By Jon Marks
It’s coming up on 53 years since that fateful Sept. 5, 1972, day Alon Howard says he’ll never forget. And he says none of us should, either.
After all, he easily could’ve been with his fellow Israelis in the Olympic Village in Munich had he not turned down his coach Moshe Weinberg’s invitation in order to stay with a friend instead. He easily could’ve been another victim of the horrific attack on the Israeli team that took 11 lives, rather than the man relating his story at Maccabi USA’s “A Mirror of Israel” program at the Kaiserman JCC in early April.
“It’s never changed and always been there,” said Howard — pronounced “Ho-vard” in Hebrew — at the event promoting Maccabi wrestling, even though the sport won’t be included in the upcoming Maccabiah Games. “It’s like yesterday. I was extremely close to my coach. We had a special relationship. I was about 11 years old when I started wrestling in Israel. We spent a lot of years together and he was my idol.”
That coach was Weinberg, who brought the then 17-year-old Howard to Munich as a member of the Israeli junior wrestling team, ostensibly hoping to gear up his training in preparation for the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. Howard and the rest of the junior team were staying outside the main Olympic Village.
“They had a different village for the youth teams from every country,” he explained of the chain of events. “To get to the Olympic Village, we needed to take a train. My coach asked me to sleep over, but I said, ’I need to rest to compete. I’ll meet you the next morning.’”
Of course, that meeting never took place once Palestinian Black September terrorists broke into the Olympic Village early the following morning, killed a resistant Weinberg and weightlifter Yossef Ramano and then took the rest hostage. When an attempted airport rescue was botched by German police that night, all of them were killed. Knowing his life could’ve ended that day continues to resonate with Howard, who eventually moved from Israel to Huntingdon Valley, where he met his wife, raised a son, Gabe, and two daughters, Leah and Sarah. As painful as those memories are, he makes it a point to tell his story at events like this.
“I do this so people will know,” said Howard, who retired from wrestling two years after Munich but has remained involved with Maccabi. “I want the people, the young generation, to remember what happened in Munich (in) 1972. We don’t want to forget about them. Every opportunity to speak, I try to do it. They’re all curious to hear about it.”
While what might’ve been how Howard’s end took place nearly 53 years ago, the story continues to be passed down from one generation to the next. That’s especially the case in the wrestling community, which Howard’s remained a part of, speaking at the JCC Maccabi Games and once lighting the torch when they were held in Cherry Hill in 1999.
Now the mantle has been passed down to current Maccabi USA wrestling coach Rob Prebish, who learned about Munich in a unique way.
“Of course, growing up you heard about the Munich massacre,” said Prebish, who’s hoping to take a contingent of wrestlers to Israel this summer to compete in their own makeshift tournament. “But actually, in 1989 we trained in Israel at the gym of one of the athletes that was killed, weightlifter David Berger. There was a little sign there that said, ‘In memory of David Berger.’”
Prebish has encountered roadblocks getting the sport back into the Maccabiah Games.
“In 2022, we were kind of a demonstration sport, not in the official program,” he said. “Because in order to be in the official program you have to have at least four countries represented. We only had two, Israel and the U.S. From that point forward, we tried to secure more entries and nobody seemed to want to help.”
But Prebish and USA Maccabi wrestling chair David Groverman will keep pushing, which is why they held an unofficial tournament at Kaiserman on April 6.
“I firmly believe the Maccabi movement is essential for Jewish athletes,” said Prebish, a high school coach in Richmond, Virginia. “It’s essential in their growth as people to experience our homeland and to walk in the steps of our forefathers and foremothers. We’ve worked really hard over the last two and a half years to try to bring wrestling back to the (Maccabiah) Games. I’m disappointed because when you march out of that tunnel and see the sea of people and everything around you, it’s a spectacle you can’t really explain unless you experience it. I want our wrestlers to experience that again.”
So does Alon Howard, who has passed his story on to his children and to generations he hopes will follow his lead, only without the kind of tragedy he still lives with nearly 53 years later.
“I was just a little boy when my dad told me what happened,” recalled his son Gabe, whose wife had just given birth to a girl — Alon’s eighth grandchild — the day before. “It wasn’t until I researched on my own that I really saw the worldwide influence the situation had. I knew it meant a lot to my dad and my family. I didn’t realize how big an event it was. I didn’t understand the magnitude and how special I was to even be alive.”
Besides that, Alon Howard has one other special connection to Munich thanks to his late coach.
“Moshe Weinberg’s wife [Mimi] introduced us to each other in 1980,” said his wife, Jodie. “He didn’t like to talk about it then. But it’s very important to him now to keep the memory alive of the 11 athletes so the world will not forget.”
Jon Marks is a Philadelphia-area freelance writer.
Amazing article