Centering on Jewish athletes

Concerning your article [“Honoring Hebrew Hoopsters,” by Gary Goldstein, Nov. 9], which makes note that the first great basketball players were of the Jewish faith, let me upgrade your information on this subject.

I and five others of the Jewish faith, who played basketball for the YMHA in Montreal, played on the Canadian Olympic basketball team in London in 1948.

We had lost the Canadian Championship in 1948 to the British Columbia team, but beat them in Toronto in a four-team round-robin, which determined that YMHA team was the lead half of the London team. We beat Winnipeg in 1949 to become Canadian Champions and in the following year we went to Israel to participate in the Maccabiah Games.

I was the youngest on the team. I was 18.

Sol Tolchinsky

Montreal

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I suppose that Jewish culture has “traditionally celebrated the cerebral over the physical” but a significant amount of anti-Semitism reflected in the quotas regarding the percentage of Jews who could be admitted to medical and law schools, coupled with a need to earn a living, undoubtedly influenced a significant number of Jewish men in the l940s and l950s to pursue careers as boxers. I’d like to think their inherent cerebral gifts accounted in part for their success in a sport also known as the “sweet science.”

Ruth Kramer Ziony

Los Feliz