Is Zeev Buium the NHL’s next Jewish superstar?
Zeev Buium, drafted this week by the Minnesota Wild hockey team, recently recalled his first game last fall with the University of Denver.
He had the jitters expected of any 17-year-old in his first Division I game.
But he also had something else on his mind: The Pioneers’ first game was on Oct. 7 — and Buium’s parents and much of his family are Israeli. “Waking up that morning wasn’t easy,” Buium told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency; throughout the day, text messages from his family, and news of Hamas’s surprise attack, trickled in.
“We kind of freaked out right away and my mom called us immediately,” Buium, now 18, said of himself and his older brother, Shai, who also played hockey for Denver. “She was like, ‘Hey, like this is what’s going on. We don’t know everything, but Israel was attacked, a lot of people were killed and injured or taken for hostage.’”
On the other end of the line, their mother, Miriam, who lives in San Diego, tried to be circumspect. She knew they had an important match that night — “It’s their first game together, and I didn’t want it to stress them out too much,” she said — and tried to reinforce one message: Their loved ones were OK.
That knowledge, Buium said, helped him as he laced up for the 7 p.m. game.
As the war and the season progressed, Buium tried to stay updated on the news from Israel while contributing to his team, which won the national championship in April.
It was a freshman season filled with accolades, including being named the National Collegiate Hockey Conference’s Rookie of the Year and Offensive Defenseman of the Year. ESPN ranked him as the No. 6 prospect entering the draft.
Buium’s path to becoming a top NHL draft pick ran through the southern Israeli coastal city of Ashdod, where his parents came from, to San Diego, where they moved in 1999, before he was born. When they arrived in the United States, he said, they had “no idea” what hockey was.
“I saw the game and I was like, ‘Oh my God,’” Miriam Buium recalled.
From there, Miriam and her husband, who goes by Iuli, got a crash course in hockey as their three sons all fell in love with the sport. It became a full-time job for Miriam, who spent many days managing the logistics of school and hockey obligations for her sons from 6 a.m. through midnight.
Zeev Buium connects with his Israeli identity so much that he wears it on his sleeve — literally. The defenseman has a tattoo on his left forearm that lists the Hebrew calendar dates of his three major championship wins: the 2023 World U18 Championships, the 2024 World Junior Ice Hockey Championships, and this year’s NCAA title.
“All the guys get tattoos, and I thought, I have something a little bit more special I can do,” Buium said. “I thought with the Hebrew lettering, it’s got a lot more meaning to it than just regular writing or Roman numerals… I obviously love being Jewish, love everything about it, so I’m not afraid to show it off.”
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
comments