Maccabiah: The Long Ride to the International Sports Games

In 1912, 15-year-old Yosef Yekutieli listened to radio broadcasts from the Stockholm Olympics and hatched an idea: an Olympic-style competition for Jewish athletes from around the globe in the brand-new city of Tel Aviv.

This picture book biography tells the origin story of the third-largest international sporting event and the unique problem-solving creator Yosef Yekutieli employed to make his dream possible.

People initially didn't take him seriously, but that wouldn't stop Yosef. For the next two decades, he worked to make this idea a reality. There was no stadium, pool, or running track anywhere in British Mandate Palestine. But Yosef wasn’t deterred.

There was one big problem left: there was no easy way to tell athletes about the games!

The solution: Motorcycles. Riding thousands of miles, over mountains and through deserts, motorcycle brigades announced the games to the world Jewish community. In 1932, the Maccabiah Games were born.

Rabbi Kerry Olitzky is the author or coauthor of nearly 100 books for children, adults, and scholars about Jewish and Muslim faith, including Welcome to the Seder: A Passover Haggadah for Everyone; Heroes with Chutzpah (with coauthor Rabbi Deborah Bodin Cohen); and Miryam’s Dance. The former executive director of Big Tent Judaism, he was named one of the fifty leading rabbis in North America by Newsweek. He lives in New Jersey.

Rabbi Deborah Bodin Cohen is the award-winning author of many books for children including An Invitation to Passover (with coauthor Rabbi Kerry Olitzky), Nachshon Who Was Afraid to Swim, and the Engineer Ari series, and the coauthor of The Heroes Haggadah (with Rabbi Kerry Olitzky). She is an editor at Behrman House and the rabbi of Congregation Beth Chai. She lives in Rockville, Maryland.

André Ceolin is a self-taught illustrator. He started his first attempt at sketching around the age of four when his father brought home some reams of paper from work. It was in that moment that he fell in love with painting and drawing. He studied at School of Visual Arts in NYC, Melies, and Escola Panamericana de Artes to develop a signature look and learned new illustration techniques. He lives in Brazil.