Roy Itcovichi was Axlep when the terror, just one hour away. Elliot Steinmetz was with his daughter in Jerusalem, where he shouted the sirens and explosions of rockets reverberated.
Zevi Samet was talking on the phone, his family inside a bomb shelter.
Tom Beza’s sister was ready for war, serving in Israel’s defense forces. Adi Markovich’s friend was at the Nova Music Festival, including among the more than 1,200 most dead for Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.
Two days later, Yeshiva’s basketball team conducted its first practice of the season.
“There were conversations, like” Why are we doing this? “” Steinmetz recalled, the eleventh year chief coach. “There was very little interest in basketball. We were playing because we had to play … We had six [players] From Israel. We had three types that served [in IDF] Who called their units, who were willing to return.
“The first meeting we had after October 7, we said that the only way this season makes sense is that if we find a way to make it bigger than basketball.”
Held in recent years for its unlikely culmining boom in 2022 with a 50 -game winning streak and NO. 1 Classification in division III-the story of feeling good of the only totally Jewish tok of the NCAA, a painful and inspiring turn that converted the 2023-24 season, captured in the documentary, “rebound: a year of triumph and tragedy in the nation of the University of Yeshiva.
“It was very hard mentally, but it was also our safe space,” said Itcovichi, a junior guard. “We have done to think about anything else. I could feel selfish, but it also made you really grateful and grateful for everything we had.”
In the midst of their most attempt season, it safely to the deadliest people in the Jewish people from the Holocaust: the Maccabees play an emotionally exhausting week to Israel, visiting family, friends and soldiers in hospitals.
They saw the remains of the festival massacre. They toured Kibbutz Be’eri, the town where more than 100 were killed and the boxes were hostage tasks.
Ofir Engel, a friend of Beza, Yeshiva’s guard, joined the team on the tour, walking fits the debris of the deserted community, telling how he was kidnapped from the house of his girlfriend’s family.
“We were looking at the bullet covers and grenade rings, you couldn’t imagine the amount of them outside the residential houses,” Steinmetz said. “It was very disturbing [in Israel]. You walk down the street at night, you are a little nervous. We were constantly going to come and go the staircase that the services as a refuge of the Apartment building, to the ceiling to see the missile paths and the iron dome. He is listening to sirens and there are explosions on top, and feels that he only sees this in the movies. “
Steinmetz had no interest in his team playing basketball on the trip.
In all, he was persuaded to participate in an exhibition game against an Israeli professional team, playing with an enthusiastic crowd that helped to give a greater meaning to the Macs season.
“The players talked about feeling guilty:” Should I return to my country? Should I serve in the IDF? Should we be playing in times of war duration of basketball? “” Said the film director, Pat Dimon. “Everyone said:” No. Some of the most prominent aspects of our day are to transmit their games in the United States. His role is to be a lighthouse of light in a dark time. “
The Mac returned to Manhattan and resumed games at the Athletic Center Max Stern, where the Israeli flag and its national anthem hang.
It is where players get used to warm -up with t -shirts with the faces of the hostages that are still in captivity.
It is where they place their phones in the duration of the line of the exit line of the 6 am, verifying if the world changed between dribbles.
“There are certain events in which there is a before and after and nothing is the same,” said Steinmetz. “October 7 is like that. The world continues, but it is a different world … I will never see a season again. It will never be just basketball. It will be something bigger than sport.”
