A movement that began because Jews were shut out of a gym in Constantinople built games so Jews could always get in. This year, Jews who wan
By ZVIKA KLEIN
Which is why I couldn’t stop counting flags.
Austria: one athlete. One. Belgium, barely more. South Africa, which for decades sent big, noisy, proud delegations, was down to a handful. And Australia, usually among the largest teams at any Maccabiah, essentially wasn’t there.
The Australian story deserves to be told properly. Maccabi Australia withdrew its whole delegation, roughly 300 athletes and 60 staff who had trained for two years, because Canberra’s travel advice for Israel sits at “do not travel,” the most severe level.
The few Australians who marched came as individuals on borrowed teams. Remember, this is the community that buried four of its own after the bridge collapse at the 1997 games and still came back, game after game. For them, staying home is enormous.
In the stands Wednesday, I heard the rumor version: that some countries have banned their citizens from flying here. Not true, and I checked, because that’s the job.
No government has forbidden anyone anything. What they’ve done is raise advisories to “reconsider travel” or “do not travel,” which voids travel insurance, which makes it legally impossible for a national federation to send a team.
The athletes were never banned. The paperwork did it for everyone, quietly, and nobody had to say the word out loud.
Organizers put the parade at around 5,000 athletes from roughly 35 countries. Four years ago it was 10,000 from about 70. Israel marched more than 2,200, the biggest delegation on the field by a mile. The US came close to a thousand.
In 2022 they brought a sitting president; this time they didn’t need one. And here’s what those two delegations prove, between them: wherever Jews were free to come, they came, in force. So the missing didn’t stay home because their love ran out. An advisory made the trip uninsurable and a federation liable, and that was that.
Some history, because it changes how you read the whole night. The first Maccabi club was founded in 1895 in Constantinople, by Jewish gymnasts who were refused membership in a local sports club for being Jews. They built their own. Out of that came the movement, and out of the movement came the games, and the games of the 1930s picked up a nickname: the Aliyah Olympics. Athletes arrived and didn’t leave.
In 1935, the Bulgarian delegation sailed into Jaffa, 350 people and an orchestra, competed, and stayed. They shipped the equipment home without them. The Maccabiah was a side door into the land at the exact moment the world was bolting its front doors against us. You came for the games and the games became your way home.
