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.
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