I was only three years old when our nation – and the world – learned of the terrible news at the first Olympic Games of my lifetime.
Even though I could not understand what had transpired, as a Jew, and rabbi of Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple, I have lived adjacent to that story for the length of my life. We all have.
On that fateful day, Jim McKay, ABC’s Olympic broadcasting anchor, shared the impossible news just after 3:00am in the morning:
I’ve just gotten the final word. When I was a kid, my father used to say our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized. Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They’ve now said that there were eleven hostages. Two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning. Nine were killed at the airport tonight.
They’re all gone.
The Munich Massacre, as it has come to be known, occurred during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich in southern West Germany. Members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage and eventually killed by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September. Eleven Israeli athletes and coaches and a West German police officer were killed. It was a time before ubiquitous “Breaking News” alerts appeared on smartphones or were transmitted from the many 24-hour news networks in the media.
This month marks the fiftieth year that we commemorate those slain members of the Israel delegation to the Olympics. One of the slain, David Berger, was raised at our synagogue…and eventually eulogized in this very sanctuary. On September 9, 1972, the New York Times published a piece on Berger’s funeral.
Here is an excerpt:
Nearly 800 attended the services at Fairmount Temple in suburban Beachwood, where Rabbi Lelyveld is spiritual leader. The temple is not far from the home of Mr. Berger’s parents, Dr. and Mrs. Benjamin Berger. Security was tight and the police inspected briefcases of persons entering the sanctuary for the service. There were no incidents.
During the 35‐minute service Mr. Berger’s body, still in the white pine coffin in which it was returned from Munich in an Air Force jet last night, was in the front of the…sanctuary.
I reached out to David’s brother, Fred, who shared how his brother’s “dedication was something I always admired…he was extremely smart and had a mischievous sense of humor.”
David Berger was indeed smart. He excelled at Shaker Heights High School, and attended both Tulane University and Columbia University, where he received his M.B.A. and a law degree. He was passionate about wrestling, and made Aliya to Israel with hopes to make his new country’s 1972 Olympic team – and realized that goal!
David loved Israel, and when he moved to Jerusalem, he was one of the first to teach sports, and specifically weightlifting, to the disabled. His intention was to open up a law office in Israel after completing his compulsory military service, but those dreams would soon be dashed. After David’s arrival in Munich, his siblings, Barbara and Fred visited him there. The periodical, Sports Illustrated, published the following about the days leading up to the massacre:
While their parents stayed home during the Games, Fred and Barbara Berger traveled to Munich, where Barbara visited David in the Olympic Village, using only a borrowed Israeli team jacket as identification. On Sept. 4, two days after David failed to place in his event, the three siblings went out for a late-night snack. “When will we see you again?” Barbara asked. David’s joking response was ominous: “I’ll be home for weddings and funerals.”
When the Black September terrorists broke into the Olympic village, they took Berger and his roommates’ hostage. He is believed to be beaten in order to intimidate the other hostages. After tense negotiations, the terrorists and hostages, including Berger, were transferred to a German airbase where the terrorists hoped to be flown to an Arab-friendly country.
In an effort to thwart that plan, German authorities engaged in a two-hour gunfight that resulted in the hostages being killed, including Berger.
When President Richard Nixon called David’s father, Ben, to ask him how he can assist in a tragic circumstance Ben asked him to send his son’s body home so he could be given a proper funeral service and burial. Of the eleven slain Israeli Olympians, only David Berger was buried outside of the land of Israel. You can visit his grave and pay him tribute where his body was buried at Mayfield Cemetery.
A moving tribute to David Berger is exhibited just a short way from here on the grounds of the Mandel Jewish Community Center. The Memorial is made of steel, and features the five Olympic rings broken in half, “symbolizing the interruption and the cancellation of the Munich games by the tragic events”, as the memorial site states. Those rings rest on eleven segments representing the eleven slain. One of the segments is shaped differently, and represents David Berger’s unique story.
The majority of those broken rings are set in an upward fashion, suggesting “the peaceful intent of the Olympics, a search for understanding and hope for the future.”
That is all very beautiful, but for 49 years the leaders of the Olympic Games refused to honor the lives of those Israeli athletes and coaches, only making a passing reference in 1996. It was only last year, at the Tokyo Olympics, that the Olympic Committee finally honored David and the rest of his delegation during the Opening Ceremony. Why did it take so long? Ben Berger, David’s dad, who did not live to see that Tokyo ceremony said, “They didn’t need people to remember the athletes, because they wanted everyone to forget the incident”.
Would those athletes have been remembered if they were not part of an Israeli delegation? I can imagine they would.
Instead of honoring the humanity of the slain eleven, the Olympic Committees of the past punted on the issue time and again because of how it might look to the world to raise up the memory of Israeli citizens.
The five Olympic rings were chosen to represent the five inhabited continents in the world: the Americas, Europe, Asia, Oceania and Africa. The rings are linked, designed to embody a unified world. As I look to the David Berger memorial, I think about those broken rings. They were designed to represent the temporary stoppage of the ’72 games, but I also view them as representative of the brokenness of how much of the world views the State of Israel – and penalizes those who support it.
One final point. In 1967 the Jewish world felt euphoria after Israel miraculously won the six-day war, avoiding the aggressive overtures of four neighboring hostile nations. In 1973 that euphoria was tempered by a hard-fought – and hard-won – Yom Kippur War.
In the aftermath of the war, Prime Minister Gold Meir, and the Israeli military establishment, received harsh criticism as to its the readiness against a coalition of Arab states, led by Egypt and Syria.
It was a sobering time, and the song, Lu Y’hi became its anthem. Seen by some as an analog to the Beatles’ famous song, “Let it Be”, Lu Y’hi could be viewed by some as a chorus of resignation. But in reality, Lu Y’hi means something like “If only”, suggesting a position of humility…but hope, too.
Humility that the world is not as good as we would like it to be, but also hope for a better outcome.
In Lu Y’hi, one of the stanzas features the following words:
And if suddenly the dark should shine
The light of a star on our faces
All that we ask for, let it be
Give peace and also strength,
To all those we love…
All that we ask for, let it be…
David Berger and the rest of his compatriots did not return home, and still we must be ever vigilant to the hate that still exists in the world, but we must always be hopeful that “there is yet a white sail on the horizon, set against the dark and heavy clouds”.