Rockers replace athletes as Maccabiah comes to an end

Four years of planning and two weeks of workmanlike sporting action came to a loud and flashy end Tuesday night when Jerusalem hosted the 19th Maccabiah’s official closing ceremony.

Local rock stars and DJs performed for a packed Teddy Stadium in the capital, as the likes of the Balkan Beat Box, Riff Cohen and Infected Mushroom gave the thousands of overseas guests one last taste of Israeli culture before they flew back to their home countries.

Like the first night of the “Jewish Olympics,” the stadium was filled with some 9,000 athletes and their supporters from over 70 countries, and it too was a celebration of the largest Jewish get-together.

The Maccabiah “was lots of fun,” Ilya Pyuro, the head of Kazakhstan’s delegation, said hours before the ceremony. With one female tennis player and seven men on the basketball team, the Kazakh delegation was one of the smallest at the games. It was great playing the other countries, even though “we’re amateurs, and the [other] teams are more professional,” Pyuro said of the competition.

Besides bringing together Jews from all over the planet, the event is also — and some might say mainly — the third largest sporting event in the world. Athletes with Olympic experience from Australia, Canada, the US, Chile and Israel participated in the various venues, raising the level of competition over the past 10 days.