Eight Jewish Athletes Inducted into International Sports Hall of Fame

Eight athletes and sports personalities have been elected to the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

Honored Americans are:

Harry Lewis, a welterweight boxing champion from 1908-1913;

Eugene Selznick, who in 1956 became the first American elected to the honorary All-World Volleyball Team. He was named an All- American every year from 1951 to 1964;

Julia Jones Pugliese, national collegiate fencing champion and coach at New York University from 1931-1938;

Allen Tolmich, a world-class hurdler, who broke a series of world and American records in the late 1930s; and

Joseph Shane, known as “the father of tennis in Israel,” he built the original tennis complex in Ramat Hasharon.

Other Hall of Fame members are:

Tatiana Lysenko, a Ukrainian gymnast who won three Olympic medals at the 1992 games;

Victor Zinger, who was goalkeeper on five consecutive Soviet Union world championship ice hockey teams, from 1965 through 1969; and

Kenneth Gradon, who served for almost two decades as president of Maccabi Europe and of Maccabi Great Britain.

Since 1979, more than 300 athletes and sports personalities have been elected to the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, whose museum is located on the campus of the Wingate Institute for Physical Education and Sport in Netanya, Israel.