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STATE OF ISRAEL AT 73
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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 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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SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 167, No. 71
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