According to the dry statistics in the last elections in Germany, one in five people voted for a right-wing party, similar to the resounding success of other right-wing parties in Europe. The public itself is still trying to come to terms with what exactly occurred here. There are various reasons, but it is still quite clear that even in enlightened and liberal modern-day Berlin, it is currently very difficult to be a Jew or an Israeli. Something has changed – antisemitism has become more violent and the attacks more frequent.
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Last Sunday, an ostensibly run-of-the-mill soccer match took place in Germany. The first round of the cup, in mid-August, is generally an event that draws the attention of only the most fervent supporters. Most are on vacation in any case and the league only begins in September (and the decisive stages in the cup take place only in May). But the gods of soccer have their own strange ways of reminding us why this sport is called the 'Beautiful Game'.
In a historic and probably a one-off occasion as far as it is concerned, Makkabi Berlin, the Jewish club of both the city and of Germany itself, met VfL Wolfsburg from Germany's top flight, the Bundesliga. The last time that a Jewish soccer club reached the heights of German football was, way back when, in the early 1930s, when other Jewish clubs also played in Europe.
Some more history. Immediately after the "Muskeljudentum" ("Muscular Judaism") speech given by Max Nordau at the Second Zionist Congress held in Basel in August 1898, Jewish sports clubs began to sprout in central Europe, initially focusing on gymnastics, athletics, swimming, and boxing, later to be followed by ball sports. They were given names combining the spirit of Zionism with strength and heroism: "HaKoach" ("The Force"), "Bar-Kochba", "Gideon" and also "Makkabi". Bar-Kochba was founded in Berlin as early as October 22, 1898. It started out as a gymnastics club and then expanded to take in additional sports, by 48 Zionist Jews. The establishment of the clubs in Germany fitted in well with the "Zeitgeist", the spirit of the times. Already at the time, the Prussians attributed great importance to sport as a means of forging better soldiers, who would be able to fight Napoleon's army – and the Jews, for their part, adopted this approach to give a lesson in Zionism to the young generation.
In 1911, Bar-Kochba also had a soccer team and shortly afterward this was followed by the establishment of "HaKoach Berlin", in a similar manner to the club with the same name that became famous in Vienna. Here, soccer was the main sport. The Bar-Kochba association incorporated tens of thousands of sportsmen in 24 countries, most of which were located in central Europe; though, Germany was an exception to the rule in that its sports clubs regarded themselves, first and foremost, as part of local society. This was also true for the Jews – Germans of the religion of Moses who did not choose to separate themselves from the gentiles via the sport in which they took part.
In 1929, Berlin's two Jewish clubs joined forces under the joint name "Bar-Kochba/HaKoach", with a soccer team in the regional league. In 1933, following the rise to power of the Nazis, it was quite clear just where this entire episode was heading. Jews were obviously forbidden to engage in sports, and in practice, the now-amalgamated club managed to visit the Holy Land in 1937 for a tour including various games, prior to disappearing from the map only one year later.
Video: The siren is heard in Uman, Ukraine.
Immediately after the War, the HaKoach Berlin soccer club was reestablished, but in 1953 it merged with another local club, losing both its name and its Jewish identity. On November 26, 1970, a Jewish sports association was re-established in Berlin, which was in essence a combination of all the old clubs – and it operates to this very day under the name Makkabi Berlin.
The association has a sports club in the city's most affluent neighborhoods, which includes soccer clubs (the senior team plays in the fifth league, alongside which youth and kids' teams also operate), tennis, basketball, volleyball, swimming, apparatus gymnastics, artistic gymnastics, shooting, table-tennis, and of course – chess. Today, as might be expected, the club takes in non-Jews too, emphasizing the fact that the club has always been open to everybody without regard to race, sex, color, or religion.
Becoming a global story
"This is my dad's mania, he is spending my inheritance money on Makkabi," explains to me in English and with a broad smile, Michael, the son of Yitzhak Koblenz, who together with Roy Friedling, a religious Jew who wears a Makkabi shirt together with tzitzit, took upon themselves the enjoyable, though somewhat expensive task (700 euros a year) of keeping the dream of Makkabi Berlin alive.
"Yes, we are mad,", Roy explains to me half in Hebrew and half in English, "but for us, this is also a way of showing to the Germans that we are here to stay. We have come back not only to reside here, to lead our lives here, and to raise our children, but also to establish a soccer team. Do you think that if I were to invest the money in politics the outcome would be the same? Absolutely not. Politics in Germany doesn't change anything. In contrast, via soccer, you can actually change things."
Wolfsburg – a club playing in the Bundesliga, Germany's premier league, which won the championship 13 years ago – has a budget of more than two hundred million euros, and the encounter with it, for the amateur club on a shoestring budget, is another dream come true on the way to achieving its professional objectives: in Germany, professional soccer begins only in the third league, and this is Makkabi Berlin's true aspiration – "To be the first professional Jewish club in Europe."
A special conference organized by the World Jewish Congress was held 48 hours prior to the game, to which I was invited as a researcher of Jewish sport and a journalist. My meeting with the members of Wolfsburg and Makkabi Berlin came as more of a surprise to them than to me. "I have to say that as a German, I was unaware of many of the things you mentioned regarding the history. This just shows how important a tool soccer can be in the war against racism and antisemitism," tells me with an embarrassed smile, Thorsten Grunow, the spokesperson and media director of the "Wolves" – the very club that was founded by the employees of the Volkswagen automobile company, way back when in those dark years.
It was the German media, rather than its colleagues from Israel, that was quick to understand the enormity of the story unfolding here. Der Spiegel dedicated five pages to Makkabi Berlin, while the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – arguably the most important of all of Germany's daily newspapers – attributed the following title to the game: "Does the coach of Makkabi Berlin need to know what a bar-mitzvah is?" The local Sky network accompanied the club recently as did ZDF, the parallel local network.
"We never believed that this would become a global story," says Roy, "But now we want to recruit the Jewish world to stand behind us, and so we will be playing in the match with World Jewish Congress emblazoned on our shirts. As I mentioned, our dream is to become the first professional Jewish soccer team in history, but I also want people in German to see right now that Jews can play at the top level, and we don't need favors from anyone."
Closure on the touchline
When we come to the team's final training session, a short time before the onset of Shabbat, the true story of the club at this specific juncture comes to light. The team has French and African players, a player of Irish extraction who was born in Germany to expatriate parents, and the captain is Doron Bruck. Bruck is the son of a German mother and an Israeli father, who has already made aliyah to Israel, he completed a degree in Israel in Hebrew and then decided to return to Germany. "Why? That is a genuinely good question," he says in Hebrew. "I ask myself that question all the time."
For the majority of players, the Star of David emblem on the shirts they wear doesn't really mean very much. They play for Makkabi Berlin because the team was promoted to the fifth league, and comparatively, it pays decent wages for amateur players. When we explain to them about the club's history, they slowly begin to grasp the fact that there might, after all, be something special here.
"You came from Israel, especially for the game?", the 69-year-old club manager, Wolfgang Sandhowe, an aging figure who appears to have stepped right out of a 1980's German soccer game, asks me. Despite the stifling heat on the pitch, he wears a long sweatsuit with a healthy portion of mud smeared over it and a whistle hanging around his neck. He carries the cones and all the training drill equipment himself, as there are only eight volunteers at the club, and they all do everything.
"You really heard about this game? I was sure that only people in Germany are interested in it," he says. He has spent most of his coaching career in the lower leagues, and his peak came in the 90s when two young Croatian brothers by the name of Kovač came to the local league in Berlin. He immediately identified the potential and explained to all and sundry in German soccer that they simply did not belong to local league football. It is that same destiny that has created so many stories surrounding this match, which also brought the Kovač brothers here as the managers of Makkabi's rivals, and the three managers hug each other and shake hands with great emotions both before and after the match.
Sandhowe and the players try to display optimism, but just for the sake of comparison – Wolfsburg's TikTok manager earns more than most of the Makkabi players. Wolfsburg's spokesperson, Thorsten, adheres to a strong sense of German diplomacy when I ask him to gamble on the result: "We are not currently at the peak of our physical fitness."
The objective: This is more than a mere gimmick
For a moment it seemed as though a considerable part of the community had come to share in the volunteering spirit surrounding the organization of the match. Everybody is playing a part in the logistics – the owners, the sons and daughters, and the spouses take part in the entire operation, only in order to ensure that they comply with the meticulous conditions required for hosting a soccer empire from Germany's top league. On a daily basis these are leading global businessmen, but today they are handing out water to the players and selling shirts at the stall.
Wolfsburg's team members who have come to the small country-club pitch on the outskirts of Berlin, voice their appreciation in typical German politeness for the hospitality and say that it reminds them of the Bundesliga. Roy smiles and says in Hebrew: "Give us five years and then come back and look in on us. That's all we need."
The atmosphere in the VIP tent is quite festive. The original Jewish community mixes in with the Russian Jewish community that came here after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The languages here are intermingled. This is the mosaic that makes up the Jewish-Israeli community here in Germany. Some have draped the Israeli flag over their shoulders, others are attending a soccer match for the very first time. Germany's former Minister of Defense, Christine Lambrecht, a Makkabi Berlin supporter, also came to the match, but she endeavors to keep away from the prying eyes of the media. In a highly publicized move, Lambrecht was forced to resign in January this year after she used a government helicopter for private purposes and a number of subsequent politically embarrassing incidents. She shouts "M-a-k-k-a-b-i" at the top of her voice from the terraces, and when a helicopter suddenly hovers over the stadium, many people in the crowd joke that it is probably hers.
When the game's female referee – of Palestinian origin – blows the whistle for the kick-off, everybody just wants to get through the first ten minutes without conceding or without any embarrassing incidents. Dr. Riem Hussein is a pharmacist by profession and is considered to be one of Germany's most promising football referees. Somebody in the crowd asks, "How will they find additional ways of screwing us over today?". The truth is that the match is basically decided in the first ten minutes with the score already standing at 2:0. The Makkabi players manage to pull back a goal but the refereeing team is quick to disallow it and the hosts are livid. "What do you expect, they are Germans," says a German Israeli in the crowd with a local accent. At half-time, in the improvised changing room in the stadium's shelter, the two managers are shouting. The manager of the favorites, Wolfsburg, shouts to his players that a half-time score of only 2:0 is inconceivable. On the other side, the Makkabi manager tries to instill a sense of belief in his players, telling them that everything is still possible. In the background, you can hear the rapper Solomon singing out loud the hit he wrote for the match, "Makkabi Lives". Solomon is a relatively well-known rapper in Berlin, and his song rouses those at the stadium as it deals with Jewish pride. Afterward, the playlist changes to include top Israeli singers, Omer Adam and Moshe Peretz.
The Wolfsburg fans eat pizza and light flares and do not really fully comprehend what is actually taking place in the stadium. This old soccer pitch, located in the heart of the affluent Jewish neighborhood, experienced some extremely somber history during the 1930s, while now, here in 2023, everybody is singing, "Moshiach, Moshiach, Moshiach" in Hebrew to the players on the turf. Indeed, this might truly b a sign of the Messianic era in which we live.
The final score is 6:0 to Wolfsburg, and indeed the referees have done an injustice to the players wearing the blue and white shirts. Not that it really matters, as the gap between the two clubs is colossal, but in the changing room, Doron Bruck explains that the objective is to become a legitimate soccer club and not merely "the Jewish club", and it is a genuine shame that the referees disallowed their goal.
This is only the beginning
After the match, in the VIP tent, people are already talking business. Real estate and soccer. When the manager and the players enter, everybody stands up and applauds them. Michael asks for permission to speak and duly thanks everyone for coming, including the wives of the players and the owners, some of whom have no idea in which league the team plays.
Following this match, the soccer bug has clearly bitten the owners even harder, and indeed it now seems that the inheritance money is about to be frittered away. The only question now is how they will be able to return to former anonymity and gray matches on remote, unplayable pitches, where the players have to endure antisemitic jibes from time to time, both from their colleagues and from the scant crowds that come to the matches.
For most of the players, this match was a unique experience that will not repeat itself ever again. This week, they have been the talk of the entire European soccer scene, and it is most doubtful that Makkabi Berlin, a team from Germany's fifth tier of soccer, will ever again grab such a portion of the media highlights.
But for the directors, Roy and Michael, this is only the beginning. "We have shown the Germans that we are here and we mean business, we are not going anywhere. Although for us, just taking part in the match is a sort of victory, we also want to win on the pitch," they say, and they understand that despite the heavy defeat, somehow, everybody has come out a winner from this encounter.
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