A memorial service for the Munich 11 may turn into a roast of International Olympic Committee head Jacques Rogge, who intends to speak at the event. The service will take place Monday in London and was organized by the Israeli Olympic Committee. Rogge was asked to address attendees at the start of this year, before his rejection of the minute of silence campaign made headlines. Now, with much bad blood between Rogge and the widows who spearheaded the initiative, Jewish leaders are predicting some harsh words for …More

The son of one of the slain Munich 11 is featured in a Simon Wiesenthal Center video released today, aimed at uncovering some of the political underworking that went into the International Olympic Committee’s refusal to uphold the minute of silence campaign. Guri Weinberg, son of late Israeli athlete Moshe Weinberg, was part of the campaign to memorialize the death of his father and the other 10 Israeli athletes killed by Palestinian terrorists in the ’72 Olympics. In the SWC video, he recounts a …More

One of the few Israelis on the 1972 Olympic team born in the country, Moshe Weinberg was the Israeli middleweight wrestling champion in Greco-Roman and freestyle wrestling for most of a decade. He even won the gold medal in freestyle at the seventh Maccabiah Games in 1965. At the young age of 30, Weinberg was named the coach of the Israeli national team and director of the Wingate Institute, a national center for physical education near Netanya. After an evening out with the Israeli delegation to the Munich …More

One of 11 children, Yossef Romano was a big, but gentle man. He made aliyah to Israel with his family in 1946 at the age of six, and served in the army during the 1967 Six-Day War. Though he was an interior decorator by profession, Romano became Israel’s middleweight weightlifting champion for almost a decade. But at the 1972 Olympics, he injured his knee during the clean-and-jerk event and was forced to drop out. Hobbling around the Olympic Village on crutches, he was due to return to Israel on September 6 …More

Fencing coach Andre Spitzer believed in the Olympic ideal. The 27-year-old would stroll through the Olympic Village and regularly chat with natives from countries at odds with Israel, insisting that this was the one place where he and his Arab competitors could interact outside of the political conflict. His wife, Ankie Spitzer, remembers Andre shaking hands with the Lebanese team after inquiring after their events results during the Munich Games. “The idea of the Olympics is first to forget that you are …More