Frozen Out Of Olympics

Last-minute Israeli ruling keeping figure skater Tamar Katz out of the Vancouver Olympics.

by Sharon Udasin

She could already see herself on the ice in Vancouver.

When New York-based, Israeli-raised ice skater Tamar Katz arrived in Israel last week for a 24-hour, whirlwind visit, Israeli Olympic Committee officials gave her the Olympic outfit and bag she would carry with her to British Columbia to represent Israel in the Winter Games.

But later that day, like a toe loop gone bad, those same officials yanked Katz’s Olympic dream away from her, ruling that she would not be going to Vancouver.

“It was the worst trip to Israel,” she told The Jewish Week Monday.

Katz, 20, who was born in Dallas and trains in upstate Monsey, moved with her family as a child to Metullah, the home of Israel’s only ice skating rink. She had qualified for the 2010 Olympics according to International Skating Union standards.

But Israeli Olympic officials required that she finish in the top 14 at the European Figure Skating Championships last month, where, weak from a virus, she placed 21st.

Katz unsuccessfully called each member individually to plead her case.
“Some of them were willing to listen to what I had to say, but the most important people I had to appeal to were not even willing to listen to anything I said. Some of them even hung up the phone on me,” Katz said.  Continue reading…

Cross-training The Body

by Sharon Udasin

For Caroline Kohles, cardiovascular fitness is a vital part of both her career and her personal life. Kohles, 48, has been the Health and Wellness fitness director at the JCC in Manhattan since it opened in 2002. Both an athlete (she has participated in triathlons) and a dancer, she is known for her combined emphasis on mind and body in every workout, a trademark that specifically comes to life in her work as a Nia martial arts trainer and black belt teacher. In April, she says, the JCC will be hosting a free multi-sport triathlon symposium.

What stands out for you when training fellow Jews at the JCC?

“Jewish people tend to want their workout to make sense – there is an intellectual component to working out. They don’t want to just do it for the sake of doing it – they want to do it because it makes sense to their livelihood and their spirit and their intellect, knowing that by taking care of their bodies they’ll be able to do other things in their life.”

Does cardiovascular training at the gym translate well to outdoor settings?

“The trick with training is what are you training for? … If it’s heart health, then you want to have a component of cardiovascular fitness. The great thing about cardiovascular fitness via triathlon training is that you cross-train the body…Triathlon training appeals to such a wide variety of body types that we find people who are all ages, shapes, sizes and genders doing triathlon training.”

How do you help JCCers to prepare for the New York City Marathon?

“For the Marathon we ran a program where we showed a film, and we had a running coach, a chiropractor that specialized in sports and running injuries, a nutritionist that specialized in running and triathlons and a massage therapist that specialized in training. … When we’re talking about heart rate and cardiovascular training specifically, there’s an opportunity for education to happen. There’s an opportunity for people to understand, ‘Wow, my heart rate is different everyday — and why wouldn’t I pay attention to that and adjust my workout accordingly?’”  Continue reading…

The Health Burden Of The Survivors

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

For Jews who escaped Europe during the Holocaust and settled in Israel, the Jewish state really was a kind of Promised Land. Yet from a health perspective, the young
country couldn’t immunize them from the physical and mental burdens they carried with them.

In fact, Europeans who immigrated to Israel after the Holocaust were 2.4 times more likely to develop cancer than those who arrived before the war, according to a recent study published in Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Researchers at the University of Haifa’s School of Public Health compiled a database of 315,544 Israeli Jews of European heritage born between 1920 and 1945. Lital Keinan-Boker, one of the authors of the study, explained that the data came from the Population Registry as well as the National Cancer Registry. Of the more than 300,000 immigrants studied, 57,496 were born in Europe and immigrated to Israel before or during World War II and did not endure the Holocaust; the remaining 258,048 moved to Israel after the war and had been caught up in the Shoah.

The scientists theorize that the biggest risk factors for these post-war immigrants were prolonged periods of both famine and severe mental stress at an early age. But funding is not yet available to test these hypotheses, wrote Keinan-Boker, who also works for the Israel Center of Disease Control.

“We cannot be sure that all of [the immigrants] were in the camps; some may have been hiding away, some in the resistance movements and some — in the USSR — running away from Poland eastwards,” she said in an e-mail interview with The Jewish Week. “The point is that our information is based on existing databases, not on individual data, and this is why we refrained from using the term ‘Holocaust survivors’; we could not be positive that all of the ‘exposed’ were indeed Holocaust survivors.”  Continue reading…