Two American basketball players, Phil Dailey and Chris Rankin, who were converted to Judaism by a three-member rabbinical Beth Din in New Jersey prior to their departure for Israel earlier this month, have been rejected by the Israel Basketball Federation as being ineligible to play for the Maccabi Petach Tikvah team in the Division Two Basketball League.
Earlier, when Dailey and Rankin first arrived in Israel they were advised that their conversion was acceptable but one of the members of the Basketball Federation Board insisted that he cannot accept any conversion signed by one of the three rabbis, whom he, apparently, knows.
The upshot of the Federation’s reversal resulted in the two players circumventing the Board’s rejection by leaving for Cyprus with two Israeli women who have agreed to marry them. A civil marriage in Cyprus is apparently sufficient to make Dailey and Rankin acceptable to the Basketball Federation, if not to the religious sector in Israel.
Dailey was an all-American college basketball player in Salem College in West Virginia while Rankin has had considerable experience as a semi-pro player in the New York Summer Basketball League.
A SUCCESSFUL CONVERSION
Meanwhile, Daniel Steinberg, a soccer star from Argentina, whose father is Jewish but whose mother is not, had no difficulty in proving that his conversion by an Orthodox Beth Din in Philadelphia, composed of three of the leading scholars in that city, was in keeping with halacha (Jewish law).
Steinberg, who is familiar with Jewish law and practices, underwent conversion after learning that his services were desired by some of the Israeli soccer teams. He is now in Israel and is working out with two or three of the leading soccer learns in the Soccer Division One League.
Steinberg, 23, played for the Argentina Junior National Team prior to moving to the United States. During his three-year residence in the U.S. he played for the Albany, N.Y. team in the American Soccer League and was a member of the New York Greek-American eleven. His outstanding play with the Greek-American team won him a spot with Yonina, one of the leading professional teams in Athens, Greece.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
