There’s a story in Dan Grunfeld’s book, “By the Grace of the Game: The Holocaust, A Basketball Legacy, and an Unprecedented American Dream,” that everyone seems to reference when talking about it.
Grunfeld’s grandparents, both Holocaust survivors, immigrants to the U.S. and shopkeepers who worked day and night, finally attended a high school basketball game of their son, Ernie Grunfeld. Everyone in the crowd was cheering for Ernie, chanting his name; he was the standout player on the team. His parents had no idea.
It is this story and others that Grunfeld will speak about at Congregation Beth El in Yardley on April 12. The event, “Commemorating Yom HaShoah: An Afternoon with Dan Grunfeld,” will do what its name suggests: recognize the Holocaust remembrance day. And it will do so with one of the more unique Holocaust survival stories out there.
Ernie Grunfeld’s mother, Livia “Lily” Grunfeld, got protective papers from a Swedish diplomat to save herself and 17 others. Ernie’s father, Alex Grunfeld, survived a forced-labor camp in Hungary. The couple met when Lily returned to her Romanian hometown after the war and was introduced to a local shop owner, Alex Grunfeld, by her brother, also a survivor of that forced-labor camp in Hungary.
After the family arrived in the U.S. in 1964, Ernie, the couple’s second son, began playing basketball on the streets of Queens, New York. Through years of practice, he built his skillset, and he ultimately grew into a standout at Forest Hills High School and the University of Tennessee, a gold medalist with the U.S. Olympic team in 1976 and the 11th pick in the NBA Draft in 1977.
After a career in the NBA as a valuable role player, Grunfeld went on to a lengthy career as an executive with the New York Knicks, Milwaukee Bucks and Washington Wizards. He helped build the Knicks’ Patrick Ewing teams in the 1990s that competed for Finals trips; the Bucks’ 2001 team, led by Ray Allen, that lost to the 76ers in the Eastern Conference Finals; and the Wizards’ teams, first with Gilbert Arenas and Antawn Jamison and later with John Wall and Bradley Beal, that made repeated playoff appearances.
“This really is about perseverance,” said Matt Julin, the president of the Men’s Club at Beth El, which is organizing the event. “It’s the American dream in a lot of ways.”
It’s also tragic.
Lily Grunfeld lost her parents and five of her nine siblings at Auschwitz and a labor camp in Ukraine. Alex Grunfeld lost his parents and both of his sisters to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Even after they got to the U.S., the Grunfelds lost their oldest son, Lutzi, to leukemia. That was part of the reason why Ernie lost himself in basketball, according to Dan Grunfeld.
“People think it’s a sports book, but it’s not. It’s also not a Holocaust book. It’s a book about a Jewish family,” Dan Grunfeld said.
Grunfeld, himself a basketball player at Stanford University in the 2000s, published the book in 2021. Upon its publication, Rabbi Ami Monson, Beth El’s current spiritual leader, helped him promote it.
Monson, then working at a synagogue in New York, knew Grunfeld from the 2009 Maccabiah Games in Israel. The rabbi was serving as program director for Maccabi USA, while Grunfeld was playing for Team USA in basketball. The two met, connected and became friends.
At the time of publication, Monson emailed 12-15 rabbis and synagogue leaders to see if they’d be interested in hosting Grunfeld to speak.
“He ended up doing a number of gigs on those emails,” the rabbi said.
Monson became the spiritual leader at Beth El last summer. After he got the job, he told Julin about Grunfeld and the book. Both agreed that it would make for a great Holocaust Remembrance Day event.
“Everybody was behind it,” the rabbi said of other synagogue leaders. “It’s just a great story.”
The event is not limited to Beth El. Another Bucks County synagogue, Shir Ami in Newtown, and its executive director, Brent Osborne, are helping to promote it.
Tickets are still available at bethelyardley.org and shirami.org. Monson hopes to see at least a couple of hundred people at the event.
“Our goal was to make it a Bucks County community event,” he said.