Ice Hockey in Israel

Ice hockey in Israel combines domestic youth, adult, and masters leagues with men's, women's, and junior national teams.[2][1] The national association was established in 1990 and joined the IIHF in 1991, while organized competition later expanded through facilities in Metulla, Tnuvot, and Holon.[2][1]

Participation has broadened beyond the sport's original immigrant base through academies, girls' programs, and a private semi-professional league.[6][7] Scarce ice time and administrative instability have nevertheless remained major constraints on development.[8][1]

The Israeli Ice Hockey Association was established in 1990 and joined the International Ice Hockey Federation in 1991.[1] The sport's arrival in Israel is traced to immigrants from the former Soviet Union and young people exposed to hockey in the United States and Canada during the 1980s and 1990s.[6] A 1993 newspaper headline referenced Israel's hockey team being "bolstered by Russian emigres," reflecting how central that immigration wave was to the sport's early base.[9] Early play was hampered by a low standard of competition and a near-total absence of suitable ice infrastructure.[6]

By 2009, an eight-team league operated with clubs stretching from Metulla in the far north to Rehovot in central Israel, and every league game was played at the Canada Centre in Metulla.[10] The Canada Centre had been donated to the town by Canadian Jewish philanthropists in the 1990s and housed what a 2012 report described as Israel's only Olympic-size hockey rink.[3]

An Israeli national team was eventually formed and competed at a mid-level in Europe.[6] A 2016 report described the association's greatest achievement to that date as its single promotion to the IIHF's first division in 2005.[1] In 2009, the national team competed annually in the World Championship's Division II—described at the time as the world's third tier—though its ranking did not qualify it for Olympic qualifying tournaments.[10]

Facilities have long been the central constraint on Israeli hockey's growth. A 2016 report identified only two usable ice hockey venues in the country: a non-Olympic facility in Holon and the Canada Centre in Metulla, located roughly three and a half hours from central Israel.[1] The association was reported to lack forty weekly hours of ice time, meaning players were commonly assigned practice slots at 8 p.m., 9 p.m., or even 11 p.m., with some teams resorting to 5 a.m. sessions or supplementing ice training with roller skates.[1] Renting rink time cost 800 shekels per hour, and players often funded their own league participation, covering equipment and long-distance travel to Metulla for Friday-night games.[11]

By 2016, the association counted 1,480 athletes across its activities, organized into four ice-hockey leagues—children and youth through age 18, a cadet league through age 20, a senior National League, and a Premier League—alongside five roller-hockey leagues. The top two ice leagues together fielded 25 teams, with approximately 18 players per team.[1] Women's participation at that time was limited: four women played in the National League and 18 more in a girls' league, while the Premier League remained all-male.[1]

A significant expansion of infrastructure came with the opening of OneIce Arena in Tnuvot, near Netanya, in 2019.[2] For its first years the arena operated independently of the Ice Hockey Federation of Israel, but from 2023 it opened to federation activities and its league merged with the national league. The Israel Elite Hockey League (IEHL), a private semi-professional competition co-founded by Tal Avneri and Marc Brunengraber in 2020, also played out of OneIce Arena.[7] By its third season in June 2023, the IEHL was drawing nearly 1,000 spectators per event and featured players from nine countries.[7] Three venues—OneIce in Tnuvot, the Canada Centre in Metulla, and Ice Peaks in Holon—co-hosted the renewed national leagues by 2023, offering youth, junior, adult, and masters divisions.[2]

A 2021 report placed OneIce Academy's registered participants at 400, spanning ages from children to people in their 50s, and noted growing participation by girls.[6] By 2023, approximately 20 girls were seeking a structured competition framework; the association responded by forming a seven-team league pairing one girls' team against six recreational men's teams aged 40 and over as a developmental stepping stone.[12]

Metulla, Israel's northernmost village on the Lebanon border, became a principal center of Israeli ice hockey because of its rink.[13] A 2012 report described the Canada Centre's Olympic-size hockey rink as the only one of its kind in Israel at that time.[3] The center was built with donations from Canadian Jewish philanthropists and presented to the community in the 1990s. Its location also intersected with a substantial local population of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, providing a natural player base.[3]

The Canada Centre's centrality created logistical burdens for clubs elsewhere: a player from Beersheba, for instance, made the lengthy journey to Metulla for a game in which he played roughly 20 minutes of net ice time.[11] All league games were held there according to a 2009 account, and a 2011 report still described it as the country's only playable hockey facility.[10][11]

The Canada-Israel Hockey School, based in Metulla, was founded by local resident Levav Weinberg with funding from Canadian Jewish philanthropist Sydney Greenberg. The school subsidized coaching, equipment, uniforms, and rink time, enrolling more than 200 Jewish children and approximately 120 Arab children.[3] Weinberg partnered with the mayor of Majdal Shams, Dolan Abu-Saleh, who organized free bus transportation to Metulla for Arab children joining the program.[3] The school initially taught Jewish and Arab participants in separate classes before placing them on mixed teams once players could compete at a common level.[3] A small group of children from the nearby village of Ghajar also participated for a time, though some families later withdrew their children and an Israeli army checkpoint repeatedly delayed others.[3]

Israel's senior men's team has generally competed in the IIHF's lower international divisions.[10][14] Its peak result was a single promotion to the first division in 2005; by 2016 Israel was ranked 32nd among 72 IIHF member nations, having previously reached 24th.[1] By 2025, the men's team had dropped to Division 2B, described as the fifth tier of international competition.[14]

Junior and youth teams have produced strong results. Israel's Under-20 men's team won silver at a January 2023 tournament in Turkey, losing only the final to Australia.[2] The Under-18 team won gold in Division 3A in Iceland in March 2023, earning promotion for the first time since 2008.[2] Then, in January 2024, the Under-20 team won gold at the IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship Division III Group A tournament in Sofia, Bulgaria, finishing undefeated at 5–0.[4] The men's senior team also secured a place in Division 2A after a last-second win over Iceland in Spain in April 2023.[2]

At the 2026 IIHF World Championship Division II Group B in Sofia, Israel won gold with a 5–0 record and 26 goals scored; the decisive final-game win over Iceland was 5–2, with goaltender Maksim Kaliaev stopping 29 of 31 shots.[8] The team traveled individually and largely at the players' own expense, and it lacked formal delegation status because the federation was undergoing liquidation at the time.[8] The next Division II Group A tournament in the United Arab Emirates was subsequently canceled amid regional security concerns related to the war with Iran, and Israel's delegation appealed the effect of the cancellation on its promotion.[8]

The 2017 Maccabiah Games brought an Olympic-size rink, imported from Austria at a cost of approximately one million euros, to Jerusalem's Pais Arena for what was reported as the first Maccabiah ice-hockey competition held in Jerusalem.[15] Canada defeated the United States 7–2 in the final before 7,000 spectators, while Israel lost 7–4 to Russia in the open-category bronze-medal game.[15]

Israel's women's national team made its international debut at the 2022 IIHF Women's World Championship Division III in Belgrade, Serbia.[16] Chen Kotler scored Israel's first goal in the team's history, against Bosnia, but Israel lost that game 5–1 and its following match against Estonia 10–0.[16] The team's general manager, Esther Silver, had developed women's hockey in Israel after playing in Canada, collecting equipment, building a training camp in Metulla, and inviting Canadian and American coaches to lead sessions.[16]

In March 2023, Israel hosted the IIHF Women's World Championship Division III Group B at OneIce Arena in Tnuvot—described as the first IIHF-level event hosted in Israel.[2] The women's team defeated Bosnia and Herzegovina 4–1, earning the team's first-ever international victory and its first medal, a silver finish.[2][17] At the time the team was formed, Israel had no women's league, and the national team played within the men's senior league to maintain competitive practice.[17]

At the 2025 Women's World Championship Division III Group B tournament in Sarajevo, Israel again finished second.[18] The team lost its opening game to Bulgaria but won its next three; Lior Leshem and Pnina Basov each recorded 10 points, while Shani Kotler added six.[18] Leshem scored all three goals in a 3–2 win over Estonia—described as the first time Israel had beaten that opponent—in February 2025.[19] Several players competing that year were active soldiers or had been displaced from northern Israel; captain Liv Sharabi, 19, came from Kfar Giladi and had been unable to return to the Metulla arena where she had trained, as it had not reopened.[19]

Max Birbraer became the first Israeli ever drafted by an NHL team.[20] After emigrating from Kazakhstan, Birbraer initially brought his hockey equipment to Israel for recreational play and soon joined Israel's Under-20 junior team, competing with it at a tournament in Bulgaria.[20] Canadian Under-20 assistant coach Paul Rosen noticed Birbraer's skating at another tournament and invited him to continue his career in Canada, where Rosen served as his legal guardian.[20] Birbraer was selected 67th overall by the New Jersey Devils in the 2000 NHL Draft.[20]

The Israel Under-20 team's match in Bulgaria—separate from the 2024 gold-medal tournament—was marked by a reported confrontation: Israeli players responded to anti-Semitic taunts from Yugoslav players in a bench-clearing brawl, an episode documented in Birbraer's biographical profile.[20]

In May 2025, Ze'ev Buium was a 19-year-old defenseman for the Minnesota Wild who had been born in San Diego to parents who emigrated from Ashdod, Israel. Playing for the United States at the 2025 World Championship, Buium scored a goal and recorded two assists across the tournament, including a goal in the quarterfinal against Finland.[14]

The Ice Hockey Federation of Israel has experienced significant administrative turbulence. A 2023 report described how findings of financial misconduct and other mismanagement led the government to take external control of hockey activities and dismiss the federation's existing leadership.[2] A new management team was installed in 2023, with Basil Gamsu as president, Mikhael Horowitz as CEO, and Pavel Levin leading the Professional Committee.[2] By 2026, however, the federation was reported to be undergoing liquidation, a circumstance that left Israel's national team without formal delegation status for that year's Division II Group B tournament.[8]

Philanthropic support has supplemented official structures throughout the sport's history. A Brandeis University philanthropy study listed Friends of Israeli Ice Hockey Federation among smaller arts and culture organizations and reported that it raised $150,000 in 2007.[21] The Canada-Israel Hockey School in Metulla similarly depended on funding from Canadian Jewish philanthropist Sydney Greenberg to subsidize coaching, equipment, and rink access for hundreds of children.[3]

In January 2024, the IIHF announced a restriction on Israeli national teams, stating that participation would remain restricted until "the safety and well-being of all participants (including Israeli participants) can be assured."[5] The Jewish Virtual Library linked the safety concerns to protests over Israel's war against Hamas.[4] Israel appealed the decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Before the scheduled hearing took place, the IIHF lifted the restriction, allowing Israel's men's Under-20 team and women's team to compete in their respective Division III world championships.[5] The Under-20 men went on to win gold with a 5–0 record.[4]

On March 2, 2024, Sport5 reported that a Canadian ruling found that the IIHF had discriminated against Israel and had failed to consider alternatives that would ensure Israeli participation.[22] A separate claim relayed by Ynet that the exclusion was retaliatory and connected to Russia was presented as an allegation and has not been independently established.[23]

Sources differ on when Israeli ice hockey formally began—one account places the sport's cultivation from the 1980s, another from 1990, and a third identifies 1991 as the year Israel's first league was established.[2][6][7] These statements likely refer to different milestones, and the sources do not reconcile them. Accounts of the federation's governance are also time-specific: the 2023 restructuring and the 2026 liquidation reports indicate continued institutional instability rather than a direct contradiction.[2][8]