Andre Spitzer

Ankie Spitzer for years has sought to have the International Olympic Committee designate a minute of silence at the Opening Ceremony of an Olympic Games for the 11 Olympians who had been killed in Munich, but her request had always been denied until the delayed 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

In 1980, Ankie Spitzer married Elie Rekhess, a professor at Tel Aviv University, and is now known as Ankie Rekhess-Spitzer. She led the fight to get the German government to admit their culpability in the failed rescue of Andre and the others. In 2003, after relatives of the killed Olympians brought a lawsuit against the German government charging the government with gross misconduct and gross mismanagement in its handling of the crisis, the Germans paid a financial settlement to the families of the Munich victims. Today Ankie Spitzer is a correspondent in Israel covering the Middle East for Dutch and Belgian television.

In 1968, he was sent to the Netherlands for further instruction in fencing for further training in The Hague with fencing master Abraham. Most of his first year in the Netherlands he stayed with the Smitsloo family in Scheveningen. In 1971, he married one of his students, Ankie, who converted to Judaism. Andre returned to Israel with his wife soon afterward where, at age 27, he became the country's top fencing instructor. The couple lived in Biranit, Israel, along the border with Lebanon. He helped found the National Fencing Academy, and became chief fencing instructor at the Wingate Institute.

Spitzer was born in Timișoara in Romania, and was Jewish. His parents survived the Holocaust in Nazi forced labor camps. After his father died in 1956 when he was 11, Andre and his mother moved to Israel. He served in the Israeli Air Force and attended Israel's National Sport Academy, where he studied fencing.

Andre Spitzer (Hebrew: אנדרי שפיצר; 4 July 1945 – 6 September 1972) was an Israeli fencing master and coach of Israel's 1972 Summer Olympics team. He was one of 11 athletes and coaches taken hostage and subsequently killed by terrorists in the Munich massacre.