Tarnished gold
Remembering Munich, looking toward London
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Print | Sculptor Fritz Koenig’s Tel Aviv memorial to the Munich 11. Photo by Avishai Teicher |
LONDON – For the British Jewish community, the most memorable moment of the London Olympics may be a somber one.
On Aug. 6, several hundred people are expected to attend a commemoration for the 11 Israeli athletes and coaches murdered by Palestinian terrorists during the 1972 Munich Olympics.
“From conversations across the community, the key thing people are engaged in around the Olympics is that they want to see a commemoration of Munich,” Peter Mason, director of the London Jewish Forum, said.
While a ceremony organized by the Israelis and the local community takes place during every Olympic Games, this one marks the 40th anniversary of the massacre. The International Olympics Committee continues to reject international calls for a minute of silence during the opening ceremony on July 27.
But the community also has made a point of joining the general air of celebration sweeping London in the run-up to the Games. In the past year, nearly every Jewish school, youth group, and charity has run Olympics-related activities. And during the Olympics, London’s Jews will welcome thousands of Jewish visitors with social events, synagogue services, guides to Jewish London, and, in the Olympic Village, pastoral care.
The welcoming efforts are being coordinated by the Jewish Committee for the London Games, which was established by the London Jewish Forum and several other community organizations.
For one of the organizations, Maccabi GB, which runs sports programming for the Jewish community, the Olympics has been “a springboard to get people involved. At every opportunity we’ve linked to the Olympics,” project manager Jessica Overlander-Kaye said.
Maccabi GB worked with more than 15 Jewish organizations on more than 30 events, ranging from talks about the roles of Jews in sport to Olympics-themed sports days in Jewish schools. It worked with students who want to write good luck cards to the Israeli delegation. An annual community fun run was expanded this year to reach 2,000 people, including Britain’s chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks.
For Overlander-Kaye, becoming involved in Olympics-themed activities through Jewish groups is “about being part of something smaller and bigger at the same time. It’s an opportunity to be part of the Olympics while connecting to the Jewish community. Viewed backwards, it reflects very well on our community, on our mentality about working from the grassroots, that we encourage people to get active and engaged. We make it easy for people.”
She is particularly proud of the work that Maccabi did this year in encouraging people with disabilities to become involved in sports. In June, the group held an event that saw the able-bodied and the physically challenged play sports together.
“We linked it to the Paralympics,” she said, referring to the international games held for disabled athletes after each summer Olympics. “The Israeli delegation will have a strong Paralympic team, and this makes sports accessible” to disabled people.
Other groups have focused on educational events. For example, the London Jewish School of Jewish Studies, which runs adult education classes, is offering sessions on whether the Olympian ideal is Jewish and asking “Who really won on Chanukah?” The United Jewish Israel Appeal has developed six workshops, including ones on the Munich massacre and Jewish ideas on strength, that have been taken up by youth groups and schools.
The closest many community members will get to the Games will be on July 25 when the Olympic torch, which has been touring across the United Kingdom, will be carried through heavily Jewish North-West London.
“Hopefully, the community will have a good showing,” Mason said. “There is a genuine building of excitement.”
During the Games themselves, the community will open its doors to tourists from abroad and from elsewhere in the UK who wish to experience Jewish London. The Jewish Volunteering Network, which operates under the auspices of the Jewish Committee for the London Games, set up a website that lists all major attractions, including kosher restaurants, synagogues, and Jewish landmarks. It also has a section on the history of London’s Jews and a calendar of Jewish events connected to the Games.
About 10,000 people already have looked at the website since its launch in January, according to Es Rosen, who manages both the website and JVN regional development.
“We have no idea how many people we can expect, but when people go to an international city they often seek out Jewish tourist sites,” Rosen said. “The Olympics have tremendous potential for Jewish London.”
The Olympic Village is in East London, so the relatively small Jewish community there has taken on the job of catering to the Olympic teams’ Jewish needs.
Four local rabbis from across the denominational spectrum will join 186 other chaplains serving the athletes, delegation members, staff, and volunteers. Rabbi Richard Jacobi of the Woodford Liberal Synagogue says he will be available for those looking “for a sympathetic ear from their own faith, or from faith in general,” in case of stress, a personal emergency, or any other need. The pastoral team also is part of the contingency plans in case of a large-scale incident.
“Personally, this is a once-in-a-life opportunity to be involved in something that presents London and British Jewry in the best possible light,” Jacobi said. “Many people think that London is dominated by anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and that is not the case. There is a degree of background radiation, but it certainly does not influence people’s lives on a daily basis. People enjoy being Jewish in London.”
Nevertheless, he adds, “The 40th anniversary of the Munich tragedy is also at the back of my mind. If anything were to happen, being part of the response feels very important to me rabbinically and personally.”
Many of his congregants are volunteering in the Olympic Village or as “hosts ” posted at strategic points in London to help tourists. Like many other local synagogues, his shul will host two Shabbat services particularly aimed at visitors, and Orthodox and non-Orthodox services will alternate in the Olympic Village.
Finally, East London communities plan to hold their own events commemorating the Munich massacre. One ceremony will be on the afternoon of Tisha b’Av, on July 28, and a religious service at Waltham Forest Hebrew Congregation will be in September. Jacobi says these events would have taken place even had the IOC agreed to hold a minute of silence.
“In the midst of everything else, a minute isn’t particularly long to appreciate what these events meant,” he said. “It is important that everyone had the opportunity to come together as a group, learn more about it and associate more with it.
“We think people — mainly Jewish but also others — feel it should be remembered. It’s part of Jewish and Olympic history.”
JTA Wire Service
More on: Tarnished gold
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As support mounts, Olympic committee still says no
International support is growing for a moment of silence at the opening ceremonies of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games to honor the memories of the 11 Israeli athletes who were murdered by Palestinian terrorists on the final day of the games 40 years ago. The committee that runs the quadrennial event, however, continues to turn a deaf ear to the pleas. The Olympics begin in London on July 27.
Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), said several times in the last few months that such a tribute has no place at the games themselves. Nonetheless, “within the Olympic family, the memory of the victims of the terrible massacre in Munich in 1972 will never fade away,” he wrote in a letter on May 1 rejecting the request.
Munich 11 widow Ankie Spitzer keeps up her fight for a minute of Olympic time
WEST NYACK, N.Y. – The room was splashed in blood, the walls riddled with bullet holes. Ankie Spitzer stood amid the chaos and made a vow.
“If this is the place where Andrei spent the last hours of his life, he and his friends, I am not going to shut up. I will tell this story,” said Spitzer, whose late husband, Andrei, was the fencing coach for the 1972 Israeli Olympic delegation.
And for the past 40 years, as each Olympics approaches, she has kept her promise to remember the Israeli delegation members who were held hostage and murdered by eight members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September during the XX Olympiad in Munich.
‘They’re all gone’
Scholars seek to keep alive memory of Olympic terror
Forty years ago, Palestinian “Black September” terrorists murdered 11 Israeli team members during the Olympic Games in Munich. Although the International Olympic Committee (IOC) declined Israel’s request for a moment of silence at this summer’s London games, there are scholars working to ensure that the 1972 tragedy is not forgotten.
One such expert is David Clay Large, a professor of history at Montana State University and author of the book Munich 1972: Tragedy, Terror, and Triumph at the Olympic Games.
In May, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon wrote to the IOC on behalf of the widows of two 1972 victims, who called for a moment of silence as a memorial during the upcoming Olympics. IOC President Jacques Rogge responded that a moment of silence would not be held because the IOC “has officially paid tribute to the memory of the athletes on several occasions.”
Flag CommentIt’s a very sad and painful event to remember when innocent Israelis were murdered right when they were about to participate in the Olympics. It is a bloody story that stands around the grand event and leaves a scar to Israelis everywhere.
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Tarnished gold
The time: 8:30 a.m., Iyar ‘8, 57’7. The place: the observation plaza of the Intercontinental Hotel on the Mount of Olives.
Nineteen hundred years earlier, in the year 38’7, there was no hotel on the spot, but it was still an observation post. On it, very likely, stood Vespasian, commanding general and soon-to-be emperor of Rome, looking at the city below and planning the siege he hoped would bring the Jews to their knees.
Now another commander stood there. His name should mean something to all of us, because on that day he changed the course of Jewish history. To him fell the singular honor of completing the "Return to Zion."
His name was Col. Mordechai "Motta" Gur. At 8:30 a.m. on that fate-filled Wednesday — June 7, 1967, on the secular calendar — Gur picked up a field telephone and uttered a single word. One can only imagine the emotions that ran through him as he enunciated each of its three syllables.
"Kadimah," he ordered. Advance.
The word given, Gur’s 55th Paratroop Brigade stormed through the Old City’s Lion’s Gate into history. Ninety minutes later, the sound of a shofar announced to the world that the return of the Jewish people to their land was irrevocable.
If anyone had any doubts before then that God had decided to end the long and bitter exile, those doubts should have ended with the piercing blast of the shofar. The ancient prophecies had been fulfilled. Now, we were truly home.
Without Jerusalem, there was only a geographical land called Israel that was more a hope than a reality. Only with Jerusalem — the real Jerusalem, the Jerusalem of our prayers and tears, the Jerusalem people refer to as the "old city" — only with that Jerusalem could our tikvah, our hope, become reality.
At 10 a.m. Israel time on that day 40 years ago, that Jerusalem, the real Jerusalem, the only Jerusalem that matters, was once again and forever more a Jewish Jerusalem.
The victory of that day — and its meaning — should be etched in our hearts forever.
The scenes that collectively as a people we must never forget are endless:
…of dancing soldiers embracing Golda Meir, then a private citizen;
…of Shlomo Goren, chief rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces, blowing that shofar with tears in his eyes;
…of a soldier, helmet in his hand, staring through glistening eyes at dirty old stones that to him were more beautiful than the most precious gems;
…of the IDF chief of staff, Gen. Yitzhak Rabin, smiling with amusement at the sight of his otherwise very secular defense minister, Moshe Dayan, inscribing a prayer to God on a scrap of paper and placing it into the cracks in the Wall.
That is why now we celebrate Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day, each year. (It fell on May 16, but that likely will be overshadowed this year by 40th anniversary commemorations on June 7.) That is why we must celebrate this day over and again, forever, by the grace of God and with His help.
Nowadays, there is much said about the future of Jerusalem. From that moment 40 years ago when Motta Gur gave his one-word order, Jerusalem has been the thorniest issue to resolve if ever there is to be peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Many in the world want Israel to divide the city once again and they want us in the diaspora to pressure Israel into doing so.
To the Muslims, it is their third holiest city, after Mecca and Medina. They want it back and it makes little difference that it was only early in the ‘0th century, fueled by an ascendant Zionism on the one hand and British colonial machinations on the other, that Jerusalem’s religious significance grew in their eyes.
To the Christians, and especially to the Catholic Church, it is the second holiest city, after Rome. A Jewish state is, for the church, a theological problem. A Jewish Jerusalem, in law as well as in fact, would be a theological nightmare.
To Jews, however, Jerusalem is not just Israel’s capital, nor simply our holy city, our only holy city, third to none and second to none. It is the heart and soul of our existence as a people. Before the shofar sounded that day 40 years ago, we remained a nation of wanderers despite the existence of a "State of Israel." Because of Motta Gur, his commander Yitzhak Rabin, and the men and women they commanded that day, many of whom paid for our joy with their lives, we are a nation redeemed.
We can debate all we want about whether to hold on to Nablus, which we call Shechem, where Abram and Sarai arrived from Haran and where their great-grandson Joseph is buried; or to Hebron, which was a Jewish city until the Arab massacre of 19’9; or to Bethlehem, where mother Rachel is buried and where King David was born; or to Tel Salun, which we call Shiloh, where the Ark of the Covenant rested for so many years; or to any other part of the west bank.
But as the pressure mounts for Israel to be accommodating to the necessities of peace by once again dividing the city in two — as Al Jolson said 90 years ago, "You ain’t seen nothin’ yet" — Jews worldwide must stand firm and united and undaunted. The line of accommodation must stop at the borders of Jerusalem — and that must include such places as Maaleh Adumim and Efrat, so-called settlements that, in fact, provide Jerusalem with a necessary buffer zone.
And that, alas, is the problem. An increasingly large percentage of Jews inside Israel and many outside it — from modern Orthodox to the secular — no longer feel comfortable in Jerusalem. Indeed, for some it no longer even is a welcoming place. The city increasingly has become a haredi preserve — with many of those haredim not even recognizing the legitimacy of the Jewish state.
In such a climate, it is unlikely that a "Jerusalem forever Jewish" campaign would gain wide support, to the great shame of us all.
There is ever-growing pressure on Israel to redivide Jerusalem. Before time runs out and Israel is forced into a decision, we need to pressure ourselves into resolving our own conflicts.
Without Jerusalem, the real Jerusalem, all the rest is nice, but it might as well have been Uganda.
Shammai Engelmayer is rabbi of the Conservative synagogue Temple Israel Community Center in Cliffside Park and an instructor in the UJA-Federation-sponsored Florence Melton Adult Mini-School of the Hebrew University. He is the editor of Judaism: A Journal of Jewish Life and Thought.
It’s a very sad and painful event to remember when innocent Israelis were murdered right when they were about to participate in the Olympics. It is a bloody story that stands around the grand event and leaves a scar to Israelis everywhere.
