Beitar Jerusalem's dressing room has changed a great deal since the 1980s, but one figure has been a constant through all of it. Meir Harush, the club's veteran kit and equipment man, turned 70 this week, and when ONE's daily interview programme asked him to name the single most exciting moment of his decades at the club, he didn't hesitate: "the championship with Eli Ohana."
It is easy to see why. Ohana, one of the greatest players in Beitar's history, was the on-field face of three Israeli championships won by the club during Harush's time in the building — the historic first title in 1986/87, another in 1992/93, and a third in 1996/97. For a man whose job is folding shirts and laying out boots rather than scoring goals, sharing in those celebrations from the inside evidently left the deepest mark of all.
Harush's tenure at Beitar stretches back roughly four decades. A Sport1/Maariv profile marking his 60th birthday, back in 2016, described him as having already given the club close to 30 years of service by then, with Eli Ohana, David Amsalem and other Beitar greats queuing up at the time to call him "a father figure" and "everything" to the players who pass through the club.
In the new interview, Harush was in typically self-effacing form. Asked, separately, what the single biggest moment of his career was, he brushed the question off with a one-word answer — "today" — a wry nod to his own birthday rather than a claim on any particular football memory.
He was more forthcoming on the game's lighter details. The most valuable shirt in his possession, he told ONE, belongs to Thierry Henry. And the player who gave him the most grief over the years, he said, was the Croatian midfielder Giovanni Rosso, who turned out for Beitar in the early 2000s — not for anything he did on the pitch, but for a headband Harush was forever chasing down: "all day, 'where's the hat.'"
Not every memory from his time at the club is a happy one. Asked for his saddest moment in the job, Harush pointed to Beitar's failure to reach the group stage of a European campaign, a disappointment he clearly still carries alongside the three championship medals.
As for the 70th birthday itself, Harush said he planned to mark it where he always is at this time of year — at the club, even with the first team still on its summer break. "I have things to do," he said, brushing off the suggestion that he might take the week off, with celebrations at Beitar's offices expected in the days ahead.
It is a modest way to mark a milestone for a man who has quietly outlasted managers, chairmen and generations of players at one of Israeli football's most turbulent clubs — and who, by his own account, still measures his career by a title won alongside Eli Ohana nearly 40 years ago.
