If you were brought up to believe that Jews are good at all sorts of things – business, literature, music, to name but a few – but fall short when it comes to top-level sporting performance, the exhibition currently on view at the Iris Smith World Jewish Sports Museum at Kfar Maccabiah in Ramat Gan should go some way to disabusing you of that misconception.
The project is a joint venture between the museum, the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, and the Embassy of Poland in Tel Aviv. It opened on January 7 and runs through to February 1, taking in International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27) by design.
There are, it must be said, convincing grounds for sticking with what, according to exhibition curator Adi Rubinstein, is simply not true. Just take a look at our Olympic history. Yes, the last games produced a record haul of seven medals. But consider the fact that Israel became an Olympic participant at the Helsinki games back in 1952, and only notched its first medal in 1992. The situation is even direr when it comes to the Winter Games, with Israel still firmly lodged on zero successes.
Nonetheless, Rubinstein maintains that hasn’t always been the case, and certainly not in Poland between the world wars. The incontrovertible facts stare out at you from the exhibition panels.
The idea for the show was spawned by the Polish authorities. “We were contacted by the Polish Embassy here three months ago,” the curator explains. “They said they were working on an exhibition that engages in the history of Jewish sport in Poland, and its impact. They said the exhibition is ready, and had already been shown at various Jewish museums around Poland – Warsaw, Krakow, and other places. They said they wanted to show it in Israel too.”
Now that was a surprise. The “impact” the exploits of Polish Jewish athletes had on the general state of sports in their homeland, where Jews made up around 10% of the total population? “The idea that Jews are no good at sport is rubbish,” Rubinstein states unequivocally. That became clearer as we did the rounds of the placard-based display.
First, however the curator dug into the backdrop to the exercise. “That was a defining moment when the Polish Embassy contacted me about this. For years, sports clubs in Poland did everything they could to conceal their connection to Judaism. Soccer clubs in Poland, for example, were an empire. And suddenly that ended. That was because their best players and coaches were murdered.”
The fall from grace in Poland, Rubinstein observes, was not an isolated event. “It happened in Austria and in Hungary too. They had the best international sides in the world, and then for 50 years they didn’t achieve anything.”
The officially sanctioned smoke screen, apparently, was lifted thanks to a gathering street-level groundswell. “The fans in these places wanted answers. They said: In 1938, we are the best. In 1960, we are the worst. How can that be? They went to the sports clubs and the authorities and demanded the truth.”
There were Jewish influencers, says the curator, right across the board, in all sorts of places. That was in evidence in Germany too, including among the supporters of the famed soccer club Bayern Munich. “The fans wanted to know who founded the club. Ah, it was a Jew.” Really? The founder of Bayern Munich was Jewish? “Yes, he was,” came the quick-fire response. “His name was Kurt Landauer. People wanted to know why that was kept hidden.”
In fact, a quick online checkup reveals that while Landauer was an important element of the club, he was not the actual founder. He played for Bayern in the very early days and subsequently served three terms as club president. He was briefly interned at Dachau after the Nazis came to power, but was released by virtue of his service in the German army during World War I. Founder or not, Landauer was a key figure in Bayern Munich’s earliest formative years.
Back to the exhibition country in question. “The same thing happened in Poland,” Rubinstein notes, with one significant difference. “There was a great quantity of [Jewish] sportsmen in Poland. First of all, there was everything in Poland,” he says, referencing the spread of Jewish sports enterprises of the day.
“There was Makkabi [or Makabi] – as per the Polish spelling, rather than today’s accepted Maccabi – there was Hapoel, and there was [Jewish sports organization] Gibor. Poland had every sports club going, just like in the rest of Europe, with every possible political alignment.” Indeed, between 1918 and 1939, there were over 400 sports ventures located around Poland that were established by Jewish athletes.
The political identity makes perfect sense considering the way sports organizations in this country worked until not too many years ago. Hapoel was identified with the left wing, Maccabi was right-leaning liberal, and Betar was even further right of the political divide. It was a national network. “Every city in Poland – Lodz, Warsaw, Krakow, Vilna [part of Poland during the interwar years] – there was a Jewish sports club wherever you looked.”
We get down to some numerical brass tacks. “In the 1930s, the members of the Polish water polo team were all Jewish. That also included the substitutes, the coach, the doctor, everyone.” Not that that necessarily produced a peaceful and harmonious state of affairs. “They were all Jews, but they got into arguments because some were socialists, others were liberals, and so on,” Rubinstein chuckles.
The placards, with photographs and textual accompaniment, proffer the collateral for Rubinstein’s claim of Jewish dominance of Polish sport prior to the Holocaust. “Take, for example, Jozef Klotz. He was the first player to score a goal for the Polish national soccer team, in 1922.” That was in a victory against Sweden in Stockholm. “The first goal ever scored by Poland was a penalty taken by Klotz, the Jew,” he adds succinctly. Klotz may have been a hero in 1922, but 18 years later he was just another Polish Jew incarcerated in the Warsaw Ghetto. He did not survive.
Other names come up. Polish Jews, it transpires, were pretty good with their fists too. A certain Szapsel Rotholc, a member of Makkabi Warsaw, was one of the leading boxers in 1930s Poland. He was the national champion in the lightweight division and represented his country at numerous international tournaments. Rotholc survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Holocaust.
And there is Leon Sperling, who played for Poland and led his team, Cracovia, to three soccer league championships. He was murdered by the Nazis at the Lviv Ghetto in 1941. “Sperling was the best footballer in Poland,” Rubinstein states.
Roman (Romek) Abraham Wohlfeiler is another striking case in point, albeit for a somewhat extraneous reason. He played for Hakoah Krakow and subsequently for rivals Makkabi Krakow. Following World War II, he played for Wisla Krakow, having survived the Holocaust after being hired by Oskar Schindler to work at his factory.
“Wisla Krakow was a Catholic club. If you want to be a Protestant, you have to play for a different club,” Rubinstein explains. “The first non-Catholic player at Wisla was Romek. His daughter Mira Sagi was at the opening of the exhibition and told the story. They didn’t allow Protestants to play for the club, but they did allow a Jew,” Rubinstein laughs. How’s that for a bit of reverse discrimination?
There is also an indirect Oct. 7 link with the exhibition. “Daniel Lifschitz attended the opening. He was the goalkeeper for Maccabi Netanya. His grandfather was [octogenarian] Oded Lifschitz, who was kidnapped by Hamas from Kibbutz Nir Oz, and was murdered.”
Lifschitz Sr., and his wife Yocheved, were peace activists who helped transport ailing Palestinians to hospitals in Israel for medical care. Rubinstein also notes that, following the kidnapping, the Polish authorities cut corners to provide Oded, who was of Polish extract, with Polish citizenship in an effort to help secure his release from captivity in Gaza. Sadly, that did not work.
The Polish embassy-sponsored show, Rubinstein believes, is an indication of where Poland is currently at in its efforts to deal with its problematic past.
“This may ‘only’ be an exhibition, and ‘only’ sport, but there is reconciliation here, through sport, with a much bigger issue. There is understanding here that the greatest athletes [in Poland] were Jews.”
There is a telling dose of irony, too. “They were murdered because they were not sufficiently Aryan,” he says. Therein lies another philosophical twist. “That was rubbish. They were superb sportsmen. Naturally they were excellent chess players, but chess is stereotypically Jewish.”
Rubinstein says there is an internal socio-political subtext to the exhibition. We have a tendency, in Jewish cultural and social milieus, to seek alternative resolutions. Put comedically, or crassly, one might suggest that for every two Jews there are three opinions. That, it seems, was a factor in the Polish Jewish community and references the aforementioned political allegiances in sporting circles.
“There were disputes between the Jews. They had the luxury of saying ‘I don’t want to play with that guy’ because he’s, say, a liberal.” Apparently, those principled stances followed Holocaust survivors over to the Promised Land.
“The sportsmen who came to Israel [from Poland] said: ‘Which club am I going to play for here?’ They told them, for example, they’d play for Hapoel Haifa, and they said, ‘No way. I’m not playing for Hapoel, I’m liberal. Is there a Maccabi club here?’ They brought the arguments with them here.”
They stuck to their imprinted guns, at least for a while. “You’d have thought that if someone survived the inferno of the Holocaust that they’d just be happy to play soccer again. But, no. They kept to their political principles. But some eventually relented and played for any team in Israel as long as they got paid,” Rubinstein smiles.
There were also weighty social and tribal existential factors taken into consideration in Jewish circles in pre-war Poland when it came to choosing sporting organizations, and the type of athletic pursuit.
“There was a great fear of assimilation, that Jews might meet and then marry gentiles. The solution they found was to register their sons and daughters in sports clubs. They could take on fencing, soccer, and water polo. It didn’t matter as long as you spent your day with other Jews. The parents thought their son or daughter would find a nice Jew to marry at the local country club.”
There was also social standing to the sporting equation. “If the upper class did fencing, I’d register my daughter for fencing at a Jewish sports club. She needs to fence because we are Jewish Poles, or Jewish Hungarians. And we need to cement our place in society.”
Was there an element of outdoing the goyim at their own game? Did Polish Jews want to show their gentile counterparts they could outshine them at sports, too?
“Fencing was the modern substitute for dueling. They realized they couldn’t go around dueling and killing each other. But you only dueled with someone of equal social status, and that was the case with fencing, too. Jews were not on a par with the non-Jews, but I could fence with a gentile because we are in the same field of sport, so I am their equal.”
An iconic figure also took that idea on board. “Herzl also fenced, for exactly the same reason. He said, ‘The gentiles don’t accept me as their social equal, so they can try to deal with me in the fencing area.’”
Jewish influence on the sporting scene in general, says Rubinstein, stretched far and wide into pioneering efforts in the sporting ethos and in the media. “Jews are also sports editors and writers. Jews always have to take a philosophical approach. Also, you can’t just go onto the soccer field and play. You have to think about the position of each player on the pitch. There are defensive and offensive tactics.”
The exhibition, says the curator, provides further evidence of that, and more, and reflects official recognition of the Jews’ contribution to Polish sporting heritage. “In the last 10-15 years, there is recognition and understanding that you can’t relate the history of Polish sport without talking about the people who really established the whole thing. That came from the street, and also from the Polish authorities.
“Today they say they are willing to deal with their [Holocaust-related] history, with the skeletons in their history.”
Better late than never.