With the Olympics in full swing in a blizzard of medals, flags and kitsch, spare a thought for Eden Nimri, a 22-year-old swimmer who competed for Israel on the international stage. On the morning of October 7, she woke up at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, where she was serving as commander of an all-female drone unit.
When the sirens sounded, Eden was asleep. Still wearing her pyjamas, she grabbed her rifle and took up a position at one of two entrances to a bomb shelter where many unarmed people were hiding, including members of her team.
Hamas soon arrived with grenades and automatic weapons. Eden opened fire on the leading terrorist but was overwhelmed and killed by those that followed. While the swimmer sacrificed her life in the fighting, 11 others, including four women from her unit, fled to safety from the second entrance. We will never know if Eden would have made it to the Olympics.
Also spare a thought for 23-year-old Karina Pritika, a former gymnast from the town of Ariel who, like Eden, had competed for her country. Last October, she was working at the Mena restaurant in Tel Aviv with her friend, Maya Haim, saving up money to travel to South America (Karina had been born in Portugal). They both lost their lives in the butchery at the Nova music festival.
The story of Jewish athletes is a pendulum that swings between acceptance and discrimination, accomplishment and bloodshed. This is a microcosm of Jewish history itself. While our people through the ages have simply craved an equal existence alongside all other nations of the world, this has been denied them.
My colleague, Keren David, has been spending some time in the JC archive. At the notorious 1936 Berlin Olympics, only one Jew was allowed to compete. Keren dug up a JC story at the time which reported that a “hymn of hate” had become common in Germany, vowing to do away with the Jews altogether once the Games had passed.
The lyrics were printed in rough translation. Here is a sample: “When once Olympia is past, / Then, boys, the spring-clean comes at last… We’ll have one more glorious go / And set about the Jewish foe.”
Before the war, Jews had been prominent in European sports. Take Austrian athlete Otto Hershmann. In the first modern Olympic Games of 1896, he won silver in the 100 metres freestyle swimming. “It was the happiest moment of my life when, amidst the strains of the national hymn, the Austrian flag was hoisted,” he commented.
He then switched to fencing, taking silver in the sabre event in the 1912 Olympics, making him one of very few to win medals in more than one discipline. Hershmann also served as president of his country’s Olympic committee, the only person in history to win a medal while doing so. After dedicating his life to his country and his sports, in 1942 he was deported and died either in the Izbica transit ghetto or by gas at Sobibór.
Hershmann’s sporting prowess was not that unusual. In Hungary, Jewish athletes dominated. At the 1912 Olympics, a third of the Hungarian squad was Jewish, including half of the gold medal-winning sabre team.
There were also many Jewish swimmers, table tennis players, water polo competitors and figure skaters, such as the four-time gold medal winner Lili Kronberger. Between 1901 and 1918, about 30 Jews took to the field for the Hungarian football squad. Árpád Weiss, an Inter Milan left-winger, was one of eight Jews representing Hungary at the 1924 Olympics in Paris.
In January 1944, he, his wife Elena and his children, Roberto and Clara, were gassed at Birkenau, alongside many other Jewish athletes.
With the Holocaust and the War of Independence behind it, the nascent state of Israel was looking forward to the 1948 Games with enthusiasm. High hopes were pinned on 20-year-old Yehuda Gabbai, who had won gold at the Mediterranean Athletics Championships in Athens, and the hockey side, which had been “almost uniformly successful in marches against the British police and military,” the JC reported. In the event, however, Israel was forbidden from taking part by the Olympic Committee, which was wary of an Arab boycott.
In 1952, when the Olympics came round again, Israel finally seemed accepted into the family of nations (though it didn’t win a medal until Barcelona in 1992, when its judokas took silver and bronze). Twenty years later, however, came the Munich massacre, in which five athletes and six coaches were slaughtered, one of whom, weightlifter Yossef Romano, was castrated.
So in this post-October 7 world, the jeering suffered by the Israeli team at the opening ceremony in Paris was nothing new. Nor were the death threats received by its athletes, nor the apparent antisemitic hate crimes being investigated by French police, nor terror attacks planned by the Iranian regime.
But if the bigotry was nothing new, neither was the courage, dignity and resilience shown by the Israeli athletes. They have refused to be cowed by this mass intimidation and continue to represent their country with passion, conviction and pride. The world might learn something from them if it only stopped jeering for a moment.
