Being like Mike translates into eclectic career

Alan Freedman archives the Jewish sports experience

Posted

Growing up in Mt. Vernon, Alan Freedman wanted to be “like Mike” but not Michael Jordan. Freedman, 60, idolized his oldest brother, Michael, who played soccer and wrestled.

Freedman played soccer and threw the shot put and discus. He was not the athlete big brother Mike was, but did form a life-long affinity for athletics that led him to a career of being instrumental in archiving the experience of Jewish athletes and helping to educate people about them as well as Jewish military heroes.

“It’s a breakdown of stereotypes and to impart a sense of pride in Jewish kids that it’s not a fluke that you have someone like Sid Luckman or even a Richard Bernstein, a blind judge who is a triathlete, and does it for the love of sport,” Freedman said. Luckman played football at Columbia University and then for the NFL Chicago Bears in the 1930s and ’40s.

Freedman, a Great Neck resident, is the executive director of Temple Israel of Lawrence and the director of the Jewish Sports Heritage Association in Great Neck, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to educating the public about Jewish men and woman in the world of sports.

Besides Michael, who died in 2013, Freedman has a brother Steven, and credits his parents, mother Beverly who lives in Mt. Vernon and father Abraham, who died in 2003, for being supportive of his endeavors.

Athletes and athletics captivated Freedman from his favorite boxer Muhammad Ali, because he was so different from other athletes in 1960s and stood up for what he believed in, to soccer great Pelé in soccer, who Freedman saw play in old Yankee Stadium.

Beginning on the fitness side, Freedman started out as the health and physical education director at the Suffolk Y JCC in Commack in 1986, when the Jewish community center was building a health, physical education and aquatics facility. A few years later, he was teaching the newly created wellness course — proper exercise, nutrition, stress management, smoking cessation and behavior modification — at Suffolk County Community College.

In 1993, he founded and became director of the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame & Museum at the Suffolk Y. It is the only national museum dedicated to Jewish athletes and those involved in the sports world.

“He breathed life into something that will always be his passion,” said Joel Block, the executive director of the Marion & Aaron Gural JCC in Cedarhurst, who was Freedman’s boss at the Commack JCC. “He had an idea and sports became the mechanism to say to Jewish children, whatever you want to do you are not limited.”

Writing and editing consultant Carrie Sheinberg worked with Freedman on a project for the Hall of Fame in Commack. “Alan was simply inspirational to work with,” Sheinberg wrote on LinkedIn.

Freedman founded and served as director of the George Kop Hall of Jewish Military Heroes at the Suffolk Y in 2008 to promote a different realm of potential role models. The mission is to increase awareness about the courage, heroism and sacrifices made by Jewish-American in the military from the Revolutionary War to contemporary times.

“We should not set limits on what we can do and it makes me realize that there is a lot more we can do and should as the human spirit is an amazing thing,” said Freedman, who met his wife Marilyn at the Scarsdale Y. They have a son, David, who played football in high school, and is now a PH.D. candidate at SUNY Buffalo, and a daughter, Rachel, who just graduated SUNY Binghamton.