This Sunday, tens of thousands of runners will surge across the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge to mark the 50th anniversary of the five-borough New York City Marathon. Behind the global spectacle, which draws millions of spectators and athletes from every corner of the earth, lies the vision of one man: Fred Lebow, a Holocaust survivor who transformed a local park run into an iconic citywide tradition.
Born Fischel Lebowitz in 1932 in Arad, a Transylvanian town in western Romania, he was the sixth of seven children in an observant Jewish family. During the Holocaust, his father was sent to a labor camp, and the family later learned that many of their relatives, among them his grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, had been murdered by the Nazis.
Separated from his parents as a young teenager, Lebow spent the years that followed moving across Europe, through Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Holland, England and Ireland, living largely by his wits. He would not see his parents again for 15 years. He reached the United States in 1951, lived for a time in Kansas City and Cleveland, eventually settling in Manhattan.
In the 1960s, marathons were a niche pursuit for serious athletes, and the idea of ordinary New Yorkers running through city streets struck most people as absurd. Lebow thought otherwise.
Together with Vincent Chiappetta, then president of New York Road Runners, he organized the first New York City Marathon on Sept. 13, 1970. The course was four laps of Park Drive in Central Park, and the budget was $1,000. Lebow put up $300 of his own money and paid for the winners’ prizes himself. About 100 spectators watched as 127 runners started and 55 finished. Lebow came in 45th.
The race stayed in the park for six years. The plan to break it out came from Ted Corbitt, the club's founding president, who proposed a course through all five boroughs. Together with other organizers, Mayor Abraham Beame and the borough presidents, it was suggested starting the race on the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. Lebow, by then president of the club and the race director, at first doubted it could be done. Once he signed on, however, he became its driving force, recruiting elite runners and promoting the race abroad. It has since grown into the largest marathon in the world, with some 59,000 runners in 2025.
Lebow looked after the observant runners at the start as well. A pre-race minyan, begun in 1983 by a runner named Peter Berkowsky who needed a minyan to say Kaddish for his father, still gathers at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island before the starting pistol.
(When the 1986 race was due to fall on Simchat Torah, Berkowsky called Lebow, and the marathon moved to the first Sunday in November.)
In years when race day fell on Rosh Chodesh and the group brought a Torah scroll to the start, Lebow arranged a tent for them, which has been provided by the New York Road Runners since 2005.
In February 1990, Lebow learned he had brain cancer and was told he might have only months to live. The runners at the marathon minyan recited a mi sheberach for his recovery. The diagnosis drew him to deepen his Jewish involvement. He told the writer Bob Brody that where he once turned down invitations to Jewish functions, he now accepted them. “I believe in G‑d,” he said. “I go to temple more often. I read more Jewish books.”
In 1992, with the cancer in remission, Lebow ran the marathon to mark his 60th birthday, wearing bib number 60. Before the start, he stopped by the minyan and put on tefillin. Berkowsky later said Lebow had been growing more observant in his last years and that the group probably had something to do with it.
Out on the course, as he passed through Williamsburg, chassidic spectators called out “Shalom!” and he answered in kind. He crossed the line in 5 hours, 32 minutes, and 35 seconds.
Lebow died on Oct. 9, 1994, and was buried at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens.
Jewish life along his course has since grown. Since 2008, Rabbi Zev and Rivka Wineberg, directors of Chabad-Lubavitch of Long Island City, set up a table at Mile 15 on Vernon Avenue in Queens and hand runners kosher sports drinks as they make for the Queensboro Bridge.
And, of course, Chabad volunteers fan out among the race's roughly two million spectators, offering Jewish men the chance to put on tefillin and inviting women to light Shabbat candles. Hundreds have put on tefillin each year, and in 2024 at least three men marked their bar mitzvahs on the sidelines. The volunteers will be out again on Sunday, 34 years after Lebow wrapped tefillin at his own starting line.
