Keller’s Korner - Jewish In Olympic Hockey: 1936 & 2026

Ninety years earlier, Rudi Ball stood at the center of a very different Olympic drama. He was the only Jewish athlete to compete for Germany at the 1936 winter Olympic Games, where his performance represented a remarkable and little known act of Jewish resilience under the thumb of the Nazi regime.

As a collector of Jewish sports memorabilia, I happen to own three of the very few surviving Rudi Ball 1933 German cigarette trading cards as Hitler wanted to burn things of Jews. I also happen to live in South Florida, where the U.S. men’s team traveled to celebrate their win in Milan. I wanted to share the story of Rudi Ball with Jack Hughes and his brother Quinn, as well as a third Jewish player on the national team, Jeremy Swayman. It’s not my typical milieu, but I made my way on Monday to the nightclub E11even Miami with two Ball cards in hand.

There, I got a chance to tell Jack Hughes about the most important Jewish hockey player before him. I told him I had emailed his Jewish mother, Ellen Weinberg-Hughes, in the past as she herself is a hockey Olympian.

Rudi Ball is a name most fans today have never heard, yet he was one of Germany’s brightest hockey talents before Hitler took power in 1933. Like the Hughes brothers today, Rudi came from a hockey family — he and his two brothers all played the sport. He starred for Germany at the 1932 Olympics, scoring three goals and helping the team win a bronze medal. At a time of rising antisemitism, his success brought pride to German Jews.

But when the 1936 Winter Olympics were awarded to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Hitler’s hatred of Jews was already well known. The German Olympic Committee did not want Rudi on the team because of his Jewish heritage (his father was Jewish). His Christian teammates were outraged. According to my research, Gustav Jaenecke and two others confronted German officials and delivered an ultimatum: “If Rudi doesn’t play, we don’t play.”

Hitler relented.

Rudi agreed to perform the Nazi salute at the Games — a painful compromise — in exchange for safe passage out of Germany for his family. They fled to South Africa.

Rudi was injured during the Olympic games, and Germany finished fifth, but his presence on that ice remains one of the most remarkable and little‑known acts of Jewish resilience in sports history.

It also had a cruel postscript: Rudi was obligated to continue playing for a Berlin team throughout the war, meaning that he was one of a very few Jews to survive the Holocaust on German soil, maintaining his freedom but watching his community be annihilated. Still, after the war, his brother Gerhard, also a talented hockey player, returned to Germany where the pair played together for several years before relocating permanently to South Africa.

Ninety years later, the world is again experiencing a surge in antisemitism. And again, a pair of hockey-playing Jewish brothers are in the spotlight.

But things are different this time. For one thing, Jewish representation in the Olympics is stronger. Back in 1936, the U.S. Olympic committee chairman was a Nazi sympathizer who boasted about how few Jews were on the national delegation. This time, dozens of Jews competed in Milan, including three on the men’s hockey team and more than a dozen on the Israeli team.

What’s more, the brothers who took the ice say antisemitism hasn’t been part of their life.

When I asked whether he or his brothers had ever experienced discrimination because of being Jewish, Jack answered simply: “No, we have not.” All three brothers had bar mitzvahs and are proud of their Jewish identity, which comes from their mother, who served as a player development coach for this year’s gold medal-winning women’s hockey team.

Ellen Weinberg-Hughes said, “It all seems surreal. I could not be prouder of both the men and women’s teams.” She added, “I did not like Jack being hit in the mouth but [was] thrilled with the goal.”

I showed Jack two rare 1933 German hockey cigarette cards of Rudi Ball, and we posed for a photo holding them together. To me, it was a most meaningful encounter: Rudi Ball fought simply to stand on the ice. Jack Hughes, Quinn Hughes, and Jeremy Swayman stood tall on the ice and won gold for their country. Both moments, separated by 90 years, remind us how powerful Jewish pride in sports can be.

Neil Keller is a Jewish historian. Visit: www.NeilKeller.com to learn who is Jewish.