Tel Aviv Founded - by Chess

A frequent correspondent notifies us that it was over a game of chess that Tel Aviv was founded. In Ha'olam, April 19th, 1929, p. 8, a witness, Kadish Yehuda Silman, describes the scene which occurred 30 years previously, ca. 1900. 

In Meir Dizengoff's house, in a gloomy, rainy day, the house of "almost the only intellectual [in Palestine] in those days," a small group of were sitting and complaining about the bad situation of the Jews in Palestine when playing chess. They were wondering what to do to improve the Jews' situation - and in particular, how Jews can own their own homes instead of renting from Arabs -  as "one was moving the knight, the other the rook, and a third keeps saying 'check!'." 

Suddenly, they all decided, as sprits rose, "what ears once heard in the time of Nehamaih: let us rise up and build!". And thus, the decision to fund Tel Aviv was made. 

Czerniak's Notebook

 

Mr. Tomer Kaufman had brought to our attention Moshe Czerniak's notebook from the 1930s, which he owns. With his permission, we present here an example: Czerniak's summary of the 1935 Olympiad. The games and commentary are in Polish, and he has in the notebook games from a variety of events in the 1930s, mostly Palestinian events but also, as noted, the Olympiad.