Newsletter
Newsletter Support JNS

Beitar soccer club drops match with Barcelona for refusing to play in Jerusalem

“I can’t betray Jerusalem,” said Beitar Jerusalem soccer-club owner Moshe Hogeg.

Crowds of fans at a Beitar Jerusalem game. Source: Beitar/Twitter.
Crowds of fans at a Beitar Jerusalem game. Source: Beitar/Twitter.

Beitar Jerusalem soccer-club owner Moshe Hogeg said on Thursday that he canceled a friendly match with Barcelona after it refused to play in Jerusalem.

“After receiving the contract for signing and being exposed to the unequivocal demand that the game not take place in the capital, Jerusalem, and some other demands that I did not like, I slept with a heavy heart, thought a lot and decided that before all, I am a proud Jewish and Israeli,” Hogeg wrote on Facebook.

“I purchased Beitar Jerusalem out of love for the holy capital; I fought a war with racism and will continue to fight it,” he said. “I promote coexistence and am in favor of peace.”

“I can’t betray Jerusalem,” he added.

Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, of Park Avenue Synagogue, told JNS that he will address “Yizkor, memory and revelation,” rather than politics, during Shavuot morning services.
“The bill will continue to return our intelligence agencies back to their core mission: the collection of clandestine foreign intelligence to protect our homeland,” said Sen. Tom Cotton.
“There’s much that goes into a security-layered approach, and as far as I’m concerned, you can never have too many layers,” the village’s police chief told JNS.
Removing sanctions on the anti-Israel United Nations adviser “will undermine important national security and foreign policy interests of the United States,” the Justice Department said.
“Reconstruction financing will not follow where weapons have not been laid down,” warned Nickolay Mladenov, amid a stalled peace process he largely blamed on the Gazan terror group.
Regardless of the findings of a recent Democratic National Committee “autopsy” report, a “majority of Americans, including Democrats, support the U.S.-Israel relationship,” Brian Romick, of Democratic Majority for Israel, told JNS.