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| Photo credit: Rishon Le'Tziyon Chess Club |
For Hebrew-speaking readers, a good and accessible idea of his importance to Rishon Le`Tziyon's chess can be seen at the club's web site. For the non-Hebrew speakers it can be noted that Friedman appears -- either as a player or as an organizer -- in almost all the pictures in the historical section of the web site, from the first (1945) where he is the middle of the front row, to the last (2001) where he is third from left (next fo Boris Gelfand).
The picture above shows "Dugo" standing on the extreme right. The occassion is the first championship of the club, in 1946. The web site notes that he came in fourth, and that the young man in the front row, Abraham Feldklein, was killed a year later by Arab terrorists during the "troubles" of the end of the British Mandate of Palestine leading up to the 1948 war.
Edited to add: the comment below, which adds a lot of information about the people in the photograph, was authored by our regular reader, Yochanan Afek.
There are a couple of well known problemists in the photo too:
ReplyDeleteSitting on the right is Ben-Zion Hendel, a selfmates composer. For years the Hendel trophy was yearly awarded to a selfmate or helpmate Israeli composer for special achievements. Second from the right in the middle row is Eliahu Shahaf (Feigin) who was for decades the chess reporter in the late daily "Davar" and also the first editor of the Israeli chess monthly "Shahmat", the general secretary of the Israeli chess federation and even for 5 years the secretary of the I.P.A. (the International problemists association). Itzchak Scwartz on his left (middle row) was for many years a keen solver in my chess composition column in Al-Hamishmar- another daily which doesn't exist anymore .