April 15, 1940
Yossef Romano, one of the 11 Israeli athletes murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympics, is born in Benghazi, Libya. One of 11 children, he makes aliyah with his family in 1946. Settling in Herzliya, the Romanos run a grocery store in the city for many years.
Romano meets his wife, Ilana, on the beach in Herzliya in 1965 and serves in the IDF during the June 1967 Six-Day War. Romano has a passion for sports and excels in Israel as a weightlifter, winning nine national championships in the lightweight and middleweight divisions. Training at the Hapoel Tel Aviv sports club, he represents Israel at the Weightlifting World Championship Games in 1965 in Iran and 1969 in Poland. He is so dedicated to his craft that a member of Israel’s Olympic Committee recalls, “He was so crazy about sports that he lost two jobs because he spent more time training than working.” (“Israel’s Dead were the Country’s Hope,” Time, 9/18/1972, Vol. 100, Issue 12, p. 30.)
Romano works as an interior decorator, but his dream is to represent Israel in the Olympic Games. A father of three young girls, he tells his wife before departing for Munich that after the Olympics he will retire from competition. The 1972 Olympic Games are the fifth Olympics that Israel competes in but the first time the country competes in weightlifting. A preview of the Israeli Olympic team in The Jerusalem Post in August 1972 notes that “Yossef Romano, competing in the middleweight division, is especially good with the (weight) press.”
On the day of the weightlifting competition Aug. 31, 1972, Romano suffers a torn ligament in his knee and is unable to complete the lifts. It is decided that he will return to Israel on Sept. 6, before the conclusion of the Olympics, to undergo surgery. In the early morning of Sept. 5, eight members of Black September, a Palestinian terrorist organization affiliated with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, force their way into the apartment housing Romano and other members of the Olympic team. Despite his injury — he is using crutches at the moment of attack — Romano flings himself at the terrorists and is about to pry a gun away from one of them when he is fatally shot by another. According to information released in 2015, Romano’s body is then mutilated by the terrorists and left in front of the remaining hostages.
