The Jewish sports world is abuzz after Assaf Lowengart signed with the New York Boulders of the independent Frontier League, making him the first Israeli-born position player to sign a professional baseball contract in the US. Lowengart signed on Feb. 9, and the local Jewish community of Rockland County has already wholeheartedly embraced him.

JTA reports:

“The support Lowengart has felt from the Jewish community is one reason he is looking forward to joining the Boulders, who play in a county where roughly a third of the residents are Jewish, many of them Orthodox … “Being able to come back there with the big Jewish community, it’s going to be pretty amazing,” Lowengart said. “I’ve been in many colleges, and the Jewish communities usually weren’t that big. So it’s going to be a pretty cool experience being connected to the Jewish community this time, having them behind me, having them support me and being able to contribute back to them.”

 

This “pretty amazing” support of the heavily Orthodox local community for the secular and nonobservant Lowengart is a masterclass of the Jewish unity — or achdut — that we need so desperately. We’ve seen such achdut, with Israel at war; secular and religious, left and right have connected on the basis of their shared Jewishness as opposed to harping on their differences.

Admittedly, the Boulders are not the Yankees or the Mets; Rockland’s Jewish community is excited to have Lowengart in their county not because he’s a celebrity, but because he’s their brother. That some of these fans may be of different religious strata than Assaf is of no consequence here, proving the phrase from the Shabbat prayer ‘Yekum Purkan’ is alive and well: ‘Kol Yisrael Achehem’ — “all Jews are brothers!”

Rockland’s Jews are continuing a tradition of achdut and baseball. Shtetl Jews who immigrated to America in the early 20th century were known to support Jewish ballplayers with fierce attachment. Some didn’t understand or even like baseball, but if a Jew was in the lineup, they would go to support him. This came to a head in 1923, when the New York Giants baseball team had a problem. The cross-town Bronx squad, the Yankees, had Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat, whose towering home runs drew fans, ticket sales, and wins away from the Giants.

How to get fans and victory back to the Polo Grounds? Giants manager John McGraw explained: “We appreciate that many of the fans in New York are Jews, and we have been trying to land a prospect of Jewish blood.” They signed Mose Solomon, who set the minor league home run record that year, billed as “The Rabbi of Swat,” to compete with Ruth. And in his first week as a Giant, the plan was working as Mose batted .375 and drew tremendous crowds of Jews coming to see him. But that was it: one week, and Solomon was gone from the Majors forever, as his terrible fielding made him a liability. The Yankees went on to win their first World Series that year, have dominated the game ever since, and ran the Giants out of town to San Francisco.

But the Jews who came to watch Solomon in the two games he appeared in didn’t care that he was a clumsy outfielder. He was a fellow Jew. We wish Assaf Lowengart better luck on the field than Mose, and continued Jewish solidarity, love, and support.

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