Celebrating successful Jewish people in sports

There were nine people inducted into the Jewish Sports Heritage Association’s Hall of Fame and a half dozen award winners, and the common bond, along with being Jewish, is that all have made an impact on their respective sports and people.

Woodmere resident Elliot Steinmetz is the association’s inaugural Marty Riger Outstanding Jewish Coach of the Year Award winner. Steinmetz, the men’s basketball coach at Yeshiva University, revitalized a moribund program that now has a national profile.

Steinmetz has coached the Maccabees for the past nine seasons. In that time the team became a Skyline Conference power and then gained prominence with a 50-game winning streak that stretched from November 2019 to December 2021. The Macs were also ranked No. 1 in Division for five weeks during the 2021-22 season.

After receiving the phone call from Alan Freedman, the association’s executive director, Steinmetz said he Googled Marty Riger.

“You can’t find a non-positive thing about coach Riger anywhere,” Steinmetz said, before the April 23 ceremony began at Temple Israel of Lawrence. “The reason I accepted is I hope one day, a long time from now, people will want to talk about me, I don’t care a thing about Xs and Os or basketball, but in the way he impacted peoples’ lives people will be able to say that about me, that I was able to impact their lives in a positive way.”

Riger coached a combined 27 years at Brentwood High School and Maccabi teams, and was known not only for his success but as a coach who cared about his players and helped them navigate difficult off the court situations.

The Jewish Sports Heritage Association was founded by Freedman to educate the public about Jewish men and women in sports. In 1993, he established and became director of the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame & Museum at the Suffolk Y in Commack.

For Steinmetz the importance of highlighting Jewish people in sports harks to the late Menachem Begin, a former prime minister of Israel, saying, “I am not a Jew with trembling knees,” the usual stereotypes of athletic Jews and the growing antisemitism.

“To have that idea of the athletic, strong, accomplishing, successful Jew in that arena and showing that we can compete in that area,” Steinmetz said. “We are 2 percent of the population and we probably have more that in the sports world. It is important and bolsters that change in that stereotype.”

A summer trip to Israel opened Riley Weiss’s eyes to a population of Jewish athletes the former Hewlett High School basketball star did not know existed.

“Going to this past summer, I feel really brought me closer to my Jewish heritage and just getting this award is a huge honor, Weiss said. ” I didn’t know how large the Jewish athletic community was ‘til Israel, and there are thousands of Jewish athletes playing from all over the country and all over the world, so that definitely opened my eyes a bit to how big the Jewish athletic community is.”

Weiss, who was one of the two Michael Freedman Outstanding Jewish High School Athletes of the Year, grew up around basketball, as her father, Jeff, was the boys’ hoops coach at Lawrence Woodmere Academy for 30 years.

“Hanging around his practices, watching, going to his games, shooting around at halftime at those games, being around all the guys on the team, they were like family to me,” said Riley, who graduated from a Florida high school, but will be returning to New York as a Columbia University student.

Hall of Fame inductee Gerald “Jerry” Eskenazi, a Long Islander for many years, had 8,000 bylines in The New York Times and wrote 15 books, including “The Thinking Man’s Guide to Hockey,” “A Sportswriter’s Life,” and “Gang Green,” a behind the scenes history of the Jets.

Eskenazi blended his sportswriting career and his religion in a story about covering a day game at Yankee Stadium on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. The Yankees and Cleveland were tied in the ninth inning, when the home team put runners on first and third and Ron Blomberg, who is Jewish, strode to the plate and delivered a game-winning base hit.

“I made it home to get my siddur and make it to synagogue and the headline was ‘Sundown Kid gets deadline single,’” Eskenazi said with a smile on his face.