BERLIN (EJP)–For the first time since the end of WWII, Berlin hosts the 14th European Maccabi Games, dubbed the “Jewish Olympics, ” at the site of the 1936 “Nazi Games”. “But I would say that the younger generation was able to convince the older generation that it is right, and the time is right to hold the European Maccabi Games in Berlin, without forgetting the past”, Osterer said.
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“These are the games of reconciliation”, Maccabi Germany president Alon Meyer said of the 10-day event in which 2,300 athletes from 36 countries will compete.
“There were a lot of people who said that they would never in their lives step again on German soil and we have to respect that”, Alon Meyer, the president of Maccabi Germany, the group organizing the game, told a group of foreign journalists.
After a memorial service yesterday in the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, German President Joachim Gauck will today kick off the games as 15,000 spectators watch at the Waldbüehne, an amphitheatre near the stadium where Adolf Hitler opened the 1936 Summer Olympics. “Jewish athletes demonstrate that we Jews are a part of Europe, we belong to Germany – and we won’t let anybody take that away from us”.
Getty ImagesAdolf Hitler watching the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Nazi authorities barred all German Jews, or people with Jewish ancestry, from competing, with the exception of fencer Helene Mayer, who competed even though her father was Jewish.
The European Maccabi Games, which take place every four years and were last held in Vienna, feature traditional sports like basketball, football, field hockey and swimming, but also chess and bridge.
Anna Jaffe, left, from the US watches her compatriot rider Katie Resnick during a dressage training session at the European Maccabi Games in Berlin, Germany, Tuesday, July 28, 2015.
“It obviously has greater significance because of the location of this event, for Jews to be in Berlin … it’s a massive statement for us and Germans”, he told the Guardian. He added that the police should be able to meet the challenge.
American athlete Jesse Owens at the finish line of the 1936 Olympics.
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The Maccabi Games were first held in 1929 and 1930 in Prague and Antwerp respectively, but they were soon discontinued with the rise of the Nazis. Athletes, managers and staff received a tour of the area, looking at the period between 1750 and 1871 – the development of modern Judaism and its connection with Jewish life in Britain today, while also taking in part of an educational activity on British Identity vs Jewish identity. For the first time, 70 years after the end of the Second World War and 50 years after the resumption of diplomatic relations between Germany and Israel, more than 2,000 athletes from 36 countries around the world will compete in 19 sports at the Olympic Park. To sum it up in one word: “normal”.
