Israeli Medals Fail to Erase Munich Horror

Images collide in Uri Afek’s head as he strolls through the seaside Olympic Village.

He sees a performance in Germany of “Fiddler on the Roof” 20 years ago, the preface to disaster. He sees the heart-stopping instant of this Spanish summer when a wiry sabra wins the first Olympic medal in Israeli history. And he sees the excitement at Lod Airport next Monday when Israel will welcome its athletes home from Barcelona.

Afek knows there will be other families at the airport as well, families deprived 20 years ago of their homecoming celebration, after 11 of their loved ones did not come back from an earlier Olympic Games.

“I know the families of all 11 will be there,” said Afek, the director of the Israeli Olympic Committee. “They will feel like they are closing a circle.”

The 11: Six athletes, five coaches murdered as pawns to regional hatreds. The Olympic Village, Munich, 1972.

What a difference two decades makes.

The scars of tragedy ache, but it is now a taste of triumph that propels Israel’s Olympic vision in the closing moments of these landmark Summer Games.

Not one Israeli medal, but two, both in judo--a hoped-for silver and a long-shot bronze.

By the time the second one had been earned, Israel had acquired unprecedented stature in the by-country medal listings. “We’re No. 26!” chanted wits in Jerusalem.

“At Munich and other Olympics, we were there to participate,” Afek said Friday. “Now we come to win. We are much more professional in our attitude and training. With Israeli coaches and athletes born in Israel, we can do what other countries are doing.”

Yael Arad, 25, took the silver medal in the 61-kilo judo competition, and Oren Smadja, 21, a native-born Israeli of Tunisian descent, got the bronze in the 71-kilo class.

Arad’s historic first medal won her a government prize of $70,000, an Alfa Romeo and a faxed message from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin: “Congratulations, Israel thanks you and is proud of your performance.” Arad’s victory even triggered talk-show-style debate about changing family values after her mother was quoted as saying proudly: “We have never pushed Yael to achieve anything.”

The medal performances lifted national spirits and erased early Olympic disappointments that left one Jerusalem newspaper complaining of “our yachtsmen capsizing and our swimmers drowning.”

Shmuel Lalkin, who led the Israeli delegation to Munich and is now director general of the Israel Sports Federation, said: “We had no medal prospects at Munich. Here, for the first time, we came with the impression that we could touch medals.”

Twenty years after Munich, the Israeli delegation has lived without incident at the Olympic Village, Afek said--but hardly as just some of the guys.

Judged, like the Americans, to be a high-risk delegation, the 30 members of the Israeli delegation got an extra dose of Spanish security and brought their own battalion of sharp-eyed men and women who look and dress like athletes but are something more. When an Israeli athlete set off to compete, or made an excursion into Barcelona, a special friend often tagged along.

In the kaleidoscopic, global Village of 15,000, the Israelis had their own kosher food in the main restaurant and celebrated their own Friday night services in their apartments. Arab athletes seemed looser in their dealings with Israelis than in Los Angeles in 1984 or in Seoul four years ago, Israeli delegation members said.

“At the opening ceremony on the field, we exchanged pins with Arabs and everybody else,” Afek said. “Since then, we’ve been sitting together, eating together, taking pictures together. I don’t say that Algeria is the same as Egypt, but there have been no problems.”

But nobody takes chances, either.

“It’s in everybody’s head when you go to an Olympics--you always remember,” said Lalkin, who escaped with his life at the ’72 Games that claimed 11 of his friends’ lives in a kidnaping by Palestinian terrorists.

Afek, the 58-year-old former national volleyball coach, is heading the Israeli Olympic delegation for the second time. When he thinks Olympics, he remembers “Fiddler on the Roof.”

An Israeli actor was featured in stage performances in Munich 20 years ago, and Afek and other members of the Israeli delegation went to see the show one festive night in September.

“Afterward, we all said, ‘Good night, see you tomorrow,’ ” Afek recalled. “But I didn’t. Somebody woke me around 4 in the morning to say: ‘Something is terribly wrong.’ ”

The Israelis publicly evoked the memory of their dead soon after arriving here, but it was left to Arad to join together Munich yesterday and Barcelona today.

“Maybe we now say, if it is possible, that we have avenged this murder,” she said after her silver-medal performance. “I think we owe it to the families and to the people of Israel.”

An amateur who has been practicing judo since she was 8 and is studying to be a nutritionist, Arad was 5 when the shots rang out in Munich.

“I was too young to remember when it happened, but I soon learned, and I was thinking about it here,” Arad said Friday. “It is part of our tradition. We will never forget.”

Said Munich survivor Lalkin: “We lost good athletes and coaches in Munich, and it took quite a while to replace them, although we were respectable in Montreal four years later. We’ve still got a long way to go, but it was quite a thrill to see that first medal come. A lot of people cried, in Barcelona and across Israel.”