3. The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Sport
The Bar Kochba club was not alone. In the last years of the nineteenth century
and the opening years of the twentieth, a number of Jewish sporting clubs
began to develop, especially in the towns of central Europe. Almost all of
them had names that echoed great heroic moments and characters from the past
of the Jewish people. Besides Bar Kochba there were significant clubs that
took the name Shimshon (Samson) and of course Maccabi – while
others called themselves names that included the words Koach (strength)
or Gibbor (hero) or Gevurah (heroism).
At the fourth Zionist Congress at Basle, in 1903, an impressive display of
gymnastics was performed for the entertainment and the edification of the
delegates by a group of more than thirty Jewish athletes and it was at this
congress that the foundations of the Juedische Turnerschaft, the Union of
Jewish Gymnastic Clubs, the basis of the future Maccabi organization, were
laid. It is important to emphasise that in their initial announcements they
emphasized the national side of their activities. This was not merely physical
activity for the enjoyment of the individual: it was physical development
in the service of the nation. The national idea became a factor in many of
the early sporting and gymnastic clubs that developed in these years.
With time, at the beginning of the next decade they crystallized into the
Maccabi Federation with dozens of affiliated clubs and this formally became
the World Maccabi Union in 1921, with headquarters over the next decades in
a number of the great Central European cities. Maccabi presented itself as
an apolitical organization unofficially connected with the Zionist movement.
With the appearance of the Turnershaft and Maccabi, and the coordination of
activities that up to then had been purely local, the movement for physical
education and sport in the Jewish national cause became formalized.
Previous | Index
| Next