JNS
“Sports has healing power,” Natan Cohen, director of marketing for NCSY, told JNS. “The court, from tipoff to final buzzer, is a place where the war isn’t happening.”
Last week, 19 Israeli high school basketball players from the Hapoel Eshkol team, displaced from the Eshkol region near the Gaza Strip, visited New York to play again.
At a game against Manhattan’s Jewish Ramaz School that ended in a 45-45 tie on Thursday, Guy Moses Auerbach, the team’s 19-year-old captain, said “each and every one of us evacuated from different places.”
“All the team split up. We haven’t played at all this season,” he said.
Team members lost family members, a coach and their homes. Hamas kidnapped some of the players’ relatives, and player Noam Or was held hostage in Gaza for 50 days. Following his liberation, Or learned of the murders of both his parents.
The Project 24 nonprofit organized a 10-day trip to bring together the Israeli student basketball players in New York.
Project 24’s founder Daniel Gradus said the students “need something else, they need healing, they need hugging.
“When they play basketball it clears their minds,” he said.
“Sports has healing power. These kids have had their lives upended, including their vision for how their season would turnout,” Natan Cohen, the director of marketing for NCSY, told JNS. “It may seem trivial at first glance, but to these kids it has special meaning. The court, from tipoff to final buzzer, is a place where the war isn’t happening.”
Moses Auerbach’s grandfather Gadi Moses remains a captive of the Hamas terrorists. Moses Auerbach called basketball his “way of life” and where he goes when he wants “to be disconnected from the world.”
The trip featured seven games and scrimmages with other youth
“It’s really fun to just get the whole team together and play basketball once again,” Moses Auerbach said.
The trip also included such diversions as a Knicks playoff game, a Yankees game, a WNBA game between the New York Liberty and Chicago Sky and a performance of “Lion King” on Broadway.
