Andrea Murez

Andrea "Andi" Murez (Hebrew: אנדראה "אנדי" מוּרֶז; born 29 January 1992) is an Olympic swimmer. Born in the United States, she represents Israel internationally and competed for her country of birth in the past. She swam for Israel at the 2016 Summer Olympics and the 2020 Summer Olympics. She represented Israel for the third time at the 2024 Paris Olympics where she was one of the flag bearers together with the Olympic judoka Peter Paltchik.

She represented the United States at the 2013 Summer Universiade in Kazan, Russia, where she was a 4 × 200 m freestyle gold medalist and a 4 × 100 m freestyle silver medalist.

Murez is also a Maccabiah Games champion, and Maccabiah record holder, as well as an Israeli national record holder. She has won 17 medals at the Maccabiah Games, 12 of them gold. Murez holds the Israeli national records in the 100 m and 200 m freestyle.

Andrea Murez was born on 29 January 1992, to Melanie (Goodman) Murez, who runs a language translation company (Language.net), and Jim Murez, a computer consultant and contractor who runs the Venice Farmers' Market. Her father also swam competitively in high school and in his freshman year of college. She is Jewish, and was raised in Los Angeles.

Her paternal grandfather, Joe Murez, grew up in pre-WWII Austria on the Danube River, swam competitively for the Jewish Hakoah Vienna Sports Club in the 1930s, and related how during Hitler’s annexation of Austria, Nazis would gather around the pool to beat up Jewish swimmers. He immigrated to the United States in 1938, serving in the U.S. Army Intelligence Corps. He then became one of the largest garlic growers in the world, and ultimately was the one to introduce his granddaughter Andi to swimming.

Her father's stepfather, Raymond Federman, who was also Jewish, was 14 years old when his parents hid him in a small stairway landing closet as Gestapo arrived at the family home in Nazi-occupied France. His family was taken away, and his parents and two sisters were killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Federman hid from the Nazis on farms in southern France during the Holocaust. He later became a leading backstroker on the French national team, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1947, where he became an English professor, an expert on author Samuel Beckett, and a novelist.

Murez's brother, Zachary (Zak), who is older than her by three years, set five swim records at Venice High School. He won 10 medals (four of them gold) in the 2003 Pan-American Maccabi Games in Santiago, Chile, and then swam for the Yale University swim team, before studying for a master's degree in computer science at UC San Diego.

Murez attended Venice High School, in Los Angeles, California, graduating in 2009. In high school, she was on the national honor roll. She also attended Hebrew school at Mishkon Tephilo in Venice, Los Angeles.