[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.

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