Editor’s Notes: Countries didn’t ban athletes from flying to Israel, they let the paperwork do it
ZVIKA KLEIN
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 wanted in were kept out by paperwork of friendly governments.
In 1930, a group of Jewish men got on motorcycles in Tel Aviv and rode to Europe.
The first Maccabiah was two years off, and there was no way to invite a scattered people to it. No television. Barely radio. So they rode, thousands of kilometers, community to community, knocking on doors: come to the Land of Israel, come compete. Yosef Yekutieli, the teenager who dreamed the games up in the first place, rode with one of the delegations.
A second group went out in 1931, over 9,000 km. to London and back. They went and fetched the Jewish people in person.
I thought about those riders on Wednesday night at Teddy Stadium, from row 9, where I sat with my two boys.
The ceremony was beautiful. It always is. This year’s torch even crossed the country by motorcycle convoy in tribute to those rides, which I’ll admit I only fully appreciated afterward, reading up on the history at one in the morning instead of sleeping.
Triumphant ceremony opens games
President Isaac Herzog spoke. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke, and there were boos, some. The American section, around 900 of them, was so loud at points you couldn’t hear Michael Harpaz and Montana Tucker calling the parade.
My kids came for the singers, obviously. I came so they would absorb something they can’t get from me at the Shabbat table: that they belong to a people, that Judaism is bigger than our synagogue and our town, that there are Jews in places they’ve never heard of who care about the same things they do. They love sports. This was the night they learned the map that comes with it.
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 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.
There’s a precedent for a Maccabiah defined by absence, and it’s not a comforting one. The 1950 games, the first in the new state, the first after the Holocaust, opened with cannon fire and Yizkor at Ramat Gan.
The great delegations of Polish, Hungarian, Czech, German, Romanian Jews never came. Murdered, most of them. The survivors were behind the Iron Curtain, barred by their own governments from traveling to a Jewish state.
Historians of the games say you could watch the Jewish center of gravity physically move that year, out of Europe, toward the English-speaking world and Israel. Who marched told you where the Jewish people now lived.
Wednesday I stood in Teddy reading the same kind of map. In 1950 the missing were dead or caged by enemies. In 2026 they’re alive, free, and desperate to come, and what stopped them was a form.
There’s another way to read 1950, though. Those games happened in a state that was two years old. Rationing, austerity, survivors arriving faster than anyone could house them. Some of the athletes at Ramat Gan had been in the camps.
Nobody watching the sad little parade of 1950 could have pictured it. Which makes me careful about reading too much doom into 35 flags. We’ve marched short-handed before. Last time it turned out we were just getting started.
Here’s the detail that actually keeps me up, though. Britain, Canada, and South Africa didn’t pull their adult teams first. They pulled the juniors first. The kids. And this is happening while Birthright cohorts and summer programs are suspended on the same insurance logic.
A bond can survive a bad year, fine. But the Maccabiah, like Birthright, is one of the machines that builds the bond in the first place, that takes a 16-year-old from Melbourne or Manchester and makes Israel unimaginable to live without.
Somewhere in Sydney there’s a father who wanted to give his sons the exact night I gave mine, and a risk department decided otherwise. Nobody chose this. That’s what bothers me most. There’s no villain to argue with, just fine print.
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 wanted in were kept out by the paperwork of friendly governments.
The torch went up Wednesday like it always does, and my boys stood on their seats to see it, and it was beautiful, I mean that. On the way out, one of them asked me why some countries had only one athlete. I gave him the short answer. The long answer is this column, and I’m still not sure it’s a good enough one.
The riders of 1930 saw a scattered people and got on motorcycles. In 1950, they held games while new olim – immigrants to Israel – were still in transit camps. I’d like to believe we still have that in us. Watching my boys stand on their seats, I mostly do.
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