Yeshiva University Basketball Team Won’t Play On Shabbat At March Madness
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
(JTA) — The Yeshiva University men’s basketball team won’t have to worry about playing on Shabbat in the opening round of the NCAA Division III tournament.
The team announced Tuesday in a post on its Facebook page that its game against York College in Pennsylvania will take place at 1 p.m. Friday. The original schedule had Y.U., the flagship university of Modern Orthodox Judaism, playing at 1 p.m. Saturday.
“They are keenly aware of our restrictions – they’ve been talking about how to accommodate us since at least Saturday evening,” Yeshiva’s athletic director, Joe Bednarsh, told The Times of Israel on Tuesday, hours before the schedule was finalized.
If the Maccabees (18-10) defeat York (23-4), champions of the Capital Athletic Conference, they will advance to play at 8:30 p.m. Saturday in York against the winner of the Nazareth-Hamilton first-round game.
On Sunday, Y.U. defeated Purchase College, 87-81, in Purchase, New York, to win the Skyline Conference championship and its first berth in the national tournament.
Bednarsh said after the victory that people from all over the world have been following the squad’s run to the championship.
“People have been reaching out to me about this team from Thailand, South Africa, Argentina, Israel, England and more,” he said. “The Maccabees are truly the pride of the Jewish people.”
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.
