The setting and timing for a phone interview for this story were coincidentally exquisite.
It took place on Sunday, July 14, less than two weeks before the start of the Paris Olympics on July 26. A television screen during the interview showed the field at Berlin’s Olympiastadion ahead of that evening’s Euro 2024 football (soccer) championship game.
The stadium was the scene in 1936 of some of the Olympics’ most powerful moments. It was where American runner Jesse Owens, a black man, earned four gold medals and thereby punctured the Aryan-racial-superiority doctrine of German chancellor Adolf Hitler, who was in attendance.
It also is where a painful snub occurred. Owens’ teammates on the United States’ 100-meter relay squad, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, both Jewish, were removed by American track coach Dean Cromwell. Glickman and others believed that he did so to appease Hitler.

The greatest tragedy in Olympics history, of course, occurred elsewhere in Germany, when Palestinian terrorists in Munich kidnapped and murdered 11 members of Israel’s delegation in 1972.
In recent decades, the Olympics’ most accomplished Jewish athletes have been Americans and Israelis. Previously, the greatest Jewish Olympians came from throughout Europe, especially the USSR. In all, Jewish Olympic medalists have represented 16 European countries, counting Russia and Ukraine following the Soviet Union’s disintegration.

This will be Paris’ third Summer Olympics and its first since 1924. That year’s winner in the Olympics’ premier event, the 100-meter dash, was Harold Abrahams, a British Jew. He was one of the protagonists of the 1981 Academy Award-winning feature film, Chariots of Fire.

Perhaps France’s greatest Jewish athlete was fencer Alexander Lippmann, who earned two golds, two silvers and a bronze in the Olympics of 1908, 1920 and 1924. Another outstanding French fencer was Yves Dreyfus, who competed in three Olympics and earned bronze medals in 1956 and 1964.
Among the first Jewish medalists were German gymnasts Alfred Flatow and his cousin Gustav Felix Flatow, who combined for five gold medals and a silver medal at Athens in 1896 in the first modern Olympics. Attila Pettschauer won two golds and a silver for Hungary in fencing in 1928 and 1932. Five Jewish members of the Netherlands’ women’s gymnastics team earned golds in 1928. The Flatows, Pettschauer and the Dutch quintet — and their coach — were among Olympians murdered during the Shoah.

A discussion of the greatest Jewish Olympians must include (along with American swimmers Mark Spitz and Dara Torres) Hungarian gymnast Ágnes Keleti, who in 1952 and 1956 earned ten medals, five of them gold. Keleti, now 103 years old, survived the Shoah in Budapest, defected to Australia during the ’56 Games in Melbourne and the next year moved to Israel, where she lived for many years.

Stuart Lustigman, a member of the executive committee of the Israel-based International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame (IJSHF), remembers two English Jews who made an impression on him growing up in London: fencer Allan Jay, who competed in five Olympics, earning two silver medals in 1960; and runner David Segal, a two-time Olympian who earned a bronze in the 4×100 relay, also in 1960.
“I was in awe of their success,” Lustigman said.
Not only athletes have made their marks on the Olympics. Ludwig Guttmann was a German-Jewish physician who fled to England before World War II and established what became the Paralympic Games: athletic competitions for those with serious injuries and conditions. The Paralympics are held in host cities following each Olympics’ conclusion. (They will begin in Paris on August 28.)

Ferenc Kemeny, a Hungarian Jew, was a co-founder of the International Olympic Committee and helped to revive the Olympic movement with the Athens Games in 1896.
Despite Kemeny’s accomplishments — he was among those who established the Hungarian Olympic Committee — he became “a target of frequent anti-Semitism from other HOC members,” according to the IJSHF’s website. “These attacks eventually resulted in his resignation in 1907, as Hungary’s IOC representative and from sports life itself.”
Kemeny and his wife would commit suicide in 1944 after being arrested by Hungary’s fascist Arrow Cross party, the website states.
Asked where European Jews most prominently made their mark in sports, Jed Margolis, IJSHF’s chairman, mentioned German and Austrian athletes who excelled early in the 20th Century despite enduring anti-Jewish discrimination in their hometowns’ sports federations.


Vienna’s Hakoah Sports Club was one of the Jewish communal organizations that filled the athletic void then. It was best known for producing a top Jewish football team that played internationally — as well as Olympians in many other sports.

As to the Paris Games, Margolis offered this prediction: “We will come home with some jewelry.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler may be reached at [email protected].