This idea is nothing new. It applies to any initiative of innovation. It applies especially in an environment where things need to begin from scratch, and so it applied to innovations that took root when Eretz Yisrael was becoming the State of Israel. And it helps to explain how one of Israel’s strengths follows from all that the immigrants to the fledgling country bring with them from their multiplicity of Diasporas.
It was this philosophy that lay behind the steps that I took to promote the organization of Rugby Union in Israel. With the growing numbers of young olim from rugby-playing countries in the late 1960s, especially those who came during and following the Six Day War, there was quite clearly a demand for organized rugby. Cricket was already established and was flourishing among ex-pats.
The year was 1971. In February I had returned to Tel Aviv from a year’s teaching in London. By the summer of 1969 I had completed two of the three seminar papers Tel Aviv University required for the MA degree, as well as the university’s two year residence stipulation. So, with one paper and my dissertation to complete and in the knowledge that England does not lack libraries, I had found myself a position at a school in London and had set off to see the wide world and to follow the Springbok rugby and cricket teams that were due to tour the UK in 1969-70. Of course, once in London there was much more to do than the completion of academic papers, but I could not return to Israel without – at least - the paper intended to impress Prof. Yawetz. For he had promised me, fixer that he was, that once I had produced a good paper for his seminar he would, using his many connections, introduce me to the Foreign Office. By the following summer, after hours in libraries at Leicester Square and Kensington, I had completed “Pyrrhus of Epirus” for the good professor. By the autumn I was ready to return.
In February of 1971 I had returned to Tel Aviv University. On campus one day that spring I was confronted by two South African lads who were passing a rugby ball. “Hi, Mr Zartz”, from Stan Chesed, in ’67 an under-fifteen in Gert Conradie’s practice at Cape Town’s Herzliya High School. I had coached the under-fourteens. That Friday afternoon, said Stan, there was a touch rugby game on the grass in front of binyan musika. Would I ref the game ? More than that: the aim was to get up a university team to take on a team from the Hebrew University during the inter-varsity sports week; would I coach them on a regular basis?
As it turned out, the Hebrew University team did not materialize. Stan and Clive Gurwitz, from Johannesburg, had chevre from a South African Habonim nachal garin based at Kibbutz Yizre’el while doing their army training. They, too, had been throwing a ball around. Our Friday afternoon sessions had moved from fun to enthusiasm and commitment. How about getting up a game in the Jezreel Valley one Shabbat ?
So, one hot summer’s morning, on Kibbutz Geva (a hike’s distance from Kibbutz Yizre’el, and thus recalling the splendid shabbat hikes that we’d done on the machon in 1960), we lashed the water-pipes to the football goalposts and, in an exhausting game in enervating sunshine, were thrashed 22-12 by the Yizre’el team.
Jack Leon wrote sport for the Jerusalem Post at that time and for many years. A good Englishman, he knew a lot about tennis but kadachat about rugby. Nonetheless when - aiming to get some publicity for rugby - I phoned him, he was taken by the idea of establishing an ‘anglo-saxon’ sport in the promised land.
He composed the article over falafel and gazoz at a Tel Aviv restaurant. His article (see attached photocopy of both the article and copy of it in SA’s Jewish Herald) described the game; but more importantly, it announced that rugby existed and was being played in Israel. Anyone keen to join in please contact me on the following phone number, I wrote in a separate letter to the press. Despite the fact that the number quoted was the postal code rather than the phone number, contacts were made, Stan and Clive got busy.
By now I was thoroughly involved in the completion of my MA dissertation and was taking a back seat in rugby activities. Jack’s article had created a stir. In Ra’anana, Haifa, Jerusalem and several kibbutzim there were plenty of takers and there was interest not only from players. Our folk, bless them, do not lack prospective machirs.
By the following summer, there were two leagues and there was a national trial between representative southern and northern teams, to pick a side to take on a British Forces team from Cyprus. Contact had been made with Danie Craven (South Africa’s “Mr Rugby” of those days). Isolated as South Africa was, it did not take much of an effort to secure rugby equipment (balls and team jerseys) and a tour by a Northern Transvaal XV was soon organized and undertaken.
(I was not at all happy with the contacts that had been made with the SA Rugby Union. I recall a meeting I attended, after I had once again become involved, in which I suggested requesting the advice of Abba Eban at the F.O. My view was not popular.)
Having completed my MA in 1972 I was already in England in September of that year, reading for a doctorate with Ian Christie at University College, London. I played in the trial, the north vs the south on the soccer field behind the bursa in Tel Aviv (see photos below: that’s me in the striped socks, jumping for the ball in the lineout and in the middle at the back of the loose scrum) but was not around for later developments. However, when I was interviewed by the Ivrit press later that year at one of Tel Aviv’s games at the American School in Kfar Shmaryahu (where our Tel Aviv team played its games) I could counter the claim that rugby in Israel was a step in the wrong direction - against integration - with the view that what the immigrants brought with them from the diaspora, innovations for the fledgling state, served only to strengthen it.
And when, 25 years later, in 1996, I attended a game between Israel and Croatia (or was it Luxembourg?) at the stadium in Herzliya (when we were living in England my wife and I spent every Passover at our flat in Tel Aviv), a qualifier between these three minnow rugby-playing countries for a place in the world cup, I had every justification for feeling proud that I had played an important part in bringing rugby union to the Promised Land.