Yuri Foreman

In between bouts, the Belarussian-born, Israeli-reared, Brooklyn boxer studies to become an Orthodox rabbi

Up a dingy stairway, on the second floor of an abandoned factory in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn, is Gleason’s Gym. The first impression given by this cavernous temple of boxing is of the gyms that flourished in the early days of television, when Gillette Blue Blades sponsored fight telecasts every Friday night, and bouts between Sugar Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta, Willie Pep and Sandy Saddler, Rocky Marciano and Archie Moore captivated 1950s America. The gym echoes with the sounds of boxing boots on canvas, gloves against leather, grunts and shouts. A slight scent of liniment, mixed with perspiration, lingers in the air as muscular young men—white, black, Latino, Asian—shadow-box in one of several rings, pound the heavy bag and rhythmically stab at the small bag, ride exercise bikes, skip rope and get massages to relieve sore muscles.

But there are a few anomalies that hint at a modern era. A TV set flickers in a corner near the office, playing recorded footage of fighters at work, a remote shuttling the images backward and forward at lightning speed to allow intensive study. Some of the fighters are women. And then there’s the mezuzah at the entrance. It was affixed there a few months ago by Yuri Foreman, the Belarussian-born, Israeli-reared Brooklynite, rabbinical student and 154-pound World Boxing Association champion of the world.

“They say that since it’s there, business has picked up,” Foreman says with a grin.

In November, Foreman defeated Daniel Santos of Puerto Rico in a 12-round bout on the undercard of the Manny Pacquiao-Miguel Cotto battle in Las Vegas. It was the 28th straight professional win for the undefeated Foreman, and it enabled him to claim Santos’ crown as WBA champion in his class. Boxing experts had tapped Santos as the favorite; he was a southpaw, Foreman’s first left-handed professional opponent; he had more experience and possessed a far more lethal punch, having knocked out 23 of his 36 opponents en route to winning 32 fights, drawing one and losing only three.

Despite Foreman’s winning streak and his reputation as a crafty boxer, he was not known as a particularly powerful puncher—with a mere eight knockouts on his record. But throughout the fight, he moved from side to side, denying Santos an easy target and moving in with crisp jabs and short crosses that took a toll on his opponent. In the end, he gained a unanimous decision, even knocking Santos down in the final round.

A huge Israeli flag was unfurled in the ring before the fight as Foreman climbed through the ropes. When the ring announcer proclaimed him “the winner and new junior middleweight champion of the world”—Israel’s first-ever boxing champion—he dropped to the floor with joy, then beamed as handlers draped a huge championship belt and then that flag around his shoulders. Afterward, journalists focused on what seemed to them to be the oddity of an Israeli champion fighter. “People should not be surprised to see world champions coming from Israel; it’s a small country but very mighty,” Foreman said at a Manhattan kosher restaurant reception celebrating his championship victory. “People are very strong there. Just to live in Israel, you have to be a champion.”

The Jewish presence in boxing goes back to at least the late 1700s and Daniel Mendoza, a Sephardic Jew from London’s East End. Proudly calling himself “Mendoza the Jew,” he began his professional career in 1790 by knocking out one Harry the Coalheaver in 40 rounds, a length typical of that pre-Marquis of Queensbury-rules era. Mendoza became known as the father of scientific boxing, and some say his prominence helped stem an outbreak of anti-Semitism in England. Jewish boxers since have been referred to as “sons of Mendoza.”

There were days in the early decades of the 20th century when Jewish fighters dominated the world of boxing. In 1930, six champions of the eight major weight classes were Jews, says boxing historian and ESPN boxing analyst Bert Sugar, who cuts a Damon Runyon-esque figure with an ever-present fedora on his head and a cigar in his hand. Among them was the incomparable Benny Leonard, known as “the ghetto wizard,” a lightweight whom the American boxing magazine The Ring ranked eighth on its 2002 list of the 80 best fighters of the past 80 years. Jewish champions included Max Baer, who defeated the German hero Max Schmeling in 1933 and knocked out Primo Carnera in 1934 to become heavyweight champion. According to Sugar, Baer was just one-eighth Jewish, but that was enough to enable him get away with wearing the Star of David on his trunks.

“Battling Levinsky,” born Barney Lebrowitz, was light-heavyweight champion from 1916 to 1920, preceding Maxie Rosenbloom, later a Hollywood actor known as “Slapsie Maxie.”

“A lot of the Jewish fighters changed their names, some to escape their mothers, others to take names that weren’t Jewish,” says Sugar. “There was one Jewish fighter named Mushy Callahan whose real name was Morris Scheer. He took an Irish name and did such a good job that one of his sons became a priest.”

But the Jewish presence in the fight world began to fade in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Barney Ross was the last great Jewish champion, earning titles in the lightweight, junior welterweight and welterweight divisions before World War II, in which he served heroically as a Marine.

“Those on the bottom rung of the ladder have always turned to fighting as a way up,” says Sugar. “First it was the Irish, then the Jews, then the Italians, the African Americans and the Hispanics. The second generation of Jews got jobs as lawyers and accountants, they didn’t have to use their fists. You’re not getting recruits for boxing from Harvard Business School, you’re getting them from the streets.”

And so it wasn’t until the last few years, when immigrants from Eastern Europe began pouring into the United States and scrapping their way up from the bottom rung, that Jewish fighters began to re-emerge. One of them is Dmitry Salita, a Ukrainian-born Orthodox Jew who refuses to fight on Friday night or before dark on Saturday. “If anyone wants a whupping from me, they got to wait until after sundown,” he says on his website. Salita gained a title shot in December against WBA light-welterweight champion Amir Khan in England but was knocked out in the first round. So far, Yuri Foreman remains the most successful of Eastern European immigrant boxers.

Yuri Foreman, 29, sits outside the office at Gleason’s Gym. Standing 5 feet 11, he has a surprisingly gentle handshake for a man who makes his living with his fists. His piercing brown eyes seem to miss little. As he talks, other fighters spot him and come over to fist-bump their congratulations. One barrel-chested African-American heavyweight expresses the pride of them all, happy to see one of their own make it to the top. In a voice with the power to knock over the Brooklyn Bridge, he roars over and over again, “Champion! Champion!”

Foreman takes all this with a shy smile above a wisp of a beard. A long coat hangs over a chair, but he wears a funky cap, a sweater and long, dark pants, with the threads of tsitzes dangling from beneath the sweater. In a few weeks, a banner celebrating his championship achievement—“Gleason’s Gym, Home of WBA Junior Middleweight Champion Yuri Foreman”—will be unveiled in what he calls “my second home.”

Or maybe it’s his fourth, after the apartment in Brooklyn he shares with his wife; after Haifa, where he grew up; and after his birthplace in Gomel, Belarus, not far from Chernobyl, whose nuclear reactor meltdown led to the evacuation of all of Gomel’s children, including the 6-year-old Yuri.

“My parents sent me to live with relatives in Estonia,” he recalls. His voice carries only a slight residue of an accent. “But after two months, the authorities said it was safe to go back, all the radiation was gone.” He shrugs and smiles at the absurdity.

The following year, Soviet policy dictated that the time had come for him to pick a sport. His parents sent him to learn to swim, but the older boys in the pool began to bully him. Because he was Jewish? “No, because I was smaller. They’d tell me to go get their towels, and I refused, so they bullied me. I came home and told my parents, and my mom took me to boxing camp so I could learn to defend myself. At first it was intimidating, but I got to like the environment there: the heavy bag, the trainer, everything.”

When Yuri was nine, his parents decided to leave Belarus, “not for religious reasons, they just wanted a better life,” he says. At first, they tried to emigrate to America with their only child, but when that “didn’t happen,” they opted for Israel.

“I can’t forget what it was like when we arrived and I stepped off the plane,” he recalls. “There was this fruity smell, like fields, like going to the country, cows, manure, a good smell. We came into the building at the airport and there was a flood of new immigrants, and they gave us free trays of oranges, which we rarely saw in Belarus. It was like paradise.”

For a while, life was difficult for the transplanted youngster. He had no friends and didn’t speak the language. Today, he says, he realizes it was harder for his parents. Back in Belarus, his father worked in a factory and his mother was a housewife. In Israel, they both went to work cleaning offices. “I’d join them after school, cleaning cubicles. Life was just hard in Israel. We weren’t starving, but we had some hard times,” he says.

Occasionally, another kid would pick a fight; Yuri knew enough boxing by then to take care of himself. Still, it wasn’t until he was 15 that a gym opened in Haifa and he could return to the sport. “Boxing is a very unpopular sport in Israel,” he says. “The only boxers were Russians and Arabs. But I daydreamed about it, and as soon as the gym opened, I went,” often training alongside Arab fighters. “There were some trainers from the Soviet Union there, and my trainer asked me why I joined. I said I wanted to be world champion.”

Foreman fought more than 50 bouts in Israel, winning almost all of them, and became Israeli champion three years running, as a lightweight and later as a welterweight. But by 1999, he’d figured out that to be a world champion, he was going to have to go “where boxing is big”—the United States. He arrived that year on a tourist visa and stayed with a friend in Brooklyn.

On his second day in America, Yuri Foreman found a job in Manhattan’s Garment District. “I cleaned the store and made deliveries, pushing carts full of clothes down the street,” he says. “I worked six days a week, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and at first I took home $200 a week. Later I got a raise—to $250.”

But there was the matter of his championship dream. He started asking people about the best place to find a gym, and they all said Gleason’s. So he went there but found that the gym charged a fee he couldn’t afford. Enter Bruce Silverglade, the Jewish owner of Gleason’s, who purchased the venerable facility, which dates to 1937, in 1983 and moved it from the Bronx to Brooklyn the following year.

“We have a program we call Give a Kid a Dream, to help kids who want to learn to box and can’t afford to pay, so we helped Yuri,” Silverglade says. “He proved himself right away. Many kids, they give you a story about what they want to do, but they’re all talk and no action. Yuri was serious about the sport. And that’s what makes a champion—self-motivation. He was coming in at night after working the whole day.” Foreman started working with trainers at Gleason’s, including Pedro Saiz, a one-time champion fighter in his native Dominican Republic. “You got to work hard if you work with me,” Saiz says, “and he does. You got to work hard, be smart, be dedicated.” He smiles fondly at Foreman. “He does it all.”

In 2001, Foreman was still struggling, still working in the garment district, when he entered the New York Golden Gloves competition, long one of the major proving grounds in amateur boxing. He won the 156-pound competition, and decided to turn pro. He made his professional debut in February 2002 and won on a second-round knockout.

“Pro boxing is different from amateur,” he says. “There’s no headgear, the gloves are smaller and the fans want to see more toe-to-toe fighting. But my focus is to be ready, to fight my fight. I worked my day job until my fifth pro fight.”

By then, Foreman had new co-managers, Alan Cohen and Murray Wilson. “I found him through The New York Times” in 2004, says Wilson, who owns two midtown Manhattan restaurants, with a laugh. “They had an article that said he could potentially be a Jewish champion. I’m interested in all things Jewish, so I called Bruce Silverglade at Gleason’s Gym. We got together with Yuri, and we made a deal. I don’t have enough good adjectives to describe him. He’s the nicest kid I’ve ever run across. He’s respectful, humble, honest, and he’ll stay that way.”

Cohen and Wilson take care of everything on the business side of the fight game, enabling Foreman to concentrate on boxing exclusively. “We give him a stipend, and we make all the decisions about everything, right up to the point where he has to OK it. But we don’t do anything without his consent, and his wife’s consent.”

Foreman’s wife, Leyla Leidecker, is a Hungarian-born former model who makes documentary films and is a former boxer herself. They met at Gleason’s Gym, where she still works out. “That’s her over there,” Foreman says, pointing out a stunning blonde in shorts and a red T-shirt, training alone. “Because she boxed, she has no worries about me boxing,” he says. “She knows how much I have to train, the right diet. We watch tapes of my opponents together. She’s a team member.”

Leidecker describes her husband—“the sweetest person ever”—as a smart fighter who’s cautious and doesn’t take unnecessary risks. “He’s very good at reading an opponent’s moves,” she says. “I worry, of course, but I don’t express it because that creates negative thoughts.”

Foreman ranked “maybe 500th or 600th” after his first professional fight. But with each victory, he moved up in the rankings.

“I’m very competitive,” he says. “If I’m running with someone, I want to run faster or longer. I had tough opponents, and I was beating them. Then I got into the top 10, and each fight was do or die to get my dream in my reach. Finally I got to be the number one challenger, and they said I’m fighting for the championship, and I said, ‘Wow!’ Suddenly my dream was almost a reality. It’s not a gift. I worked hard, there were no shortcuts.”

Early in his professional career, Foreman had begun to feel “drained mentally, physically and spiritually” as he struggled to balance his work and his boxing. He even considered giving up on his championship dream and returning to Israel, as many of his friends predicted he would. But he hated the idea of conceding.

And by that time, he and Leidecker, who was not Jewish, were married, and she began to ask him questions: What is kosher? What about the Sabbath? What is Kabbalah?

“I didn’t know anything,” he says. “I was very secular. I never learned about Judaism, never was interested. I ate non-kosher food and didn’t care. To me, it was all nonsense. I was never invited to a Shabbat dinner.”

But his wife found a class about Judaism in their neighborhood taught by DovBer Pinson, a Chabad Orthodox rabbi, and they went to the class together. “He was gentle, soft-spoken, knowledgeable,” Foreman says. “In the first class, he brought up a parallel of life being like a boxer: When you get knocked down sometimes, you have to get up. And he didn’t know I was a boxer! After the class, I spoke to him, told him I was a boxer, and he invited us to Shabbat dinner. Here we had no family, and a stranger invited us! There was so much food, so much caring and love, it was awesome. So we kept going to his class, and Leyla decided to convert.”

Leidecker, who describes herself as “a spiritual person who was looking for what Judaism has to offer, its system of belief,” found the Orthodox conversion process “not hard for me, not a big deal if you’re really into it. I studied, and I still study every day.”

As he studied with the rabbi, Foreman found that the experience was having a major impact on him. “I became a more conscious person,” he says. “My vision broadened. I could listen to others and be more grounded, focused. And it helped me in boxing, too, not to lose my head in the ring. Judaism is my outlet. I come to the gym and I give 150 percent, but when I leave, I’m a different person.”

Soon, he began to think of becoming a rabbi himself. Foreman sees no conflict between fighting and his rabbinical training. To him, both are spiritual undertakings, two sides to the same coin of being in the moment, getting the most out of each. “I’m learning that boxing is not everything of me,” he says. “It’s a big part, but with Judaism, I have become more of a better person.” Pinson, who heads IYYUN, the Institute for the Exploration of the Deeper Dimensions of Torah, is as impressed by his student as Foreman is by him. “No other fighter can balance spirituality and physicality” like Foreman, the rabbi has said. He called Foreman a “gentle lion” who is breaking stereotypes about boxers and Jews.

Gradually, Foreman became more and more immersed in his studies, and about three years ago, he joined a class that would lead to his becoming a rabbi. There were others in the class at first, but they dropped away, and now he is the only student. Unlike his wife, who is primarily interested in Judaic philosophy, his focus is on Halachic law.

Foreman figures that it will take him another two years—for a total of five years of study—before he can become a rabbi. “And when I pass, it’s still just the beginning,” Foreman says. “You still have to learn.”

The fact that a boxer, now a world champ, is studying to become a rabbi has brought Foreman an inordinate amount of media attention. So it seems only fair to ask if this cannot be seen as just a shtick, a clever means of gaining publicity. In response, he smiles. “I told a friend in Israel about it, and he thought it was a PR thing,” he says. “I said no. With God involved, it’s got to be legit. If you study with the rabbi, he’s not joking. It’s difficult to stay with a shtick for five years.”

Foreman leaves the gym and takes the subway to the synagogue. Unlike at Gleason’s, where he’s a hero recognized by all, he is just another anonymous New Yorker on the subway and on the Brooklyn streets. He enters the synagogue, a long, low two-story building whose exterior is painted a sickly shade of light green, and goes upstairs in search of his quarry: Diego, a fat gray cat who has made his home in the synagogue and is tolerated because he is good at catching mice. Foreman picks up the cat, gently strokes it for a few minutes, makes sure that the creature has enough food and water, and leaves.

“My cat mitzvah,” he says.

Foreman’s boxing future is uncertain. He has to defend his title early this year, and he and his manager, Murray Wilson, would like to have him fight a big name—perhaps even Manny Pacquaio, widely regarded as the best fighter in the world today, pound for pound. “Yuri is now at the point where he can make some serious money,” Wilson says. “Why not fight Pacquiao? Even if we lose, we win.”

Promoter Bob Arum, whose Las Vegas firm, Top Rank, staged the Pacquiao-Cotto fight and Foreman’s fight with Santos—Foreman calls the Jewish Arum “my other rabbi”—also is looking ahead to a Foreman-Pacquiao match. “Down the road, that probably will be Foreman’s big fight,” Arum says. “If he’s still champion by the end of the year, it’s a real possibility for early 2011….I’ve talked with Pacquiao about it, and he’s interested.” But ESPN’s Bert Sugar is not so sure that’s a good idea. “Yuri is an excellent mechanic, very fast,” he says. “But I don’t think he has the potential to beat Pacquiao; he’s not a knockout puncher.”

The larger looming question is what Foreman will do later, after he becomes a rabbi. He says he hopes to continue boxing. Bruce Silverglade, the Gleason’s Gym owner is protective of his famous boxer. “My dream is for him to fight a couple of times in 2010, and in 2011 have a big fight with someone like Pacquiao, make several million dollars and retire. He’ll have nothing else to prove. For him to stay in the ring, maybe get hurt, it’s not worth it,” Silverglade says. “For him to become a rabbi would be a big boost for Jews around the world. When young kids see a rabbi with a long white beard, they can’t relate. But a nice, good-looking fellow like Yuri, he’d be a role model. Maybe they’d say, ‘I want to go to the synagogue, too.’”

Focused as usual on the here and now, Foreman is noncommittal about the future. He agrees that he can be a role model. “Growing up in Israel, there are so many kids like me, they just don’t know,” he muses. “When I become a rabbi, I can go back as a rabbi and bring them closer to their Jewish faith.”

But then he hesitates. “I don’t know what it will be in two years,” the future rabbi says. “You know the Jewish saying: You make plans, and God laughs.” And he laughs, too.

Boris Weintraub is a former senior writer at National Geographic and an associate editor at Moment.