May 18, 2026

Welcome to ‘The Jewish World Series’

“Is this heaven?”

No, it’s Ohio.

Every May, something unusual happens at Lou Berliner Sports Park in Columbus. The high school baseball teams of Jewish day schools throughout the country — spanning the full width of the United States, from the Atlantic Seaboard to the Pacific Coast — descend on a Midwestern city for three days of competition.

They sleep in local hotels. They pray together in the morning before games. And then they play ball.

This phenomenon is the Columbus Baseball Invitational (CBI), which runs this year from May 17 through May 19. It is the largest Jewish high school baseball tournament in the United States. It is also, improbably, the creation of two parents who just wanted their kids to have a few more games to play.

For years, the Columbus Torah Academy (CTA) faced a common problem among Jewish day schools: Postseason tournaments would often take place on the weekends, and when games fell on Shabbat, they would automatically forfeit to maintain religious observance.

In 2009, two CTA baseball parents hatched an idea to give their kids more opportunities to play ball. They decided to invite other Jewish day schools for a tournament of their own. The concept was modest. Just a few schools for a few games on a long weekend. Something to make the season feel complete.

Word went out, and several schools expressed interest almost immediately. Just like that, the inaugural CBI, nicknamed the Jewish World Series, was born.

The first tournament took place in 2010 and featured four Jewish day schools – CTA, Ida Crown Jewish Academy (Chicago, IL), The Ramaz School (New York, NY), and The Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy (Livingston, NJ). The championship game began at 10:30 pm on a Saturday night, after the Sabbath had ended.

The Ramaz School took home the first trophy, and from there, the tournament steadily grew. By 2013, six schools were competing. By 2016, there were eleven.

In 2024, the CBI was the largest it had ever been, with a record 15 teams competing. Last year’s edition topped that, drawing 20 teams in total. SAR High School (Bronx, NY) won the tournament both years.

This year’s tournament will set a third consecutive record, with 23 teams, but the numbers only tell part of the story. What makes the Columbus Baseball Invitational something more than a tournament, the things that keep schools coming back year after year from every corner of the country and encourage more schools to enter every year, happen largely away from the diamond.

Tournament coordinator Lisa Kaufman, who has run the CBI since 2015, calls it “a dizzying 48 hours.” Teams arrive Sunday afternoon by plane, charter bus, or parent carpool, and are fed lunch before the opening round of games begins at 5:30 pm. Dinner is served back at CTA once the games are over.

Monday is a doubleheader day for all teams, which means an early morning. Before any baseball is played, all 23 teams will make their way to a local synagogue for morning prayers.

It is a rare moment in which every player in the entire tournament will be in the same room at the same time. They’ll arrive in uniform, 23 sets of colors and nearly 500 ballplayers, packing the sanctuary and praying together before heading out to the field.

Last year, Monday evening brought something else entirely — for the first time, the CBI hosted a players-only concert in a hotel ballroom featuring prominent contemporary Orthodox Jewish musicians, headlined by Mendy Worch. This year, Eitan Katz gets that honor. Romanian kosher hot dogs, shipped in from Chicago, will be served during the show.

“It’s endless eating for these kids,” Kaufman said.

At the games themselves, the atmosphere is unlike anything on the American high school baseball calendar. Lou Berliner Sports Park — the nation’s largest baseball complex, featuring 31 ball fields — runs up to 11 games simultaneously, each field humming with its own intensity. High school students from CTA and neighboring schools pour in to watch, filling the grounds with a restless teenage energy. Members of the broader Columbus Jewish community show up, too, some with no connection to any of the schools.

Lou Berliner has strict rules about outside food, but the CBI long ago negotiated a kosher exception. Each morning a van arrives, and a large grill and full concession stand is set up. A Kona Ice truck rounds out the offerings.

Israel Baseball Americas has representatives and merchandise on site as well. In a tournament full of Jewish baseball players, there is always interest in their table.

With 23 teams spanning a range of skill levels, the competition at the top of the bracket is genuinely elite. But what strikes most observers isn’t the level of play.

“The baseball, the Jewish camaraderie, the team bonding — all of that is kind of in the same pot, and it creates this wonderful experience for everybody,” Kaufman said.

And it stays with the players long after they leave.

“I have people that participated in (the CBI) seven or eight or nine years ago,” Kaufman said. “They come up to me, and they are quite emotional. They’re like, ‘this meant so much to me when I played in high school.'”

The tournament has its share of memorable off-field guests too. This year, Peter Kurz, the former President and Secretary-General of the Israel Association of Baseball,  is coming to Columbus to speak with the players.

And back in 2017, Al Clark,  a 26-year MLB umpire who grew up attending Hebrew school in New Jersey, had his bar mitzvah in an Orthodox synagogue, and went on to become the first-ever Jewish umpire in the American League, made the trip.

It was the kind of scene that could only happen at this tournament: a retired big-league umpire, Jewish, sitting with a group of Jewish day school kids from all over the country, all of them connected by the same game and the same faith. Clark had even brought his 1989 World Series umpire ring to show, and for those few minutes, the distance between a Jewish kid with a baseball dream and the biggest stage in the game felt very small.

Some of them are on their way to traversing that distance.

Jacob Steinmetz was the first to suit up for Team Israel. Competing in the CBI with the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns & Rockaway (Lawrence, NY), the right-hander later joined the Blue and White in the 2023 World Baseball Classic, striking out major-league All-Stars Manny Machado, Jeremy Peña and Gary Sánchez of the Dominican Republic.

Steinmetz was drafted by the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2021, but missed all of the 2025 minor-league season with an oblique injury.

Columbus Torah Academy’s very own Akiva Epstein, who made aliyah after high school, was next, suiting up for the Israeli national team last September in the 2025 Senior European Championship.

There is no direct line, of course, between a first pitch at 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday night in Columbus and a player taking the field for Team Israel. But the thread connecting them is real.

It runs through every morning minyan before a game, every postgame handshake, and every Jewish kid from across the country who arrived in Columbus not sure what to expect.

The two parents who dreamed this up in 2009 only wanted a few extra games. They got them.

They also got something they couldn’t have imagined: a tournament that has outlasted any reasonable expectation of what a modest idea hatched in Columbus, Ohio could become.

_{By Chase Levitt, Israel Baseball News Staff}