Kafka java consumer freezes after balance failure

we ran into an annoying Kafka consumer issue after failing to rebalance consumers. It seems we had network problems at the given time, which caused the ZK to expire. This caused a re-registration of consumers and then a rebalancing.
After 4 attempts, the rebalance failed (rebalance.retries.max = 4). On client sides (Java Kafka Consumers), we have not received pb notifications. We just didn't have any new message and clients worked for hours without reading any messages.

Is there a way to get consumers notified of these unsuccessful rebalances so that we can monitor and possibly restart our consumers?