Howie Lassoff, Jewish Basketball Legend, Dies at 57
Howie Lassoff, who helped lead Maccabi Tel Aviv to six league titles and won Maccabiah gold with the U.S. squad, has died.
Lassoff, a member of the Philadelphia Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, died Feb. 7 following a battle with cancer. He was 57.
The 6-foot-10 Lassoff was the starting center for the Israeli national team from 1982 to 1991. As a member of Maccabi Tel Aviv, he won six European League championships playing against NBA stars Drazen Petrovic, Arvydas Sabonis, Vlade Divac, Rik Smits and Toni Kukoc.
According to the Lower Merion High School website, Lassoff was a household name and a national hero in Israel.
He starred on the U.S. team in the 10th Maccabiah Games that won the gold medal under NBA Hall of Famer Dolph Schayes.
Lassoff moved on to a 15-year career in the European League after playing four years at American University, the last three as a starter.
He had starred at Lower Merion High School in suburban Philadelphia. Lassoff was inducted into the Philadelphia Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 2011.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO