Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

German Jewish Athletes Belatedly Recognized

As summer approaches, sports fans may worry about the progress of the Mets’ rookie first baseman Isaac Benjamin “Ike” Davis, of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry, and use Sandy Koufax’s recent White House visit to remind everyone that the “only Jewish left-hander not named Sandy Koufax to toss two no-hitters” was Ken Holtzman.

The overpowering passion for Yiddishe sports has also struck Europe in the form of a book from the Göttingen publisher Verlag Die Werkstatt: “Jewish Sports and Sporting Jews in Germany: An Annotated Bibliography.” The book astutely traces what happened to Jews in Germany’s sports world before, during, and after the Nazi period.

This is essential and timely subject matter. After all, the German Jewish high jumper Gretel Bergmann, now 96, only received the national record due her last year. The German Athletics Federation was reportedly swayed to do so by the release of “Berlin 36,” a German film that, as the London Times reported, “tells how Nazis replaced Jewish woman athlete for man in drag.”

For all her achievements and belated recognition, Gretel Bergmann is far from the only Jewish athlete with a fascinating story (although possibly the only one with a Nazi drag queen rival). Also discussed in “Jewish Sports and Sporting Jews in Germany” is Zishe Breitbart, born Siegmund Breitbart to an Orthodox Jewish family of blacksmiths in Łódź, Poland.

Like Bergmann, Breitbart has attracted on-screen attention with Werner Herzog’s 2001 fictionalized biopic “Invincible.” Despite the film’s title, Breitbart, who sought to transform physically slack ghetto Jews into athletes, was himself vanquished by blood poisoning at the early age of 42.

Other German Jewish athletic greats have not benefited from movie fame, however, like the gymnast Alfred Flatow, a gold medalist at the 1896 Athens Summer Olympics. Flatow and his cousin Gustav, also an accomplished gymnast, were both murdered in their 70s in Theresienstadt. Honored in modern Germany with a 1996 postage stamp, the Flatows have been relatively little commemorated outside their homeland.

Nor is the Hungarian Jewish soccer player and coach Béla Guttmann a household name outside central Europe, despite his association, starting in 1922, with the renowned Sport Club Hakoah Wien, an all-star, all-Jewish soccer team which thrived until the 1938 Anschluss. Their adventures are described in “Star of David and Leather Ball: the Story of Jews in German and International Soccer,” another title from Werkstatt. German Jewish athletes, forerunners of today’s Maccabiah Games, take your places!

Watch Gretel Bergmann, who for many years has gone by the name of Margaret Lambert, describe her 1936 Berlin Olympics experience:

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.