INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

Congressional Record, Volume 171 Issue 39 (Thursday, February 27, 2025) [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. ____________________