Sarah Levy’s great-grandfather faced a Yom Kippur rugby dilemma, she’s playing in the Olympics

When Sarah Levy arrived at Northeastern University in the fall of 2014, the San Diego native felt an impulse common to incoming college students: “Oh, let’s fill up my whole schedule, I’m completely free,” she recalled thinking.

Levy, who played soccer as a child, turned to sports and signed up for rugby, the first women’s team on campus with tryouts. Levy was drawn to the idea of joining a team, and after her first rugby match, she was immediately hooked.

“After that first game, it was done — I couldn’t not play,” Levy told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I just fell in love with it right away. My dad had played growing up, so I always had a draw to it. But I didn’t know women could play until I got to college and there was a team there.”

The sport runs deep in Levy’s family. She was born in Cape Town, South Africa, the great-granddaughter of South African rugby star Louis Babrow, who famously weighed whether to play a match in New Zealand on Yom Kippur in 1937 — ultimately opting to suit up, reasoning that it wasn’t yet the holiday in his home country.

Now Levy, 28, has reached the pinnacle of a sport that she did not know how to play a decade ago. She is in Paris, preparing to represent the United States in the 2024 Olympics as a wing for the national women’s rugby team. She attributes her passion for rugby not just to how much she loves the sport but to the strong support structure it provides — something she had as a child at her San Diego synagogue and JCC, where she taught and went to camp.

“Once I joined rugby, it just took up so much more of my schedule,” Levy said. “Once I was in college and whatnot, the rugby community kind of fulfilled that community for me a lot more, but all of the Jewish friends I’d made growing up, those are still the people that know me from when I was really young, and we still celebrate all the Jewish holidays as a form of tradition.”

Maintaining her Jewish ties

Levy has also maintained her Jewish ties in another way: In 2022, she began working with Zack Test, a former Olympian and the US team’s assistant coach, who went to Jewish day school as a child.

“To have him as a coach to look up to — and his daughter actually goes to the same preschool I went to when I was growing up — and just have someone else that knows the holidays that are coming up, or knows when things are going on in the world, how it affects us differently, that’s been really nice to have,” Levy said.

Test, who played for the US in the 2016 Olympics, said he and Levy “instantly” connected once he found out that she was Jewish.

Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7, Test said he and Levy have been able to lean on each other. Levy’s family lived in Israel for a year when she was very young, and she and her sister both celebrated their bat mitzvahs there. Test’s mother is Israeli and his sister’s family lives there.

“Especially with what’s going on in Israel, we just look at each other and say, you know, what we’re doing is being proud Jews and we’re representing the tribe in a really special way,” Test said.

Levy said she temporarily deleted her social media after Oct. 7 and has not been particularly comfortable talking about the war in the months since. Leading up to Paris, Levy said the possibility of boycotts, protests or even violence directed at Israeli athletes has crossed her mind. She recalled the 1972 Munich Olympics, in which 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were killed in a terror attack.

“That always worried me, and now I think hearing about the security in the Olympic Village, I suddenly was like, ‘Oh, now I’m at that, I am there,’” Levy said. “I was like, ‘Oh, these would be athletes I would be playing against, or athletes I would probably want to go talk to because they’re also Jewish and having that connection.’”

After graduating from Northeastern in 2018, Levy played for the New York Rugby Club in the Women’s Premier League, which plays fifteens, a form of rugby similar to American football, with 15 players on each team competing in two 40-minute halves. The US national rugby program soon recruited her as well, and she switched to playing sevens, a different form of the sport that is played at the Olympics.

Levy also connected during that time with Eyal Hakim, who coaches two teams in South Florida in addition to the Maccabi USA women’s team. Hakim, who is Jewish, helped Levy stay at the sport’s highest level after she began struggling while trying to juggle rugby and a part-time physical therapy doctoral program. Levy said she hopes to play for Hakim one day in the Maccabiah Games.

“He was really a support system I had this whole past year when I was not making rosters,” Levy said. “He was one of the ones that was inspiring me to keep going and know my worth as a player and instill that confidence in me that I needed when I wasn’t getting the affirmation by getting a selection and knowing that I was on the right track.”

Hakim told JTA that Levy is “probably one of the most genuine people you will ever meet” and hailed her athleticism on the pitch as well as her humility off it.

“We have a lot of caring, genuine people, but she is a good representative of what a Jewish athlete should be,” said Hakim. “She works extremely hard and she pushes herself to every limit she can. And then on top of that, she’s just a genuinely good person.”

Levy got back on track with help from Hakim and others and learned that she had officially made the Olympic team on June 7. She said she had trouble processing the news until she began telling her friends and family.

“To see how excited they were for me, it allowed me to take that step back and really enjoy it and really see the pride that they had for me,” Levy said. “And realize, ‘Oh, this was a huge accomplishment. I don’t need to keep looking at it as checkpoints in my career.’”

Now, despite her concerns about antisemitism, she is looking forward to joining another community: the Olympic Village. She’s excited to meet athletes from all over the world — something she got a taste of at the JCC Maccabi Games as a teenager.

“I remember swapping pins and all that stuff, so it’ll be cool to actually do it at the Olympics,” Levy said. “I just think that will be so cool.”