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How a youth hockey league is accommodating Shabbat-observant players
This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.
(JTA) — Six hours of hockey games squeezed in between Saturday night and Sunday may seem like suboptimal scheduling, but for Alex Ottensoser, a forward on the North Jersey Avalanche 16U travel ice hockey team, it’s the main reason he signed up.
As a Sabbath-observant Jew, Ottensosser would have to miss many of the games on most other hockey teams, and that’s if a team would be willing to take a player who would miss Saturday games in the first place. That all changed when his mother’s friend mentioned the idea of forming a team for players who similarly observe Shabbat.
That idea came seven years ago, when several parents from New Jersey’s Bergen County approached the Avalanche, a competitive youth ice hockey program based out of Hackensack, New Jersey, about starting a Sabbath-observant team. Up to that point, Robert Rudman, one of those parents, says his son, now a junior in high school, would have had to miss at least one game every weekend because of his family’s Sabbath observance.
After some discussion with the Avalanche organization, Rudman says they offered to make a parallel team that was similarly competitive with the organization’s existing teams but also accommodate their religious practices.
Since then, the Avalanche have been attracting Sabbath observant players from the New York metropolitan area. “We’ve grown so much that this past year we had four teams made up of at least 15 players, so about 60-65 kids,” said Rudman. Now, “if you come to The Icehouse [in Hackensack] – which is where the Avalanche play their games – after Shabbat, you’re going to see four different age groups all playing.”
Rudman estimates that 95% of the players on these teams are Sabbath observant, although they have also attracted a small number of nonreligious players who simply want to keep their Saturdays free. The Avalanche teams are open to boys and girls, although the vast majority of current players are boys.
Jews who observe Shabbat have been accommodated in a wide array of fields. Former Treasury Secretary Jack Lew was the first observant Jew to hold a cabinet position. Former senator and vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman managed to make it work. And Ryan Turell, the former Yeshiva University star now playing in the NBA’s G League, hopes to become the first Orthodox player in the NBA.
Yet, for practical reasons, youth ice hockey has remained hard to access for Sabbath-observant Jews. Competitive youth ice hockey requires large time commitments from players and their families, including on weekends. Teams from the age of 6 and up typically have multiple weekly practices, and games Saturdays and Sundays, from September through March. Because of this intense schedule and competition for limited rink time, Saturday games are built into the culture of youth hockey, perhaps more than most other sports.
Sabbath-observant Avalanche teams have had their share of success on the ice, including winning state championships at the A and AA levels. (Courtesy of the Avalanche)
Jewish students in the New York metropolitan area have filled this void, compensating for their schools’ lack of ice rinks, with floor hockey. The yeshiva league currently stands at 15 teams and has developed into its own subculture, complete with local youth leagues and a summer camp. Still, the pull of ice hockey remains strong, and a small number of Jewish high schools now field ice hockey teams.
For Ottensoser, fitting in two weeknight practices and multiple weekend games with his Ramaz Upper School workload, and commuting from the city to practices and games, requires efficiency. “I find a way to do work in the car and make use of the time,” he said.
While hockey teams that accommodate Sabbath observant players may be uncommon, it’s not without precedent. The Avenue Road Hockey Association has fielded Toronto-area teams with similar accommodations, and the NY Icecats, a hockey program based out of rinks in New York and Hackensack, also fields teams “arranged to accommodate Sabbath observant families.” In addition, some Sabbath-observant players do manage to play on competitive teams without these accommodations, including on several teams in Long Island.
“[W]e are in an era where the schedule is much more fungible. It’s much easier to create specialized schedules for people,” said Judith Shulevitz, journalist and author of “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.” “So I think it’s easier to accommodate schedules for particular means.”
That said, she also sees a broader appreciation for a day of rest, citing the players from non-observant backgrounds who have joined the Sabbath-observant Avalanche teams. In her view, kids are too driven and scheduled, with not enough down time. “As soon as you begin to grasp the importance of a day of rest, you will begin to grasp the idea of a day of rest with others and begin to structure your time in such a way that it becomes possible,” Shulevitz said. “That’s what they’ve done. They want the day of rest. They’ve joined a [Sabbath-observant team] so they’ve created a structure for themselves.That’s a social good in and of itself.”
Ultimately, while the Sabbath-observant Avalanche teams have had their share of success on the ice, including winning state championships at the competitive A and AA levels, Rudman says the goal is not to get players to the NHL. (The league currently features a small but historically strong group of Jewish players, including Edmonton Oiler Zach Hyman who wears the number 18 for chai, or life in Hebrew.)
“It’s so they can be kids and play the game they love, without having to sacrifice anything in terms of their religion,” he said.
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
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