Yom Kippur is a holy day for the Jewish people and Israeli sports are also closed from all activities on this day. What did the Israelis not do to move matches or to avoid performing on this day, as Maccabi Haifa is doing now, which is waiting at the hotel in Turin for its match against Juventus in the Champions League that will take place at the end of the fast, or the Israeli judo team that will compete in the World Championship in Tashkent after the fast, following the intervention of U.S. The head of the union, Moshe Ponti, who managed to move the dates of the competition so that everyone could participate.
But not infrequently the Israeli athletes are also “caught” participating in competitions or games right during Yom Kippur, while representing the State of Israel or themselves around the world. In some cases it even became a stain for life – but in the State of Israel there is no law that prohibits Israelis from representing the state during Yom Kippur.
More than 30 years ago, at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the brothers Dan and Ran Torten decided to go to sea during Yom Kippur to cruise in the 470 model. Very quickly the story was discovered and received huge headlines. The two claimed that they only trained and did not compete on the beach of Busan, but according to the records they participated in the cruise and finished it in ninth place, which caused a great uproar in the country, so that the Olympic Committee decided to send them home early due to the affair and because of their choice to go to sea against the instructions.
It was Yom Kippur for Olympic sports in Israel, literally. The affair reached the discussion table in the government and the heads of state ruled that “the athletes who participate in the Olympic Games represent the State of Israel and are not private individuals, and therefore any deviation from the instructions of the Israeli Olympic Committee is a serious disciplinary offense.” The politicians celebrated it and there were even calls to punish the heads of the delegation who did not prevent it.
“They made a big mistake,” stated the former sailor, Eitan Friedlander, who was a veteran of them and did not get to go to the Olympic Games in 1988. “They put their personal interests before the interests of the country. In some cases these actions created an unpleasant situation internationally, because the Israeli government and the Olympic Committee always explained to the bodies that managed the competitions that Jewish athletes could not take part in competitions on such a holy day and even fought to move competitions so that it would be A day of rest, and at the end a pair of sailors came and actually did something opposite. They were two talented guys who failed to understand the task.”
Director of the delegation to the Seoul Olympics, Uri Afek, was the one who sent them home. “I haven’t seen them since,” said Afek. “Neither before this nor after this – no Israeli athlete has competed on Yom Kippur, but that has nothing to do with this case. The desire to succeed probably made them go out into the water. They are from an exemplary family with a professor father but not traditionalists, so I imagine that they did not light candles Friday and they didn’t think it had any great significance.”
The sports association established an inspection committee about a month later, in order to investigate what happened that day. That committee had the authority to impose penalties. In the end, it was determined that the brothers participated in the cruise and were therefore suspended for five years from all activity in sports institutions. However, instead of accepting the punishment, the brothers went on a journey to defend his name and appealed to the Supreme Court, which canceled the punishment imposed on them in 1991. In any case, they never returned to sports.
Over the years, Dan Turtan studied medicine and became a fighter pilot in the IDF with the rank of colonel commanding the Hazor base. From time to time, so they say, Dan would come to the beaches to watch his daughter sail, and disappear. He did not want to talk about this case today. His brother, Ren, also advanced in life, working in a biological institute and then opening a business in the Netherlands.
“The bottom line,” Uri Afek pointed out, “in my eyes, this is an event that was not really that significant in their lives and it is not some kind of stain, because the very fact that these two men are successful figures who even reached a high rank in the Air Force, to the glory of the people of Israel, that says everything. Instead, they served as an example to others. It’s true, they had a fall more than 30 years ago, but after all these years they should already be forgiven.”
“As soon as they saw it on the scoreboard, the story was over,” he claimed Amon Erez, former board member of the Sailing Association. “As soon as they received the punishment and dropped in the sporting level because they broke the rules, they no longer competed, but they were excellent athletes.”
The Olympic Games in Seoul were an event that Israeli sailing will not forget, and not only because of the Tortan brothers’ scandal. The pair of sailors Eldad Amir and Yoel Sela also competed there, in the “Flying Dutchman” model, and for the first time since 1952, Israeli athletes were faced with the possibility of winning an Olympic medal, which at the time was just a dream. One of their cruises was on Yom Kippur and they decided to give it up, unlike the Turtan brothers. They did so knowing it could hurt their results – and in the end both finished fourth and missed out on a podium appearance.
“We knew in advance that we would not compete on Yom Kippur, which was actually the second day of our competitions at the Games in Seoul,” he said Eldad Amir. “As an athlete, it’s like competing with one hand tied behind, because we just didn’t get the same conditions. There are more important values than competition. In retrospect, that day actually had the best conditions for us, so if we had finished among the top six, we could have even won the gold medal.” .
According to him, even though they missed a day of competition, they did not give up and aimed for a medal. But the loss of the medal was not necessarily because they did not compete on Yom Kippur, but because of an appeal filed against one of their sailings and the decision to give them an average score that jumped them up in the ranking. “They didn’t come towards us and in my eyes it was a scandal,” added Amir.
As a token of appreciation for not competing on Yom Kippur, the two were invited to wave the Israeli flag at the opening ceremony of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and Eldad Amir did so. He consoled himself by leading the Israeli delegation that won Israel’s first Olympic medals, with Yael Arad’s Olympic silver medal and Oren Samadja’s bronze medal in judo.
Yom Kippur fell on one of the 16 days of competitions in the Seoul Olympics. This was a problem known in advance to the Olympic Committee in Israel. As a result, for example, the fencer Lydia Hatuel-Zuckerman did not go to the Olympic Games. Boxer Yehuda Ben Haim also made the long journey from Tehva Tikva to Seoul for nothing, after he was supposed to compete on Yom Kippur against Majir Mahjoub from Morocco and built on the fact that his opponent would not show up for the weigh-in the day before and thus receive a technical victory, but instead that his opponent showed up for the weigh-in and received it himself A technical victory after the Israeli did not make it to the fight.
There were also problems with apparatus gymnast Revital Sharon. She requested special permission to compete at 8:30 p.m., that is, at the end of Yom Kippur, and the matter was indeed settled, but to her astonishment that day she learned that she was assigned to the 11:00 a.m. session at the Olympic Games, contrary to promises, and because she did not appear, she received a score of 0.000. Only after a threat of Israel’s withdrawal did the organizers eventually move her to the final session and allow her to compete.
Yom Kippur is a sensitive issue, but many times Israeli athletes have not even been able to explain to foreigners what the meaning of this day is. In 1996, Celta Vigo moved their game time so that Chaim Rabivo could play and he was substituted in the 70th minute in order to arrive in time for fasting, which made huge headlines in Spain. Even before that, one of the first and most prominent legionnaires, the late defender Avi Cohen, had to face this dilemma when he arrived in Liverpool, and in the end decided, on the advice of his father, to appear in the game against Southampton while fasting and not even drinking water, just because he was afraid of losing your place
In 2009, football coach Nir Klinger informed the management of AL Limassol that he refuses to stand on the lines in the season’s game of the Cypriot league, because he fell on Yom Kippur, and in response he received a letter of dismissal.
Two years earlier, in 2007, the Davis team played against Chile in Ramat Hasharon. On the eve of Yom Kippur, Andy Ram and Yoni Ehrlich went up to the doubles match, which lasted almost until the intermission meal. During the match, which was dragged to five sets, the crowd began to leave the stands and there was fear that the match would be stopped, but the Israeli duo achieved a decision right on the edge and gave Israel an advantage. “There was crazy pressure on us, the referee told us ‘last game, if it doesn’t end now I’ll stop the game’. After all the hustle and victory in this game, in the end we lost. As much as I prayed, after all the fasting in Kippur, nothing helped us.”
A similar thing happened to Andioni also three years later, in a match against Austria at Yad Eliyahu Hall, there Andy Ram He took the microphone and said: “We made it short this time because of Yom Kippur.” Also against Belgium in 2013, the two found themselves in a similar situation, when the media stopped reporting in the middle of the match, and Ram said: “It was one of the crazy victories for me and Yoni in the Davis Cup. A tremendous victory, after we came back from a 2:1 deficit in the sets. A match that lasted over four hours I remember that the match moved to Yom Kippur in Israel, when the fast had not yet started in Belgium, and we won 3:6 in the fifth set, when we know that if we don’t keep Yoni’s serves at the end, we can stop the game and come back after Kippur to complete it. A good end to the game, less good to face – Because despite the victory, we lost 3:2 in the match.”
Apart from the Andioni duo, Dodi Sela retired in the middle of the ATP tournament in Shenzhen in the middle of the quarter-final match because of Yom Kippur and in fact gave up ranking points and the possibility of earning tens of thousands of dollars. Also in basketball, David Blatt gave up his team’s games because of the holiday. There were many others, of course.
Despite the desire to avoid performing at sporting events on Yom Kippur, there are those who have decided to represent the country despite this during Yom Kippur. This is done, for example, in the Israeli equestrian team, which appeared in 2018 at the World Championships held in the United States. If in the past the country was in an uproar because of an Israeli rowing pair that competed in the Olympic Games during Yom Kippur, then the Israeli riders who competed there did so to reach the Olympic Games – and it actually went relatively quietly.
Dr Amichai Alprowitzthe sports director of the Israeli team in show jumping on horses, confirmed this: “Four years ago, on Yom Kippur, the Israeli team competed in the World Equestrian Championship because we were chasing the Olympic criteria. The first day of the competition fell on Yom Kippur and there was no choice. We updated the The sports authorities in the country and no one told us, ‘No, it’s forbidden.’ Legally, the country can’t ban it.”
According to Dr. Alperowitz, there is no obstacle to doing so: “There is no law, regulation or procedure that prohibits someone from competing on Yom Kippur. It’s not exist. It’s like there is no law that prohibits driving on Yom Kippur. It’s just a custom and we respect it. In horses too, the goal was not to compete on Yom Kippur, but in 2018 the world championship was supposed to be in Canada on certain dates and in the end they decided to move it at the last minute to the United States with specific dates that could not be changed. It was important for the Olympic criterion and that’s why we appeared in it. The format of the European or World Championships is five days, and we wanted to compete as late as possible, but in the end it was a lottery and all four competed on Yom Kippur according to local time, with two of them competing on Yom Kippur according to Israel time and two not.”
Indeed, in the State of Israel there is no law that prohibits this. Neither does the Ministry of Culture and Sports recognize such a law or regulation, but there is of course a request to respect Yom Kippur. Such a request was conveyed in an official document addressed to the sports associations and asked them not to compete and represent the country around the world during the holiday, but it apparently does not legally obligate them to do so. That is probably why the equestrian team appeared four years ago at the World Championships and was not punished.
According to the document, entitled “Instructions for the participation of representative sports delegations of the State of Israel”, it reads: “Israeli delegations, groups and individuals, that represent the State of Israel in international events will not participate in sports competitions that will take place on the eve of Yom Kippur. An effort will be made not to take part in any competition, however, an Israeli delegation may participate in the event of a European or World Championship, and in any case of the Israeli delegation participating in an event on these dates, the delegation will mark the date by wearing a black memorial ribbon and in an internal ceremony. At the same time, in the event that the date of the competition or the event falls on these days, an effort will be made ahead of time by the sports bodies and all the factors that can be used to influence the organizers to change the date of the competitions and events.”
Dr. Alperovitch is a researcher of sports culture and policy from the Levinsky-Wingate Academic Center, so he also studied the influence of religion on Israeli sports and wrote a study on the effects of the Seoul Olympics. “It is clear that the Tortan brothers were in the water on Yom Kippur. Did they compete or practice? It’s something else. Today everything is filmed, but in 1988 this competition was not filmed. There were two versions that came in their favor, because there are those who claim that they were in the water and that it was written that they did not finish the cruise or did not start competing. As a researcher, I checked it and found neither this nor that.”
According to him, “The committee claimed that they violated the Olympic Committee’s guidelines and suspended them, but they went to the High Court and the ruling said unequivocally that you cannot punish an athlete if you did not say what the sanction would be if he violated the rules. This was even before the invention of the code of ethics in the Olympic Committee. There was an intention or desire to avoid it as much as possible, but even today it is basically impossible to punish any athlete who competes or plays on Yom Kippur. They came out with justice in their hands, but they did not return to the sport because of the public criticism – and to this day it is a story that no one forgets.”