ``a 
     matter of life and death for the State of Israel'' that must 
     retain a Jewish and democratic identity. He feared for 
     Israel's future internally as well as externally, regarding 
     Judaism's genius in its Biblical prophets' humanistic ideals 
     and moral sensitivity towards society's weak and 
     disenfranchised. Oz advocated the curbing of the 
     establishment's raw power ``to cause pain.'' He was gravely 
     concerned for the growing conflict between those advocating 
     for strict Orthodox Jewish law (Halacha) and the great 
     majority opting to preserve democracy.
       He lauded secular Israel's significant and multiple 
     accomplishments in revitalizing the Hebrew language and 
     culture, establishing a flourishing modern Jewish state 
     recognized as the world's start-up nation with such humble 
     beginnings and acute security concerns. Oz's sharp arrows 
     were aimed not only at the political Right but also at 
     Israel's Socialist founders for failing to acknowledge the 
     full tapestry of the Jewish heritage, with patronizing 
     treatment of the Mizrachi and Sephardic Jews who had a 
     moderate approach toward religion and diversity. He bemoaned 
     the worldwide rise of dangerous fanaticism of Islamic 
     fundamentalism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, white supremacy, 
     racism, and xenophobia.
       Amos Oz, the secular prophet of pain and promise, doom and 
     deliverance, concludes his last book, Dear Zealots, with whom 
     he sought dialogue, on a stirring message of both searing 
     pessimism and consoling optimism, ``I am extremely fearful 
     for the future . . . But I like being Israeli. I like being a 
     citizen of a country where there are eight and a half million 
     prime ministers, eight and a half million prophets, eight and 
     a half million messiahs. Each of us has our own personal 
     formula for redemption, or at least for a solution . . . What 
     I have seen here in my lifetime is far less, yet also far 
     more, than what my parents and their parents ever dreamed 
     of.''
       Rabbi Dr. Israel Zoberman is founder and spiritual leader 
     of Temple Lev Tikvah (Heart of Hope) in Virginia Beach. It 
     meets at The Church of the Holy Apostles, the only world's 
     community of both Episcopalians and Roman Catholic. He was 
     born in Chu, Kazakhstan (USSR) in 1945 to Polish Holocaust 
     survivors. He and his family lived among Jewish refugees in 
     Poland, Austria and Germany, prior to moving to Israel in 
     1949. He is a member of the Virginia Beach Human Rights 
     Commission.

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