First team manager and former Maccabi star Benny Tabak gave the start sign for Maccabi Tzair's 2014 "Torch" Marathon
For the 70th consecutive year, Maccabi Tzair's annual "Torch" Marathon was held earlier this week, on the penultimate day of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. And as every year, an outstanding Maccabi athlete is chosen to join the Maccabi Tzair participants to give the start sign for the race. This year that honour fell to Maccabi Tel Aviv's former star and first team manager Benny Tabak. As a veteran Maccabi athlete representing all Maccabi groups, Tabak received the torch from the Maccabi Tzair chairman and handed it on to Yogev Ohayon, a young athlete active in the Maccabi groups and member of the basketball team. In this way the torched is passed on from the older generation to the younger generation of Maccabi athletes.
The "Torch" Marathon is the flagship activity of the Maccabi Tzair Youth Movement and is held every year during the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, which celebrates the resistance of the Maccabeans to religious oppression in the years before the common era. This year the venue for the marathon was the Maccabean wood in the central Israeli town of Modi'in. Members of the Maccabi Tzair movement were delighted with the presence of Benny Tabak and Yogev Ohayon and took the opportunity to have their pictures taken with them.
