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.
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.
The Israel Chess Federation had posted a series of photos of Israeli players and teams, mostly in international events such as the 2022 Olympiad. The photos are by Dr. Mark Liebschitz [ph. spelling]. Of particular interest is the above image - what seems to be a (small) double blindfold simul (3 boards each) in the Israeli Knesset, or parliament.
I am now on reserve duty. I serve, unsurprisingly perhaps, as a history officer in the IDF's history department. My commanding officer sent me and others this photo of two IDF soldiers playing chess in a military base somewhere. Of course, the faces of the soldiers were hidden in the original image as well and it is an unclassified one. White (left) seems to be winning.
