Nadene Goldfoot
I have found a skill that many Jews evidently have. It is the skill of playing chess. For a small group of people who are only 0.02% of the world population, we've had a lot of great chess players.
The USA might remember Bobby Fisher as one of them. Bobby Fischer (1943–2008), was US grandmaster & World champion when in his teens. He defeated Spassky for the world championship in 1972 but refused to defend it in 1975."Fischer won the World Chess Championship in 1972, defeating Boris Spassky of the USSR, in a match held in Reykjavík, Iceland. Publicized as a Cold War confrontation between the US and USSR, it attracted more worldwide interest than any chess championship before or since."
At age 14 he became the youngest ever U.S. Chess Champion, and at 15 he became both the youngest grandmaster (GM) up to that time and the youngest candidate for the World Championship. At age 20, Fischer won the 1963/64 US Championship with 11 wins in 11 games, the only perfect score in the history of the tournament.
He joined a Christian Sabbatarian sect and stated that he had never been a Jew. His mother had a very hard life, which could be the cause of both his genius and his thoughts about life.
Bobby's mother, Regina Wender Fischer b:March 31,1913 in Zurich, Switzerland
d: June 27, 1997 in Palo Alto, California:
Bobby Fischer was born at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, on March 9, 1943. His mother, Regina Wender Fischer, was a US citizen, born in Switzerland; her parents were Polish Jews. She was admitted to Brooklyn's Hebrew Orphan Asylum on 24 Oct 1919. Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Regina became a teacher, a registered nurse, and later a physician.
After graduating from college in her teens, Regina traveled to Germany to visit her brother. It was there she met geneticist and future Nobel Prize winner Hermann Joseph Muller, who persuaded her to move to Moscow to study medicine. She enrolled at I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, where she met Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, also known as Gerardo Liebscher, a German biophysicist, whom she married in November 1933. In 1938, Hans-Gerhardt and Regina had a daughter, Joan Fischer. The reemergence of anti-Semitism under Stalin prompted Regina to go with Joan to Paris, where Regina became an English teacher. The threat of a German invasion led her and Joan to go to the United States in 1939. Regina and Hans-Gerhardt had already separated in Moscow, although they did not officially divorce until 1945.
At the time of her son's birth, Regina was homeless and shuttled to different jobs and schools around the country to support her family. She engaged in political activism and raised both Bobby and Joan as a single parent.
In 1949, Regina moved the family to Manhattan and the following year to Brooklyn, New York City, where she studied for her master's degree in nursing and subsequently began working in that field.
Paul Felix Otto Nemenyi b: June 5, 1895 in Hungary
Bobby Fischer's biological father was actually Paul Nemenyi. This was not confirmed by Fischer or his (by then deceased) mother. Nemenyi, a Hungarian mathematician and physicist of Jewish heritage, was considered an expert in fluid and applied mechanics. Hungary at the time, was producing a generation of geniuses in the exact sciences, who would be collectively known as Martians, that included Theodore von Kármán (b. 1881), George de Hevesy (b. 1885), Leó Szilárd (b. 1898), Dennis Gabor (b. 1900), Eugene Wigner (b. 1902), John von Neumann (b. 1903), Edward Teller (b. 1908), and Paul Erdős (b. 1913). A child prodigy in mathematics, at the age of 17, Nemenyi won the Hungarian national mathematics competition. Nemenyi obtained his doctorate in mathematics in Berlin in 1922 and was appointed a lecturer in fluid dynamics at the Technical University of Berlin. In the early 1930s, he published a textbook on mathematical mechanics that became required reading in German universities. Stripped of his position when the Nazis came to power, he also had to leave Hungary where anti-Semitic laws had been enacted, and found work for a time in Copenhagen.
In March 1949, six-year-old Bobby and his sister Joan learned how to play chess using the instructions from a set bought at a candy store. When Joan lost interest in chess and Regina did not have time to play, Fischer was left to play many of his first games against himself. When the family vacationed at Patchogue, Long Island, New York, that summer, Bobby found a book of old chess games and studied it intensely.
Although Fischer's mother was Jewish, Fischer rejected attempts to label him as Jewish. In a 1962 interview with Harper's, asked if he was Jewish, he replied that he was "part-Jewish" through his mother. In the same interview he was quoted as saying, "I read a book lately by Nietzsche and he says religion is just to dull the senses of the people. I agree." In a 1984 letter to the editor of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, Fischer demanded that they remove his name from future editions.
Fischer associated with the Worldwide Church of God in the mid-1960s. The church prescribed Saturday Sabbath, and forbade work (and competitive chess) on Sabbath. According to his friend and colleague Larry Evans, in 1968 Fischer felt philosophically that "the world was coming to an end" and he might as well make some money by publishing My 60 Memorable Games; Fischer thought that the Rapture was coming soon.
During the mid-1970s, Fischer contributed significant money to the Worldwide Church of God. In 1972, one journalist stated that "Fischer is almost as serious about religion as he is about chess", and the champion credited his faith with greatly improving his chess. Yet prophecies by Herbert W. Armstrong went unfulfilled. Fischer eventually left the church in 1977, "accusing it of being 'satanic', and vigorously attacking its methods and leadership".
Fischer won the World Chess Championship in 1972, defeating Boris Spassky of the USSR, in a match held in Reykjavík, Iceland. Publicized as a Cold War confrontation between the US and USSR, it attracted more worldwide interest than any chess championship before or since. In 1975, Fischer refused to defend his title when an agreement could not be reached with FIDE, chess's international governing body, over one of the conditions for the match. Under FIDE rules, this resulted in Soviet GM Anatoly Karpov, who had won the qualifying Candidates' cycle, being named the new world champion by default.
After forfeiting his title as World Champion, Fischer became reclusive and sometimes erratic, disappearing from both competitive chess and the public eye. In 1992, he reemerged to win an unofficial rematch against Spassky. It was held in Yugoslavia, which was under a United Nations embargo at the time. His participation led to a conflict with the US government, which warned Fischer that his participation in the match would violate an executive order imposing US sanctions on Yugoslavia. The US government ultimately issued a warrant for his arrest. After that, Fischer lived as an émigré. In 2004, he was arrested in Japan and held for several months for using a passport that the US government had revoked. Eventually, he was granted an Icelandic passport and citizenship by a special act of the Icelandic Althing, allowing him to live in Iceland until his death in 2008
On January 17, 2008, Fischer died at age 64 from kidney failure at the Landspítali Hospital (National University Hospital of Iceland) in Reykjavík. He had been suffering from degenerative kidney failure. He originally had a urinary tract blockage but refused surgery or medication.
On January 21, Fischer was buried in the small Christian cemetery of Laugardælir church, after a Catholic funeral presided over by Fr. Jakob Rolland of the diocese of Reykjavík. In accordance with Fischer's wishes, only Miyoko Watai, Garðar Sverrisson, and Garðar's family were present.
Bobby Fischer may have had 2 Jewish parents, but from what I've read about him, had received no
Jewish family life or education. He didn't know what it meant to be Jewish other than what negative
connotations he had heard. It's a lesson for all of us. Genes alone doesn't make
one Jewish; the environment is also needed; the learning, the education matters and
love. I don't think he had much of any of it. That's why he centered on chess. .
- Susan Polgár (born 1969), Hungarian-born US grandmaster & World champion, 2577
- Zsófia Polgár (born 1974), Hungarian-born Israeli international master, 2500
In August 2000, Polgár married Hungarian veterinary surgeon Gusztáv Font. They have two children, a boy named Olivér and a girl named Hanna. While Judit remained in Hungary, the rest of her family eventually emigrated: Sofia to Israel, Susan to the United States, and her parents to Israel and the United States.
Several members of Polgár's family died in the Holocaust; her grandmother was a survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp.
Out of many men, we've had only 2 Jewish women chess players reaching the heights of greatness like the men have. The Polgar women must have what it takes.
Jewish players and theoreticians have long been involved in the game of chess and have significantly contributed to the development of chess, which has been described as the "Jewish National game".
Although Jews make up less than 0.2% of the world's population, of the first 13 undisputed world champions, over 50% were Jewish, including the first two. The Modern school of chess espoused by Wilhelm Steinitz and Siegbert Tarrasch; the Hypermodernism influenced by Aron Nimzowitsch and Richard Réti; and the Soviet Chess School promoted by Mikhail Botvinnik were all strongly influenced by Jewish players. Other influential Jewish chess theoreticians, writers and players include Zukertort, Tartakower, Lasker, Rubinstein, Breyer, Spielmann, Reshevsky, Fine, Bronstein, Najdorf, Tal, Fischer, and Polgár. Professor Arpad Elo, the inventor of the scientific rating system employed by FIDE, analysed some 476 major tournament players from the nineteenth century onward, and of the fifty-one highest ranked players, approximately one-half were Jewish. One of the strongest ever players is the ethnically half-Jewish Garry Kasparov, who was world No. 1 from 1985 until his retirement in 2005; however, Kasparov has described himself as a "self-appointed Christian", preferring to follow his mother's faith. The strongest female chess player in history by far is the Jewish Judit Polgár. There is currently a strong Jewish presence among the world's best players. Currently, three of the top ten players in the world are ethnically Jewish (Ian Nepomniachtchi, Levon Aronian, Teimour Radjabov). Beersheba in Israel is the city with the most chess grandmasters per capita in the world. Israel has also won one silver and one bronze medal at Chess Olympiads.
Lithuania has had several chessmasters:
- Simon Alapin (1856–1923), Lithuanian[11][12];
- Abram Rabinovich (1878–1943), Lithuanian/Russian[13]
- Eduardas Rozentalis (born 1963), Lithuanian grandmaster[13]
Life ended for the Jews of Plunge in 1941 when Jonas Noreika led the slaughter of the Jews and the plunder of Jewish property. Noreika, a murderous, racist, thief, commandeered and stole the Orlanskis home and amongst the many items he plundered, was the Orlanskis’s prized chess table.
The topic of Jewish participation in chess is discussed extensively in academic and popular literature. One such book devoted to the topic is The Great Jewish Chess Champions by Harold U. Ribalow and Meir Z. Ribalow, Hippocrene Books, 1987, ISBN 0-87052-305-8. Others include Chess, Jews, and history, by Victor Keats, 1994, Oxford Academia Publishers, ISBN 1-899237-00-3, Chess Among the Jews: A Translation and Explanation of the Work of Moritz Steinschneider, by Victor Keats, 1995, ISBN 1-899237-02-X, Chess in Jewish history and Hebrew literature, by Victor Keats, 1995, Magnes Press, ISBN 965-223-915-1, and Can I Play Chess on Shabbas, by Joe Bobker, 2008, ISBN 965-229-422-5. See also Jewish chess masters on stamps, by Felix Berkovich and N. J. Divinsky, McFarland, 2000, ISBN 0-7864-0683-6. H.G. Wells, himself a chessplayer, discusses the eminence of the Jewish race in chess, in his History of the World. The Museum of Jewish Heritage is developing a special gallery relating to Jews in sports and chess, which will recognize "major Jewish chess players such as Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Tal, and Judith Polgar".
Resource:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_chess_players
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Fischer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Nemenyi
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