Meet Rabbi Shira Rosenblum, the elite U.S. Archer at the Maccabiah who doesn’t shoot on Saturdays

Brandeis University News

When she first entered college, Shira Rosenblum had no intention of taking up archery. Instead, she tried out for Brandeis’s a cappella groups. She didn’t get in. Next, she applied to be a Resident Advisor. She was rejected. The following year, she heard that the campus archery club was meeting in her building. Having dabbled in the sport as a kid, she decided to drop by. The coach told her that there were no tryouts and anyone could just walk on to the team. This proved appealing. “I thought: great, no tryouts, they can’t tell me I can’t come, and I just started going,” Rosenblum recalled. She convinced the team to ensure that she never had to shoot on Shabbat for practices or tournaments, put in 12 hours a week, and began competing.
Fast-forward to 2017 and Rosenblum, now an ordained Conservative rabbi, is serving as the entire U.S. archery team in Israel’s Maccabiah, the quadrennial Jewish Olympics which began on July 6.
This year’s American delegation to the Maccabiah is its largest ever, with over 1,100 participants, second only to the Israelis. But the team has only one archer. Rosenblum—who has taught archery at Camp Ramah in the Rockies, was previously the #2 ranked archer in Massachusetts, and this year came in 4th in the New York State championship—is representing America alone. (Those teams with only one member for a given sport compete in all the individual events, while skipping the team ones.)
This is only the second year that the Maccabiah has included archery, but it is not the first time Rosenblum has honed her skills in the Holy Land. During her year in Israel while in rabbinical school, she happened upon the Jerusalem archery club, which graciously permitted her to use their facilities and equipment. At the time, the U.S. wasn’t ...

Read More