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…
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.