Ralph Klein (basketball)
Israeli basketball player-coach
Ralph Klein, also known as Rafael "Ralph" Ram (Hebrew: רלף קליין; July 29, 1931 – August 7, 2008) was an Israeli professional basketball player and coach. In Israel, he was known as "Mr. Basketball".
Early life
Klein was born in Berlin, during the time of the Weimar Republic to an affluent Hungarian Jewish family that returned to Budapest before the outbreak of World War II. His father was murdered in Auschwitz, but he and his family survived thanks to efforts by Raoul Wallenberg.
Basketball playing career
Club career
After the war, at the age of 16, Klein began playing football, but later moved to basketball, and played in the Hungarian national league. In 1951, he immigrated to Israel, with his mother.
After serving in the Israeli navy, he joined Maccabi Tel Aviv, with which he played in more than 160 games, through 1964. With Maccabi Tel Aviv, he scored 2,701 total points, and won eight Israeli Super League national championships and six Israeli State Cups.
National team career
Klein was also a member of the senior Israel national basketball team. With Israel's senior national team, he played at the 1952 Summer Olympic Games, and at the 1954 edition of the FIBA World Cup.
“Ralph Klein (basketball)” enters the record as israeli basketball player-coach. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ralph, Klein and basketball can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q667769. VIAF identifies the subject as 80463498. The Library of Congress control number is no00079479. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1931, 2008, 1951 and 1964.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ralph Klein (basketball)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.