Sunday, April 5, 2026

Photos

Itzchak Aloni

Yosef Porat

Menachem Oren

Eliahu A. Mandelbaum

Israel Yosef Keniazer

Yosef Dobkin

Moshe Czerniak

Shlomo Smiltiner
Source: see below

Sometimes, it is good to remember that chess players are also people, and to find photos of how they looked - or at least, how they looked to the public. Above are photos of the Israeli players of the 1952, 1954, and 1956 Olympiads as given in Mandelbaum and Perstiz's Israel Be'olympiadot Ha'shachmat [Israel in the Chess Olympiads] (Tel Aviv: Mofet, May 1958). They all seem - to judge by the sets and clocks - from the olympiads in which they participated, but this is tentative. 

Photos are, respectively, from the following pages:

Aloni - 90; Porat - 93; Oren - 89; Mandelbaum - 92; Keniazer - 95; Dobkin - 91; Czerniak - 94; Smiltiner - 92. 

Why this order? The photos are from a section of endings they played, and are arranged by the Hebrew alphabetical order, with Oren first and Keniazer last.