[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 71 (Monday, April 26, 2021)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E453-E454]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         STATE OF ISRAEL AT 73

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. ELAINE G. LURIA

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                         Monday, April 26, 2021

  Mrs. LURIA. Madam Speaker, I include in the Record remarks submitted 
at the request of a Virginia Beach constituent, Rabbi Dr. Israel 
Zoberman, of Temple Lev Tikvah and is a reflection of his views:

       Distinguished Israeli historian Tom Segev was born in 
     Jerusalem in 1945, earned his doctorate at Boston University 
     and his books were translated into fourteen languages. In his 
     A State At Any Cost (The Life of David Ben-Gurion). Farrar, 
     Straus and Girous. 2018, he treats us to a mesmerizing 
     account of Israel's first prime minister's tumultuous life in 
     the context of fateful times for the Jewish people and 
     humanity. It is

[[Page E454]]

     based on a newly released treasure trove of archival material 
     shedding more light on the interaction between complex times 
     and a complex personality of significant contrasts.
       Ben-Gurion was a politician-philosopher-poet, or equally 
     the other way around, which he probably preferred. Born in 
     Plonsk, Poland on October 16, 1886 as Daveed Yosef Green, he 
     died on December 1, 1973 in Tel Aviv, Israel shortly 
     following the traumatic Yom Kippur War. Indicative of his 
     total attachment to realizing the Zionist dream, he regarded 
     his arrival in Jaffa, Palestine on September 7, 1906 from 
     Odessa, Russia as his preferred birthdate so engraved on his 
     stately memorial besides his wife Paula, in the Negev, 
     Israel's mostly desert land.
       Admired as likely Israel's leading founder, his finest 
     hour, rightly identified by Segev, was his heroic decision to 
     declare Israeli statehood on May 14, 1948 immediately 
     following the British departure which upended its Mandate 
     since 1917.
       Early on in his budding career as a Zionist politician in 
     Poland, he proved to be a master of detail, thoroughly 
     studying any given subject before him, particularly recording 
     in his notebook statistical and economic information. Ben-
     Gurion was also known to be a lover and obsessive collector 
     of books, which he shipped home when abroad, amassing an 
     impressive library. He favored Plato though he copied in 
     ancient Greek from Aristotle; identifying with Plato's model 
     of the philosopher-ruler he sought to blend his statesmanship 
     for the reborn Jewish state given a long lack of sovereignty 
     with a rabbinic tradition celebrating argumentation.
       The late Professor Yigael Yadin, the famed Dead Sea 
     Scrolls' scholar who served as IDF Chief of Staff and Deputy 
     Prime Minister, is purported to opine that Ben-Gurion was 
     envious of those with academic standing and thus his enormous 
     drive for acquiring books. Ben-Gurion regarded Dr. Chaim 
     Weitzmann, Israel's first President, who was instrumental in 
     the breakthrough 1917 Balfour Declaration, as his archrival 
     and refused to allow him to sign the Independence 
     Declaration.
       Ben-Gurion felt some guilt for not doing more to save 
     fellow Jews during the Holocaust and his encounter with the 
     surviving remnant was painful. He could not even bring 
     himself to visit Poland at war's end and was relentless about 
     the survivors leaving Poland for Germany's American zone 
     through the B'richa (Escape) organization headquartered in 
     Paris. My family and I were among some 200,000 surviving 
     Jewish refugees enabled to leave Poland. Ben-Gurion's goal 
     was to bring them all to the emerging Jewish state with my 
     own family arriving there as Israel celebrated its first 
     Independence Day. Earlier, Ben-Gurion sought to create a 
     temporary Jewish State in Germany's Bavaria but denied by 
     General Eisenhauer, who did agree to settle in the American 
     Zone many fleeing East European Jews.
       Ben-Gurion bemoaned that the Holocaust deprived the nascent 
     nation of its best human potential, more than the high number 
     of Jewish victims. He credited the leadership and financial 
     support of American Jews for making a critical difference in 
     the 1948 War. He was concerned during the Cold War years that 
     a Soviet nuclear strike on New York would deprive Israel of 
     Jewish support, becoming convinced that Israel required a 
     nuclear capability for its very survival, ever-worried of a 
     second Holocaust. He believed in the potential of nuclear 
     energy in developing the vast wilderness of the Negev's 
     desert. Ben-Gurion viewed Israel as the only authentic Jewish 
     center with ``Hebrew Education'' as the link with the 
     Diaspora. Back in 1900 when he was only fourteen in Plonsk, 
     Poland, he established with two friends the Ezra Association, 
     pledging to speak only Hebrew.
       The multi-faceted Ben-Gurion opposed the watershed 1967 
     War, afterwards preferring a smaller Israel at peace with its 
     Arab neighbors, attested in his support for the 1947 U.N. 
     Partition Resolution. He died before witnessing Israel's 
     negotiated peace with Egypt and Jordan along with the recent 
     Abraham Accords, adding four more Arab countries. Ben-
     Gurion's single-mindedness and utter devotion to his cause of 
     creating a Jewish state in times of unparalleled pain and 
     messianic promise, remains his crowning glory. Both visionary 
     and practical, Segev aptly concludes, ``People believed in 
     him because he believed in himself.''

  Rabbi Dr. Israel Zoberman is the founder of Temple Lev Tikvah in 
Virginia Beach. He was born in Chu, Kazakhstan, in 1945 to Polish 
Holocaust survivors and was raised in Haifa, Israel.

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