96-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor Olympian Wins Israel Prize
Agnes Keleti. Image by Haaretz
By Naomi Zeveloff February 15, 2017
Israel awarded its highest honor today, the Israel Prize, to 96-year-old Agnes Keleti, who survived the Holocaust to become an Olympics gold medal gymnast.
Born in Hungary, Keleti immigrated in Israel in 1957. A founder of Israeli gymnastics, she worked in the field for more than 50 years, Haaretz reported.
She survived the Holocaust by using an alias, working as a maid and in a factory. While her father and extended family died in Auschwitz, her mother and sister survived with the help of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.
Keleti was a gold medal winner at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics and the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. She holds more Olympic medals than any other Israeli, and is second only to American swimmer Mark Spitz in number of Olympic medals held by a Jew.
Contact Naomi Zeveloff at [email protected]
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
