Ping Pong Prodigy Won’t Play on Shabbat
Estee Ackerman, an 11-year-old table tennis star, was disqualified from the national finals when her match fell on Friday evening and she chose not to play, the New York Post reported.
“I practiced and trained for six months for this,” the sixth-grader from West Hempstead, L.I. told the paper “Ping pong is important to me, but my religion of Judaism is also very important to me.”
Estee is currently the nation’s No. 4 ranked player in the 8-to-11 age bracket.
“She had a Shabbos-over-sports moment,” her father, Glenn Ackerman, a funeral home director, told the paper.
Neither father nor daughter blame USA Table Tennis, the sport’s governing body, because nearly 800 players were playing in the five-day event in Las Vegas last month.
The pull-out did not affect Estee’s ranking and she is still considering an intensive trip to China to hone her ping pong skills.
The story is reminiscent of that of Naomi Kutin, a New Jersey weightlifter who refuses to compete on shabbat. She lifts twice her weight and is considered by many to be the strongest girl in the world.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
