NEW YORK — It’s not unheard of to find Bruce Pearl, the men’s basketball coach at the University of Tennessee, somewhere in public screaming with his shirt off — be it as a spectator rooting on the women’s basketball team with his portly belly painted orange and sporting a giant V for Volunteers, or onstage rapping at a school awards ceremony.

Last week, though, at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, the gut stayed covered as he donned a tux to emcee a fundraising gala for Maccabi USA.

Pearl will be among the 9,000 participants from more than 54 countries in the Maccabiah Games in Israel, July 12-23, when he serves as the head coach of the US men’s basketball team.

Organizers of the Olympics-style competition for Jewish athletes, which has been held every four years in Palestine and then Israel since 1932, say it is the third largest athletic gathering of any kind.

Rabbi Avraham Arieh Trugman, once a familiar face in Denver where he helped set up the local chapter of the National Council of Synagogue Youth, is a man of many fascinations.

In recent years, the rabbi — who today runs Israel’s Ohr Chadash program — has grown increasingly visible as a writer, speaker and teacher.

In all of these pursuits, he shares his knowledge of, and considerable enthusiasm for, the mystical dimensions of Judaism. He has already penned such books on Jewish music and dreams, and this year has released two more volumes, both published by Devora.

As in his earlier works, Rabbi Trugman’s approach is grounded in Orthodox Judaism, but he takes an open-minded and alternative perspective to many of his subjects which lends them an almost New Age flavor. His considerable knowledge of Kabbalah and related fields of Jewish mysticism no doubt plays a large role in why his work lends itself to a wider audience than one might expect.