Orthodox Rabbi Who Attempted Unorthodox Intervention on Behalf of Israeli Basketball Coach at Madison Square Garden to Appear Tomorrow at STAPLES Center at Game Against L.A. Clippers
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 19 /PRNewswire/ — Following his impromptu Madison Square Garden intervention last night on behalf of the ejected Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball coach during an exhibition with the NBA’s New York Knicks, Rabbi Yizchak Dovid Grossman, is coming to Los Angeles for tomorrow’s STAPLES Center game between Maccabi Electra Tel Aviv versus the Los Angeles Clippers.
The game, which will be played at 7:30 p.m., will benefit Rabbi Grossman’s Migdal Ohr, the world’s largest orphanage in Northern Israel and home to nearly 7,000 orphaned, impoverished, underprivileged and new immigrant children.
Not knowing that two technical fouls result in an automatic ejection, Grossman attempted to persuade the referee to change his call and allow Maccabi Coach Pini Gershon to continue coaching. “But he says the law is the law, that he must leave,” Grossman said, referring to the referee in broken English. “What could I do? I tried to make peace.
“This is not a regular game,” Grossman said he told the official. “In a game for friendship, you forgive.”
In 2005, Maccabi became the first international team to win on North American soil when they defeated the Toronto Raptors at Air Canada Centre. Despite yesterday’s controversy, participants in tomorrow’s game are looking forward to it.
Israeli Prize Laureate Rabbi Grossman founded Migdal Ohr in 1972 with 18 children in a small one-story building in Northern Israel. Today Migdal Ohr is roughly the size of the UCLA campus, where each day thousands of children from all over the world are fed, clothed, housed, educated and nurtured onto productive lives. Migdal Ohr runs a network of schools, providing academic and vocational studies while integrating new immigrant children into Israeli society through specialized curricula and after-school programs.
Tickets are available at www.migdalohrusa.org.
SOURCE Migdal Ohr