The opening ceremony of the 17th Maccabiah Games at the Ramat Gan stadium Monday night marked the start of the main 2005 summer event in the Jewish world. The Maccabiah Games are obviously not an important sports event. Participation doesn’t depend on achieving Olympic standards, and records are rarely broken here. The Maccabiah might better called the Diaspora’s greatest matchmaking championships, or its summer jamboree.
The Maccabiah Games’ budget is $13 million. Most of the budget comes from the athletes and accompanying persons’ participation fee of $2,250, not including airfare, donations obtained by the Maccabi World Union, and corporate sponsors, including Bank Hapoalim (LSE:BKHD; TASE:POLI), Pele-Phone Communications Ltd., and Shikun Ovdim Ltd.
But the state has also invested in the games. The Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, the Ministry of Tourism, and the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption invested $1.5 million. To this sum should be added spending by Israel Police and the security forces on security and protection. For example, a protective glass booth was built for the opening ceremony at Ramat Gan stadium for the prime minister, president and other dignitaries.
At a time of frightening figures on assimilation it seems to be extremely important to organize a meeting of young Jewish men and women. The only question is why should Israel’s battered state budget bear part of the cost? Alternatively, if it is investing in a semi-sports event, wouldn’t it be better to invest in Israeli sport for leisure and competitive sport?
Why should the state invest in a sports event for the Diaspora?
Israel Olympic Committee and Maccabi Israel chairman Zvi Varshaviak : “We are still the Jewish state, and if you read the statistics, the Jewish people is disappearing. 7,000 athletes have come to Israel, and they’re meeting each other. They won’t establish ties? They will, that’s a fact. This is what ties young people to Israel. There are a lot of young people here who have come to Israel for the first time, and wouldn’t be here were it not for the Maccabiah. It creates community activity. For them, Israel isn’t just sports. No one says that the Maccabiah is only sports. Through sports, we can bring them to Israel. We haven’t been able until now to bring such a large number of Jews to Israel. Such a large number of young Jews haven’t come to Israel together for any conference.”
Why doesn’t the state channel this money to Israeli sports for achievements by Israeli athletes at the Maccabiah?
”The Maccabiah budget is a special budget from the Ministry of Education. It doesn’t come at the expense of sports, which has a dismal budget anyway. The competitive sports budget, in accordance with Israel Olympic Committee guidelines, will be almost NIS 8 million this year. This is a very small budget. But the real problem of sports isn’t with the Olympic Committee, but with the sports associations that are the greatest victims of the budgets. The great threat to Israeli sport is that the associations will disappear. They are the infrastructure on which Israeli competitive sport is built.”
How much does the state allocate?
”The budget for sports was NIS 120 million in the mid-1990s, and it has fallen to NIS 49 million. For the sake of comparison, Greece’s athletics budget is $10 million. The Greek government allocates for track and field athletics as much as the Israeli government allocates for all sports in Israel, including the Wingate Institute and other items. The budget for pure sport is nothing.”
Nevertheless, wouldn’t it be better to transfer the state’s allocation for the Maccabiah to sports?
”The two things aren’t connected. I wouldn’t want one budget to be at the expense of the other. Israel invests in the Maccabiah Games once every four years. In Israel, the Maccabiah is revenue, not expenditure. 20,000 tourists come for the games, paying to participate and their airfare, and they are accompanied by many people who leave a lot of money here. The Maccabiah isn’t expenditure; in my opinion, it’s income. Rich people come here too, and after seeing things, they make donations.”
Wouldn’t you expect the Maccabiah to leverage investment in sports?
”I’d expect the Israeli government to invest in sports facilities for athletes to use all the time. But they don’t do it, because there’s no money. Israel has no facility where European-level championships can be held. A ten-year program is needed to do this, slowly building one facility after another, from NIS 40 million arenas to football stadiums costing NIS 120-150 million each. That’s my expectation.”
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on July 13, 2005