Jewish wrestler Amit Elor wins gold for US in Paris Olympics, extending 5-year undefeated streak
Elor, 20 and the daughter of Israeli immigrants, is the youngest-ever American wrestler to win a gold medal
Amit Elor celebrates during the bronze medal match of the Wrestling Senior World Championships, Sept. 21, 2023, in Belgrade, Serbia. (Kadir Caliskan – United World Wrestling/Getty Images)
(JTA) — Amit Elor is leaving the Paris Olympics the same way she went in: undefeated.
Elor, who is Jewish and the daughter of Israeli immigrants who moved to the United States to train as athletes, bested Kyrgyzstan’s Meerim Zhumanazarova 3-0 in the gold medal contest Tuesday evening to extend a five-year winning streak.
The win makes Elor, 20, the all-time youngest U.S. gold medalist in wrestling.
It also means that she joins a handful of other Jewish wrestlers to win gold medals on the mat. Károly Kárpáti of Hungary won gold at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin; he was later imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, where he witnessed the murder of gold medalist fencer Attila Petschauer but survived. Henry Wittenberg won gold for the United States in 1948 despite tearing several tendons in an earlier match; he went on to help launch Israel’s Maccabiah Games and coach wrestling at Yeshiva University. An annual national Jewish high school wrestling tournament bears his name.
Elor, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who moved to Israel, experienced both online antisemitism and the sudden deaths of both her father and a brother during the years when she broke into the elite ranks of U.S. women’s wrestlers. She wrestles at the 68-kilogram weight class and in October became the youngest American wrestler — male or female — ever to win a senior world title.
“It killed me at the time that he didn’t see that,” she said, referring to her father Yair Elor. “He would have been so proud.”
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