The scoreboard at the PalaRuffini in Turin told a brutal story by the final buzzer: Soviet Union 98, Israel 76. But nobody in Italian basketball that June had expected Israel to be on that scoreboard at all, in a gold-medal game, four days before the biggest closing weekend the European Championship could offer.
EuroBasket 1979 ran from 9 to 19 June across four Italian cities — Mestre, Siena, Gorizia and Turin — and it was supposed to belong, as it always did in that era, to the Soviet Union, the reigning continental power stacked with Vladimir Tkachenko, Sergei Belov and Anatoly Tarakanov. Israel arrived as a middling entry with no history of troubling the tournament's summit.
Ralph Klein, the Berlin-born "Mr. Basketball" who had already turned Maccabi Tel Aviv into European champions in 1977, was in charge of the senior national team, and his squad opened the group phase in Gorizia with a defeat to France before delivering the shock of the tournament: a 77-76 win over Yugoslavia on 11 June at the PalaGrappate, a result that put the continent on notice.
Israel carried that momentum into the second group phase in Turin, going 3-2 to finish behind only the Soviet Union and secure a place nobody had pencilled in for them — the gold-medal final, against the very team that had just beaten Yugoslavia 96-77 to get there themselves.
The final, on 19 June at the PalaRuffini, was as one-sided as the pedigree suggested it might be. The Soviets pulled away in the second half, with Tkachenko scoring 29, Belov 22 and Tarakanov 22 as the USSR claimed its twelfth European men's title, 98-76.
For Israel, Yanay led the scoring with 18, Miki Berkovich (known internationally as Mickey Berkowitz) added 16, Lou Silver scored 12, and Menkin, Motti Aroesti and Kaplan chipped in the rest, with captain Barry Leibowitz marshalling the effort from the backcourt.
The defeat did nothing to diminish the individual story of the tournament. Berkovich, then 25 and already a fixture at Maccabi Tel Aviv, averaged 23.6 points across the championship and was named EuroBasket 1979's Most Valuable Player — a rare instance of the award going to a player whose team fell in the final, and recognition that stood alongside his later induction into the FIBA Hall of Fame.
For Klein, it was a second continental peak inside three years, following his 1977 European Champions Cup with Maccabi, but this one carried a different weight: it was earned in the colours of the country itself, against the sport's dominant Cold War power, on a neutral floor in northern Italy.
Israel has never come closer to a European basketball title since. Through the team's next four decades and more than thirty EuroBasket appearances — including tournaments as recently as 2022 and 2025 — the silver from Turin has stood alone as the national side's best finish, a fact repeated in FIBA and federation histories to this day.
It is a different kind of archive story from Maccabi Tel Aviv's club triumphs of the same period: no Final Four crowd, no blue-and-yellow choreography, just a small national squad from a country with roughly a hundredth of the Soviet Union's population, walking off a court in Turin with silver medals and a tournament MVP award that had no business being theirs by reputation alone.
Berkovich would go on to play into the 1990s, become an Israel Prize laureate, and remain, by most reckonings, the finest player Israeli basketball has produced. But it is the summer of 1979 — the upset of Yugoslavia in Gorizia, the run through Turin, the 76 points that weren't enough against the Soviets — that supplied the single result the national team has spent every year since trying, and failing, to match.
