The Fallen Members of the Israeli Team
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Amitzur Shapira was born July 9, 1932 in Tel Aviv. He was Israel’s top track and field coach. He was a top short distance runner and long jumper in Israel in the 1950s and became an instructor at Israel’s national center for physical education, in Netanya. He lived in Herzliya, with his wife and four children.
Andrei Spitzer was born in Transylvania, Romania on July 4, 1945. At age 11, Andrei and his mother made aliyah to Israel in 1964. He served in the Israeli Air Force and attended the Israeli National Sport Academy to study fencing, and subsequently became head coach of the Israeli fencing academy.
David Mark Berger was born on May 24, 1944 in Shaker Heights, a neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio. He was a National Merit Scholar who won bronze and gold medals in the 1965 and 1969 Maccabiah Games in Israel, respectively. In 1969 he was a gold medalist at the U.S. Junior National Weightlifting competition.
Born in Riga, Latvia on June 18, 1948, Halfin had competed for 11 years in school and junior national competitions in lightweight, freestyle wrestling.
Kehat Shorr, an expert marksman, was born Feb. 21, 1919 in Romania. At 53, he was a civil servant in Israel’s Defense Ministry, living in Neve Sharrett, a suburb of Tel Aviv, with his wife and daughter, when he attended the 20th Olympics in Munich in 1972 as a marksmanship coach.
Mark Slavin was born Jan. 31, 1954, and he was scheduled to participate in Greco-Roman wrestling in the middleweight class. The Games were to be his first international competition.
Moshe Weinberg, a prize-winning wrestler and coach of Israel’s 1972 Olympic wrestling team, was a fighter through and through. Born in Israel in 1939, he was the Israeli middleweight wrestling champion in Greco-Roman and freestyle wrestling for most of a decade.
Yakov Springer, an international weightlifting referee in Israel’s delegation to the 1972 Munich Olympics, was born in 1921 in Poland and grew up in Warsaw. During World War II, he lived with his family in the Kalish ghetto in Poland. At age 18, he fled to Russia, leaving behind his family, all of whom perished in the Holocaust.
Yossef Gutfreund was born in Romania on Nov. 1, 1931. He was Israel’s only Class A wrestling referee. The 1972 Munich Olympics were the third in which he participated.
Yossef Romano was a big but gentle man, a sports fanatic, someone whose smile was wide and frequent. One of 11 children, he was born in Libya on April 15, 1940; he made aliyah to Israel in 1946.
Ze’ev Friedman was born May 24, 1944 in Prokopevsk Siberia, then part of the former Soviet Union. His first interest in sports was as a gymnast, but he switched to weightlifting where he excelled.
Photos and biographies courtesy of Munich11.org