All across the country and around the world Yom Hashoa – Holocaust Remembrance Day is being commemorated as we all look back to the horrors the Jewish People experienced. The Maccabi Tel Aviv Youth Department marked the day as team after team spent time by a special memorial that was erected in the Youth Department courtyard. The coaches spoke about the importance of the Holocaust while a player from each squad read about the connection between the Yellow & Blue shirts and the Yellow Star that the Jews of Europe were forced to wear.
Here is the text that was read by the players:
Until the beginning of the 1940’s, the colours worn by Maccabi Tel Aviv were blue and white. In 1942, at the suggestion of one of Maccabi Tel Aviv’s players of the time, the late Yossef Merimovich, the colour yellow was adopted along with the traditional blue as a sign of solidarity with the Jews of Europe who were suffering the horrors of the Nazis and were forced to wear the infamous yellow star.
The stories of these horrors were “trickling” in to Israel and were a source of great pain to the Jewish community in Palestine, including the players of Maccabi Tel Aviv Football Club. The news of the “yellow star” awoke in many long hidden emotions and Merimovich’s suggestion to adopt yellow along with blue as the team’s colour found wide support among the club’s management.
