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BY HANNAH PURKEY

In print | Published October 29, 2009

It’s the kind of thing every athlete dreams of someday doing: walking up to the mound to pitch in a World Series game. It’s not something many would pass up.

Yet that is exactly what hall of fame pitcher Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers did in Game One of the 1965 World Series.

Why? Simple.

It was Yom Kippur. Sandy Koufax was a Jew.

And Jews do not work on the holiest day of the year, even if your work is pitching in one of the biggest Major League Baseball games of the year.

Whether it was because it was so unbelievable that anyone would choose not to play in the World Series, or because of the comment by Don Drysdale, Koufax’s replacement, to General Manager Walter Alston when he was pulled in the third inning — “I bet right now you wish I was Jewish too” — this game that Koufax did not even play in is one he will always be remembered for.

His act of piety drew criticism from devout fans and applause from devout Jews, and it has allowed others to follow in his footsteps.

Shawn Green, another Dodger, in 2001 refused to play in a game that was scheduled on Yom Kippur, and I’m sure the memory of Koufax had some part in the rescheduling of the Yankee-Red Sox game this year that would have conflicted with the high holidays.

As a Jewish athlete, I have faced the same decisions — on an obviously much smaller and less publicized scale — that Koufax had to make when Jewish holidays conflicted with important games.

But as the only Jew on my soccer team for years growing up, there was no way my protests would warrant a change in the game schedule, and I knew there was no way they would change my mother’s opinion on whether going to synagogue was optional.

While this might have been the case in high school, I never imagined that religious conflicts would be an issue coming to such a diverse and considerate school as Swarthmore.

Yet sophomore year, I found myself and a teammate in the locker room, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in hand, watching the sun set to mark the end of our 24-hour fast before starting in a game 30 minutes later. Not ideal playing conditions.

And this has by no means been a unique experience. Again this year, the women’s soccer team had a game on the high holidays, this time on Rosh Hashanah.

In fact, all of the fall sports had games or competitions scheduled on Rosh Hashanah this year, two of which were conference matches.

This fact is especially shocking considering it is explicitly against the Centennial Conference rules.
In the 2009-2010 Centennial Conference Manual, it clearly states “Conference competition may not be scheduled on religious holidays.”

Yet for the last two years, much to my chagrin, it has been, and it does not look like things are going to change: The conference is attempting to schedule yet another conference game on Yom Kippur for next year.

This scheduling conflict has lead to a long back-and-forth between Swarthmore women’s soccer coach Todd Anckaitis and the Dickinson athletic director, with Anckaitis not wanting to play on Yom Kippur without three of his players and the Dickinson AD not wanting to reschedule the game for Sunday.

While the game has now been moved to an entirely different week and the conflict resolved, it was not without going through the tedious process of rescheduling a conference match, requiring weeks of emails and phone calls between the Swarthmore and Dickinson coaches and ADs.

The odd thing is that both sides were right. While games should not be scheduled for religious holidays, the conference manual also states “no regular-season Conference competition should be scheduled on Sundays.”

The manual does not clarify why games are not allowed to be scheduled on Sundays when they are allowed to be at four o’clock on Tuesdays, yet this is a rule that the conference has managed to follow.

I understand that there are far more religious Christians than Jews that play in our conference, and I am not arguing that the conference should start playing games on Sundays instead of Saturdays so Jewish athletes can observe the Sabbath.

But it is not unreasonable to ask that Jewish athletes not be forced to choose between their sport and their religion on the two most holy days of the year for them, especially since it appears that the Conference rules say they should not have to.

Just as a game would never be scheduled on Easter or Christmas morning, games should not be scheduled on Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashanah as a league-wide policy, whether there are known Jewish athletes on the competing teams or not.

Schedules are arranged long before the religious affiliations of the incoming class of athletes are known, and thus the league should not risk the potential conflict.

Swarthmore is too diverse and too politically active of a school for this policy to have gone on as long as it has.

The Centennial Conference should start following its own rules, but it appears this will only happen if student-athletes start demanding it.

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