Ultra-Orthodox Jews find gym to call their own

JERUSALEM -- Yossi, a gangly 19-year-old in a black skullcap, passed through the frosted doors into a silent expanse of StairMasters and weight benches, a gym bag slung over his shoulder.

It was 12:30 p.m. at the Kosher Gym, a converted warehouse that stands among loading docks in north Jerusalem. Its bright spaces are free of MTV-tuned televisions and piped-in hip-hop -- whose female singers the gym's male clients are not allowed to hear.

The brainchild of David Melki, a former member of Israel's national tae kwon do team, it is the only health club in this increasingly religious city that caters exclusively to ultra-Orthodox and other observant Jews, who have long been encouraged to shun physical exercise in favor of time with the Torah.

But prolific childbirth, years of sedentary study and poor diets have brought doctors' orders to exercise. The year-and-a-half-old gym's 800 members include rabbis, one of whom trots on the treadmill in black slacks and a white dress shirt, a sign that the club has been accepted with, well, modest enthusiasm.

At midday, women in ankle-length skirts and head scarves filed from the main exercise area of blond hardwood floors, through the foyer and out of the club.

Then the men began arriving. Segregation of the sexes is just one nod toward modesty that has won the gym rabbinical approval and attracted a small clientele of secular women tired of see-and-be-seen health clubs.

Over two hours on a recent afternoon following a long holiday lull for Passover, the gym's top-of-the-line equipment filled with Yeshiva students such as Yossi, who declined to give his last name, fearing rebuke back in the classroom.

Many young haredim -- or those who "tremble before God," as ultra-Orthodox Jews often refer to themselves -- are emerging from their cloistered precincts to embrace the compromise with modernity that the Kosher Gym represents. It is an athletic refuge away from their religious one, a place where it is acceptable to run in shorts, as long as the skullcap is still firmly fixed to the head.

"Yossi, how you doing, man?" shouted Jim Poodiack, a 51-year-old trainer in a black tank top.

A former high-school coach from Atlanta who immigrated to Israel five years ago, Poodiack is the back-slapping fitness sherpa and scold of the Yeshiva boys.

"Very, very good," replied Yossi, who joined soon after the gym opened, weighing more than 300 pounds. He is now half that. The hum of Yossi's treadmill broke the silence as he began a brisk jog.

More young men arrived, the slow return to routine after Passover.

Men in bushy beards, baseball caps and black skullcaps began raising the average age of a crowd that had grown to 20 people.

"Man, look at you -- nice to see you back," Poodiack yelled archly to a 30-something man munching an apple and holding a cellphone, as he headed sheepishly for a treadmill. "A problem with your membership, maybe?"

Yosef Meir, 18, emerged from the upstairs locker room for his second-ever workout.

"Right over there," Poodiack told him, pointing to a box containing exercise programs. Meir picked up his plastic folder and headed to the calf-lift machine.

"Shtaym, shalosh, arbah ... ," Poodiack counted out -- two, three, four -- in American-accented Hebrew.

"Looking good, man, looking good," he told Meir, who was puffing hard.

Yossi continued pounding away on the treadmill, his pace rising and falling. Poodiack looked over his client's shoulder, checking his statistics, then turned his attention to the rest of the crowd, whose efforts he found wanting.

"Come on, guys," Poodiack urged. "I want to smell all that matzoh, all those macaroons coming off. Come on!"

The clangs and groans subsided as the lunchtime break waned. Yeshiva students left machines, towels in hand, skullcaps amazingly in place.

"Good job today," Poodiack calls out. "Have a good one."