Playing Baseball and Bringing Honor to the Jewish People
Peter Kurz has two foremost passions in life: Israel and baseball. As a ten-year-old from the Upper West Side in New York City, he traveled to Israel for the first time in 1967, and began his lifelong love of the Jewish state. Two years later, in 1969, the New York Mets won the World Series, defeating the Baltimore Orioles, which solidified his love of baseball.
Despite making aliyah in 1976, Kurz did not abandon his passion for the American national pastime. Yet Kurz’s penchant for baseball has often been a lonely experience for him in Israel, a country where basketball and soccer are substantially more popular. He has dedicated much of his professional life to changing the perception of baseball among Israelis. In 1998, he began coaching the sporadic local Israeli Little League team and worked his way up to secretary-general, president of the Israel Baseball Association, and now general manager of the national Israeli baseball team.