It’s a Tough Call for Some Baseball Fans : Choosing Playoffs or Prayers on Yom Kippur

In a cruel postscript to a storybook season in this long-suffering baseball city, the calendar has posed a thorny moral dilemma to a substantial segment of Indians fans:

To play or pray?

The first postseason baseball games played in Cleveland in 41 years fall during observances of Yom Kippur, the holiest of the High Holy Days of the Jewish faith.

For thousands of Jewish baseball fans, the question of whether to spend the nights of Oct. 3 and 4 in a box seat or a temple seat will be a highly personal one, dictated by the yearnings of the heart versus the needs of the soul.

“There is that temptation,” said Martin J. Plax, area director of the American Jewish Committee. “It’s going to be a tough call. A lot of people will be in temple wishing they were at the ballgame.”

Beyond witnessing a fair amount of teeth-gnashing and hand-wringing, Plax said he received a call from one distraught fan who suggested petitioning the team to reschedule the games. Plax swiftly rejected that idea.

“This is the way the schedule works,” said Plax, who is also a baseball fan. “If you are truly religious, you can do without for a couple of games. When entertainment becomes the focal point of our existence, we’re in trouble.”

Variations on that theme seem to best describe the sentiment among observant Jews. It’s painful, it’s unfair, it’s downright cruel. But the power of God is recognized as superior to the power of Indians slugger Albert Belle.

“It was a no-brainer,” said Howard Groedel, a lawyer who lives in suburban Solon, near Cleveland.

Having already ordered his playoff tickets before he noticed the conflict, he decided to sell his Game 1 field box seats, 20 rows behind the home team dugout, to the highest bidder and donate the money to charity.

“I wouldn’t have felt comfortable going to the game,” Groedel said. “I just couldn’t have enjoyed it.”

For inspirational role models, Jewish baseball fans can look to the athletes.

Probably the best-known example of sports versus religion arose in 1965, when Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers declined to pitch the opening game of the World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur.

“A lot of boys and girls of my generation were inspired by the conviction of that decision,” said Rabbi Benjamin Kamin of Temple-Tifereth Israel in Beachwood, Ohio. “It was inspiring and somewhat historic for us.”

Few other examples of the age-old conflict are as well known or as controversial, for a simple reason. “There’re not a whole lot of Jewish players,” said Ron Cohen, former president of the Wahoo Club and a 30-year Indians season ticket-holder.

In 1938, Detroit Tigers teammates Hank Greenberg and Harry Eisenstat sat out an important pennant race game when it conflicted with Yom Kippur, recalled Eisenstat, 79, a former Indians pitcher who lives in Cleveland. At the time, Greenberg had 58 home runs and was closing in on Babe Ruth’s record of 60.

“We felt there might be some resentment from the fans, but there wasn’t. They understood,” Eisenstat said.

Eisenstat did not place the same sanctity on Rosh Hashana, which begins the 10 days of the High Holy Days. He recalls pitching in Yankee Stadium and being knocked out by a Joe DiMaggio home run. On the walk to the showers, he said, a small Jewish man with a piercing voice berated him from a seat behind the dugout: “Good for you! Good for you! What are you doing pitching on Rosh Hashana?”

“I shot back, ‘What are you doing here?’ ” Eisenstat said.

Indeed, the obligations for compliance with the holy days vary in strictness, depending on the denomination of Judaism: Reform, Conservative or Orthodox.

This year, Yom Kippur--the Day of Atonement--begins at sunset Oct. 3 and continues until sunset Oct. 4. Temple services for the holy day begin Oct. 3 before sunset and end about three hours later.

Services resume the following morning and continue all day. Seats in the synagogue are at a premium and are usually reserved weeks in advance.

Orthodox Jews honor the holiest of all religious holidays by not driving, not wearing leather, not carrying money, not washing and by performing no physical labor whatsoever. Practicing Jews of all denominations are expected to fast the entire 24 hours.

At sunset of Yom Kippur, most families gather for a large meal known as the “break fast.” Whether the dinner is held with Game 2 on a TV set or radio blaring in the background depends on the strictness of the household.

Rabbi Kamin, a devoted baseball fan, plans to put the sport out of his mind on Yom Kippur, and he expects the majority of his 4,000-member congregation will too.

“Frankly, being in a ballpark on the holiest night of the religious year represents an evacuation of the most basic responsibility one has to his or her heritage,” Kamin said. “Where do we draw the lines? In heaven or on a sports diamond?”

But Rabbi Daniel Schur, head of the Heights Jewish Center and chairman of the Orthodox rabbinical body of Greater Cleveland, suspects his brethren in the more liberal denominations may erect a big-screen television in the temple foyer for viewing during breaks in the services. “They may even announce the scores from the pulpit,” he said.