Israeli Teams Make Questionable Moves : Interior Ministry Looks Into Country’s American Pro Basketball Players

John Irving, the NCAA’s leading rebounder in 1974-75, hadn’t touched a basketball in four months. At the urging of a friend, though, he went to Brooklyn’s Little Gym, where an Israeli professional team was holding tryouts.

Coach Shmuel Yacobsen liked what he saw and offered the 6-foot 9-inch former Hofstra University player a contract. There was only one hitch: Irving, a black man born in Queens, had to convert to Judaism. That was in 1982.

“I didn’t find anything wrong in making the conversion,” Irving said at a news conference here earlier this week. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do. . . . If I was in one of the staunchest Muslim countries, I’d have to be a Muslim, or respect their traditions.”

He said he read a pamphlet he had been given, entitled “What Is a Jew?” and met twice with a New York rabbi who asked him a few questions. After the second meeting, the rabbi shook Irving’s hand and welcomed him to Judaism.

“For me, that was cool, because I was going to get paid,” Irving said. Under Israel’s Law of Return, his certificate of conversion entitled him to automatic Israeli citizenship and, thus, eligibility to play in Israel’s professional league.

A few days ago, Israel’s Interior Ministry stripped Irving of his citizenship because of “certain irregularities in documentation” in his conversion. His basketball career here appears finished, and he may be deported.

More than that, Irving is not an isolated case. According to players, coaches, sportswriters and Interior Ministry officials, many of the estimated 150 Americans who have played professional basketball here over the last decade did so under questionable circumstances.

Some were here thanks to the man who became known as the basketball rabbi because his name showed up on the conversion documents of so many lanky athletes. Others gained citizenship by marrying Israeli women thoughtfully provided by their employers.

Those who marry Israeli citizens are granted automatic citizenship.

“I know a girl who got married three times, with three basketball players,” said Mordechai Rosenblum, a sportswriter for the newspaper Maariv. “One of the girls got $5,000 and a ticket for a nice weekend in Cyprus.”

Said Simmy Reguer, a U.S.-born Israeli basketball coach for the last 12 years: “It’s pretty disgusting. At the beginning, basically they were lying about the white players. But now they’ve been lying about the black players. You know, the management here has no shame. . . . Everybody and their mother was a Jew all of a sudden.”

Israeli basketball insiders say that at least 20 bogus citizens are playing here, including at least 12 of 120 in the top-ranked national league.

“We are checking several cases,” said Yehoshua Kahana, deputy director general of the Interior Ministry in charge of its population administration department.

Involved in Israel’s emerging basketball scandal are the rules of its basketball federation, its unique citizenship law and its anthropology.

“You know, we don’t have tall guys in Israel,” Rosenblum said. “So, if we have to play only with Israelis, we have no chance to compete” internationally.

Each of the 12 teams in the Israeli national league is permitted to hire one foreign player. Most of the European nations Israel plays in international competition allow two. The Israeli rule was a compromise between those who wanted to be competitive and those who feared that too many foreigners would stifle home-grown talent.

There are the two loopholes, however, the Law of Return and the marriage clause.

Coaches and club managers, eager to build winning teams, used both to bring additional foreign talent to their teams. If they couldn’t find enough good players who were Jewish by birth, they found others willing to convert.

Proselytizing is discouraged in orthodox Judaism, and many converts must go through a year or more of rigorous instruction and testing before being accepted as “Jews by choice.” Earlier this year, the Israeli government ground to a virtual halt, briefly, while legislators debated the fine points of conversion as stipulated in what became known as the “Who is a Jew” bill.

For tall candidates with good moves, however, there has been a minimum of red tape. Coaches and club managers found rabbis willing--given the proper incentive--to sign the necessary conversion papers.

“Some conversions cost $10,000,” said Reguer, the son of a rabbi, who said that his refusal to go along with such schemes has hurt his coaching career.

As a result of such maneuvers, national league teams average three American-born players each. League champion Maccabi Tel Aviv team has five, as does its principal rival, Hapoel Tel Aviv.

Some of the American players really are Jewish, and others appear genuinely to consider themselves Israeli citizens, no matter what the circumstances of their conversions. Maccabi Tel Aviv’s Aulcie Perry, for example, has even served in the Israeli army.

The rest, though, are here simply because they got the best deal from an Israeli club. The players make anywhere from $20,000 a season to $150,000 at the top of the scale, according to Reguer, and also get free apartments and cars.

“You’re talking very big bucks” for players who couldn’t make it in professional basketball in the United States, he said.

Some here contend that the Interior Ministry was finally embarrassed into action last year by the cases of Mark Rankin and Phillip Dailey, two U.S.-born players whose conversion to Judaism in the United States was rejected by Israeli rabbinical authorities. The two determined young athletes then flew to Cyprus, where they married Israeli women old enough to be their mothers.

The case hit the newspapers, and the two were finally ordered to leave the country a few months ago.

For his part, Irving feels unfairly targeted by the new Interior Ministry campaign.

“I fell in love with the country and liked it so much that a year later I brought my family,” he said.

Now, he has one child who was born in Israel and another on the way. He has opened a couple of businesses here, and even if he can’t play basketball anymore, he said, he wants to continue living here as a citizen.

“I’m not a total conservative, orthodox follower of the religion (but) I respect it,” he said.

“This has been going on for years. Why me, now?”