IN THE 1980 comedy Airplane! there is a scene where a passenger asks a flight attendant for light reading, and she offers a leaflet called “Famous Jewish Sports Legends.” At the time, Sandy Koufax, Hank Greenberg, Sid Luckman and Mark Spitz sat atop a short list. Over the last 44 years, that joke has largely become stale as the Jewish population across professional sports has grown exponentially.

In the Jewish faith there are various denominations and subgroups within the denominations and rarely do you find those of the Orthodox faith in sports. The reason is straight forward: Orthodox Jews do not work (literally speaking, to expend inordinate energy) or travel on the Jewish Sabbath — Shabbat — which is observed every week from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday. In the world of sports, cutting Fridays and Saturdays off the schedule makes for tough sledding.

Zevi Eckhaus, an Orthodox Jew and an uncommonly gifted athlete, will be on center stage Friday when Washington State kicks off at 5 p.m. against Syracuse in the Holiday Bowl.

The 6-0, 200-pound product of Culver City, Calif., is devout in his faith, so developing into a high school standout and college football starting quarterback is something of a miracle — and in no small way a nod to supportive parents.

Turning off lights and operating cars is not permitted over Shabbat. That’s just one of many prohibitions, and the one on “carrying” would seems tailor-made to keep a kid from running with a football.

“There are things that I really hold true to me,” Eckhaus told Cougfan.com last week. “I don’t practice the Sabbath, it’d be hard to play football and do that. But I do wake up every morning and pray with tefillin. I try to honor the holidays as much as possible. It’s pretty cool that this game will be on Hanukkah. And we played Fresno State on Yom Kippur. I didn’t have any form of technology. I didn’t eat or drink for 25 hours, and Coach Dickert even went out of his way to have a private room set aside for me after the game for me to finish out the final prayer.”

The tefillin that Eckhaus references is a set of two black leather boxes with straps that contain Torah verses and are worn by Jewish men during prayer. 

The eight nights of Hanukkah this year began on Wednesday evening and runs through Jan. 2. Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the Jewish year, a day of repentance where people of the faith fast from sundown to sundown. Koufax famously declined to pitch in Game 1 of the 1965 World Series because it coincided with Yom Kippur. 

Related: Rider on the Storm: Zevi Eckhaus carrying the torch as Coug QB1 in Holiday Bowl

THERE ARE MORE and more Jewish athletes these days, with the likes of Quinn and Jack Hughes, Alex Bregman, and Max Fried all active Jewish sports stars, but it is still somewhat of an anomaly to have a Jewish football player. 

“It’s an honor,” Eckhaus said of being a Jewish football player. “I still talk to a lot of my Jewish friends that I grew up with. I went to a religious school up until eighth grade and I talk to a lot of my Jewish friends about football and they don’t really get how football works and that. But it’s cool when I go home to synagogue and it is always a conversation-starter. I definitely wear it with pride and honor.”

Eckhaus has been playing football from a young age and it didn’t take long for him to realize he was unique due to his religious observances. Playing Pop Warner, he would ask his teammates whether or not they were Jewish, and the response was almost always no.

“I’m not sure I ever got a yes,” Eckhaus said with a chuckle. “I don’t think I’ve encountered more than 10 or 15 teammates that are Jewish. We actually have one here, AJ Hasson is also Jewish. And on the other side of things, all the kids I went to school with growing up were going home to play video games while I had football practice.”

Eckhaus went to a school in Los Angeles called Cheder Menachem from kindergarten through eighth grade before it was time for him to transition to a public school, which ended up being Culver City High. The transition took time.

“I actually did eighth grade twice,” Eckhaus said. “I did it at Cheder Menachem and then did it again at public school to help get acclimated. The Jewish school that I went to, they weren’t as familiar with how regular schools run their curriculum. We pretty much learned Judaical laws for six hours and then we had two hours of what they called English, which was essentially math, science, everything kind of in a bunch. So when I went to public school, it was kind of like a shock for me.”

ECKHAUS STARTED HIS college career at Bryant University in Smithfield, R.I., and there was still a significant Jewish population considering its proximity to major cities like Boston and Providence. But in Pullman? Not so much.

“I’ve run into a few Jewish students who I still keep in contact with,” Eckhaus said. “There’s a Rabbi out in Spokane, and sometimes he’ll organize things in Pullman, or sometimes he’ll come down to Pullman. If he does that, I usually try to get involved with that. The Jewish students I stay in contact with, I try to get involved with them. If the rabbi can’t come down and there’s a holiday, I’ll invite a friend over and we could practice whatever the holiday may be.”

Eckhaus is not only hoping to leave a legacy for other Jewish athletes, but for his younger brothers, ages 15 and 13.

“They’re in the trial areas of sports,” Eckhaus said. “They’re playing football, basketball, baseball, and track. They’re hitting them all to see what sticks. It’s not really something I’ve ever harped on with them. I just tell them to have fun because they’ll figure out the religious piece on their own and blaze their own trail that way.”

WSU quarterback Zevi Eckhaus (Photo: Whittney Thornton/Cougfan.com)