JACK MILNER
When 16-year-old Sera Shor attends next year’s Maccabi Games – in July – she will become the fourth generation of her family to have been involved in the Games.
Sera recently flew to Cape Town where trials were held to select a junior under-18 netball team. She was one of nine girls selected to represent South Africa at Maccabiah.
She attends Yeshiva Girls’ High School in Johannesburg and when in grade 7, she shared the netball award. In grade 9 she was awarded half colours and another award was garnered the following year. She also plays indoor netball on a weekly basis.
Sera is the youngest family member to have achieved Maccabi colours. Her great-grandfather, Abe Levenstein, was the oldest member of the family to attend the Maccabiah. He managed the 1985 cricket team and was a well-respected administrator.
Sera’s grandfather, Jack Lurie, has devoted almost a lifetime to the Maccabi movement. He began his career as the football manager in 1977 and was a long-time member of the board of Maccabi South Africa.
Jack’s wife, Sandra, was also involved in the movement and represented South Africa in the lawn bowls competition in 2009.
Sera’s uncle, Brian Levenstein, participated in two Maccabiahs as a left-arm spinner in cricket and her mother, Kim, was a member of the medical team at the 1993 Games.
Dream comes true for Hermina
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Almost everybody has one dream they wish would come true and fortunately for some it does.
The city of Detroit has a large Jewish community and one of them is Hermina Hirsch, 89. Hirsch, a Holocaust survivor, was finally given the opportunity to fulfil a lifelong dream, namely to sing the American national anthem at a Major League baseball game.
She performed The Star-Spangled Banner last weekend at Comerica Park prior to the Tigers playing the Tampa Bay Rays.
In an interview last month with the Detroit television station WWJ, Hermina called on the club to allow her to sing and said she would not be nervous singing in front of thousands of baseball fans.
“If I lived through the concentration camp, it couldn’t be that bad,” Hirsch said. “I don’t want to die before I sing at a baseball game.”
She was born in Czechoslovakia and had to endure a series of Nazi camps, beginning in 1944, at the age of 17. She was liberated in January 1945.
She has been a Tigers fan since moving to Detroit with her husband in 1953.
