    [Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 39 (Thursday, February 27, 2025)]
    [Extensions of Remarks]
    [Page E169]
    From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

                    INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

                                     ______

                            HON. JENNIFER A. KIGGANS

                                  of virginia

                        in the house of representatives

                          Thursday, February 27, 2025

      Mrs. KIGGANS of Virginia. Mr. 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 are a reflection of his
    views:

         INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY--80TH ANNIVERSARY OF
                             AUSCHWITZ'S LIBERATION

           Israeli author and lawyer Yishai Sarid was born in Tel Aviv
         in 1965, serving as an intelligence officer in the IDF. His
         law degree is from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem earning
         an M.A. Public Administration from Harvard University. His
         arousing, even disturbing novel, The Memory Monster (New
         York: Restless Books, 2020), raises profound questions
         reflecting the searing struggle of Israelis to come to grips
         with the Holocaust's enormous impact on their identity and
         very lives, with the Shoah's long shadow as constant
         backdrop. In addition, the genocide's implications touch on
         the universal human condition and its absurd dimension. As
         much as human memory is an honored, even reveled, component
         in the Jewish lexicon laden with lessons, warnings, and
         guideposts, it carries within it, as the novel's title
         attests, no less than a devouring monstrous quality.
           The mesmerizing account is a confessional report to
         Jerusalem's Memorial Yad Vashem's chairman of the rise and
         collapse as well as fall from grace of a once enthusiastic
         recruit on a sacred national mission of accompanying Israeli
         high-schoolers, military personnel, VIPs, and ordinary adult
         tourists to Poland seeking a very brief exposure to a death
         camp site. The heavy-laden theme is made bearable by a
         genuine literary talent utilizing a relieving dose of sarcasm
         and deprecating self-loathing. We do know that biting dark
         humor was used by the camps' condemned inmates as a survival
         mechanism in a universe turned upside down.
           The author, however, finds tragic, grotesque and Kafkian
         qualities in a so-called normal post-Holocaust reality where
         the unnamed book's protagonist becomes consumed by the
         realization that the past is embedded in the present with
         ``The Memory Monster'' threatening to remind us that we
         cannot escape the past and thus we are destined to be doomed
         rather than redeemed. Yad Vashem's chairman turns from his
         respectful position ``as the official representative of
         memory'' to someone who enables carrying on painful memories
         which are bound to exact a heavy price on the living.
           The Israeli military delegations' visits do have a
         commendable educational purpose and value, binding a
         torturous not too remote past with present able military
         personnel of a proud Jewish state. Not all the Israeli
         soldiers have family ties with the Holocaust, some are not
         from a European background and their ties with Polish Jewry
         are very tenuous. The sight of Israelis in military uniform
         is disturbing to some Poles in a land where antisemitism is
         still present albeit with a small Jewish community. I vividly
         recall upon visiting Poland in 2017 and stepping out of the
         new state-of-art Polin Museum next to the giant Warsaw Ghetto
         Memorial, an Israeli military group getting ready to conduct
         a memorial service at the moving site. I introduced myself to
         a handsome colonel pilot who asked me to intercede with then-
         President Trump to advance peace between the Israelis and
         Palestinians.
           Leading a day tour of Israeli adults whose goal in Poland
         was shopping and vacationing, not too serious Holocaust
         learning, provokes a questioning soul-searching response from
         their disappointed guide who regards his job as a sacred
         calling without God's participation, ``What's the point of
         all these recitations? If it is our duty to carry on living,
         why not live life in all its stupidity?'' The narrator's
         scholarly dissertation was prepared in a book form for the
         public with the attractive covet of Belzec SS officers
         exuding confidence.
           Belzec is the last of the six major extermination camps on
         Polish soil to be properly maintained. It is also the place
         where many of my paternal relatives from Zamosc perished,
         including my great-grandparents Rabbi Yaacov and Dena Manzis
         Zoberman. Visiting there in 2017, I led our group of
         seventeen American Jews in the Kaddish, aware that I was
         touching my severed-sacred roots.

      Rabbi Dr. Israel Zoberman is the founder of Temple Lev Tikvah in
    Virginia Beach. Hundreds of his family members were murdered in the
    Holocaust.

                              ____________________