Establishment of the Israeli League

 

Source: see below

The above three-line note from Ha'aretz's chess column of Aug. 14th, 1953 (p. 4) may not look not much. It merely says "in its meeting the ICF decided to arrange a national team championship soon." But as a frequent correspondent points out, this is the first public notice on the ICF's decision to establish league play - which still is going on, 70 years later. 

Judaism and Chess on Postcards

Our correspondent Terje Christiansen send us three chess related postcards found in the Blatatnik Archive Jewish Postcards collection. The last one below is an antisemitic caricature describing chess as the "Game of Cohens" (a German pun on chess being the "Game of Kings"), but the other two are rather romantic pictures of, well, Jews playing chess, with no antisemitic overtones. The details of all the postcards are found by clicking on the images of the postcards in the link above. 

Doulingo and Chess

 

Credit: see below

The above picture, from my own cellphone, is this month's challenge on the popular language-learning application, Doulingo. There is a one-month chess.com membership. Duolingo also has an interesting language-centered blog, which has an interesting post about chess-related words: chess, check, checkmate, etc. As is typical of Douligo's posts, the language is informal and intended to be humorous and fun, but, so far as I can tell, the facts are quite accurate.