Jewish Chess History
Chess History in Palestine and Israel
Monday, November 18, 2024
Some Popular Articles about the Jewishness (or Otherwise) of Chess Masters
Friday, October 4, 2024
Sammy Rubinstein, a Simultaneous Display by his Father, and the Need for Sources
1. While superficially similar, the photograph here is not actually in the same room.2. The people in the photo are dressed in conservative black - not how people would dress in Palestine back then (although the difference is somewhat subtle). Similarly, golden watches and pipes, while not unknown, were not common in Palestine. In short, the Palestine simuls were much more "working class" than this display.3. All the sets are matching sets, of the same size/making. This would not be typical of Palestine of the time, where it was customary for players in simultaneous displays to bring their own sets. Local chess clubs simply didn't have 50 or 100 matching sets available.4. The demonstration board in the back seems to be in German or another European language, not Hebrew.5. I do not recognize any of the players/personalities in your photo.6. In many of Rubinstein's simuls in Palestine, the players were mobbed and assisted by their neighbors/onlookers - very typical of the time in Palestine, but not in Europe (to the great chagrin of Palestine chess column editors, who tried to uproot this "uncivilized" practice...). Here the onlookers are not doing so.
Saturday, September 28, 2024
"Fancy" Sets
Graves of Non-Masters
Above is a photo I took of the grave of Vladimir Ze'ev Shteinberg, 1965-2024. He is buried in the Ganei Ester Cemetary, Rishon LeZion, Israel. He was not a chess master, but he was a good amateur player, with a FIDE rating of 2180. He also held the Israeli chess rank of senior candidate master, according to his ICF player's page (in Hebrew).
Graves of chess masters often have a chess theme, as Edward Winter's article on the subject shows. But I am not aware of many graves of non-masters having such a theme. Does any reader know of similar chess motifs on the graves of non-masters?
Saturday, August 31, 2024
Fischer in Reykjavik... in 1961
Source: Chess Life, vol. 16 no. 2 (February 20, 1961), p. 37
Mr. Herbert Halsegger notifies us that Fischer was in Iceland, winning in Reykjavik... already in 1961, in a small round-robin tournament against the Icelandic players, including the GM Fredrik Oalfsson. 11 years before his rather better known victory against GM Boris Spassky in the same location...