Jüdischer Sport in der Zeit zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen

In the period between the two World Wars, Jewish involvement in organized sports reached unprecedented levels across Europe, and beyond. Sport gained significance in the everyday lives of many Jewish men and women, both as a collective practice shaped by ideology and as a space where new forms of social life and identity began to be explored and negotiated. As these developments unfolded, attention shifted from purely competing aspects of (Jewish) collective belonging toward regulating and reflecting upon the relationship between individual and community.
 
The two decades of the interwar period marked a new—and final—highpoint for Jewish sporting life – first in Europe, then increasingly elsewhere. The volume and quality of surviving sources attest to this steady expansion: sport permeated more and more aspects of daily life and reached ever larger segments of the Jewish population. It remained a collective practice shaped by ideology, while also gaining significance as a space for renegotiating social roles and norms. At the center of this shift was no longer merely competing conceptions of collective (Jewish) identity, but rather a growing focus on the regulation and reflection of the relationship between individual and community.
The ideological construction of collectives, together with the ambiguity and contradictions brought about by processes of differentiation and pluralization, reflected—indeed anticipated—some of the fundamental challenges of modern human existence.
 
The conditions that sparked this boom were ambivalent. The First World War had dramatically accelerated the spread of sport, bringing large segments of Europe’s male population into contact with it through military service. Particularly for the Jewish communities in Poland, it was the war itself that had—ironically—put an end to previous restrictions on organized sports clubs, which in the Prussian and Russian partitioned territories had been seen as potentially deviant or subversive. It was this development that led Jewish communities to establish a federation. 
 
Yet at the same time, the Jews of Central Europe were confronted with a violent resurgence of antisemitism as a direct consequence of the war. As the imperial order with its traditionally multiethnic population structures collapsed, a multitude of new nation-states emerged. Each of these newly established titular nations defined itself in opposition to one or, more often, several minority populations. Jews in particular were subject to discrimination across national borders and found themselves caught in the crossfire as revolutionary upheavals broke out during the drawn-out end of the war, or when members of two national groups vied for dominance.1 In fact, Eastern (Central) Europe descended into civil war-like conditions, and, between 1917 and 1921, the fear of pogrom violence the fear of pogrom violence The violent excesses of the Russian Civil War (1917–1922) must be understood in the context of the profound political and social upheavals that shook the former Tsarist Empire after the collapse of the monarchy. This conflict, marked by extreme brutality, saw the Bolshevik forces (the Red Army) clash with the counterrevolutionary “White” armies across the territory of the former Russian Empire. Within the ideological discourse of the counterrevolutionary camps, antisemitism played a central role. The Bolshevik Revolution was frequently portrayed as part of an alleged Jewish-communist conspiracy aimed at undermining Christian Russian society. As a result, Jews—regardless of their actual political affiliation—were collectively associated with Bolshevism and constructed as a political enemy. This antisemitic rhetoric provided the ideological foundation for a wave of pogroms that became a grim reality, particularly in contested regions of what is now Ukraine, Belarus, and southern Russia. During the Civil War, an estimated 1,500 pogroms occurred, claiming the lives of tens of thousands of Jewish civilians, displacing many more, and leaving deep and lasting trauma. extended as far as Berlin and Vienna. Regardless of their political orientation, the Jewish sports movement repeatedly responded with effective measures to threats of antisemitic violence and repression. In Vienna, for example, the Jüdische Turnerschaft (Jewish Gymnastics Association) played an active role in resisting pogroms in 1918, and in Germany, even the nationalist  Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten

Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten

also:

Reich Federation of Jewish Front-Line Soldiers

In 1919, the Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten (RjF, League of Jewish Front Soldiers) was founded. This was a reaction to anti-Semitic hostility towards Jewish soldiers returning from World War I. There were approximately 85,000 Jewish front-line soldiers, 12,000 of whom died during the war. Nevertheless, they were accused of having shirked their duty before the war and thus causing Germany's defeat. The RjF made it its mission to inform people about the achievements of Jewish soldiers and to help them gain recognition. The RjF organized self-defense units in various locations to protect the Jewish population from anti-Semitic attacks. The Reichsbund had its own newspaper called “Schild” (Shield). The political stance of the RjF was German nationalist. From 1936, the RjF was banned from engaging in political activities. Two years later, the RjF was dissolved.  (Reich Federation of Jewish Frontline Soldiers) made youth sports development part of its efforts to combat antisemitism. When the Maccabi World Union (MWU) was founded in 1921, the recent experience of violence played a decisive role in the decision to make paramilitary training (Wehrsport) mandatory across all local chapters. The solidarity practices that had been developed to protect Jewish bodies continued to have an effect years later: In 1938, Germany carried out the so-called "Polenaktion" (Polish Action). In response, the Morgnshtern sports association mobilized its resources to receive and care for the thousands of Jewish Polish citizens expected to arrive in the border town of .2 
 
In Germany, antisemitism had long been a serious problem that affected Jewish athletes both individually and collectively—even before the systematic exclusion that began immediately after the National Socialists seized power in the spring of 1933.3 For example, the West German Football Association (Westdeutscher Spiel-Verband) refused to allow the newly founded Hakoah Essen Hakoah Essen The Turn- und Sportclub Hakoah Essen was founded in December 1923, emerging from the gymnastics division of the Jewish Youth Association in Essen. In 1925, it became a co-founder of the VINTUS (Association of Jewish Gymnastics and Sports Clubs). The club primarily attracted Jews who had previously not been involved in sports—often because they feared antisemitism in non-Jewish clubs. By 1928, Hakoah Essen had around 1,000 active and supporting members. It maintained strong ties with the local Jewish community, who supported it. The club offered a wide range of sports, including gymnastics, athletics, football, boxing, swimming, hiking, jiu-jitsu, tennis, fistball, handball, winter sports, and fencing. In 1933, Hakoah Essen joined the Maccabi World Union. Although Nazi repression increasingly disrupted club activities, many of them continued for a time. However, some disciplines—such as hiking, jiu-jitsu, fistball, handball, winter sports, and fencing—were discontinued, while bowling was introduced in their place. After late 1938, there are no surviving records or evidence of further activity by Hakoah Essen. to participate in football and athletics competitions, citing the flimsy excuse of a general admissions freeze. Forced into action, Hakoah Essen and eight other affected clubs founded their own association in April 1925: the Association of Jewish-Neutral Gymnastics and Sports Clubs of Western Germany (Vintus).4 Elsewhere, Jews who held prominent positions in mainstream sports clubs were subjected to antisemitic harassment and agitation. The journalist Felix Pinczower accused the 1. FC Nürnberg of terminating the contract of coach Jenő Konrád due to verbal attacks from the notorious Stürmer newspaper—a sequence of events now remembered differently by both the club and Konrád’s family memory, who interpret it instead as a hasty escape from Germany.
 
Faced with both external and internal challenges, Jewish communities turned to sport as a way to renegotiate a sense of belonging that had come under strain. The way sport was practiced and organized was flexible enough to accommodate both shifting between different options and pursuing them side by side. Just as the wider sports movement of the interwar years saw the revival of the Olympic Games, the rise of workers’ Olympiads, and a growing number of world championships, so too did Jewish sport become a space where international—and increasingly global—connections were felt with greater intensity and clarity. Trans-territoriality and transnationalism had long been defining features of European Jewish life. Now, through emigration to the Americas and the Zionist project in Palestine, these dimensions extended beyond the continent. Sport served as a means of connection, drawing together the increasingly dispersed Jewish communities into a shared cultural and social space. The numerous international tours of the Austrian football champions Hakoah Vienna in the 1920s made a particularly lasting impression. Meanwhile, the Maccabi movement, whose world federation had already organized congresses, hosted its first major European sporting event in 1929 in Ostrava. From this emerged the initiative to establish regular Jewish games across national boundaries, held in the British Mandate territory of Palestine. In 1932, this vision became reality with the first Maccabiah Games in Tel Aviv. The Berlin-based Felix Simmenauer documented these inaugural games in a travel diary, published here in full for the first time, which complements his film recordings. His film project highlights the emerging and increasingly influential media dimension of sport—especially of major sporting events—an area he had already begun to explore in earlier Maccabi short films of 1929 and 1930, well before Leni Riefenstahl’s famous Olympic films.5 His estate, now held by the archive of the Jewish Museum Berlin, includes a draft design for the Maccabiah film poster, which serves as the cover image for this chapter. The poster invites multiple interpretations and lends itself to various critical readings. It was also clearly designed to appeal and to spark curiosity. More importantly, however, it captures a historical moment of openness and carries within it a sense of future possibility—one that history would soon utterly betray.
 
That the years leading up to 1939 now appear to us as a uniquely flourishing period of Jewish life in Europe—including the Jewish sports movement—is inseparable from our indelible knowledge of the catastrophe that was to follow: the Shoah. This retrospective view fundamentally differs from the perspective of those who lived at the time, who assumed—without question—that they had a future, both as individuals and as communities, and that it was theirs to shape. Against this backdrop, contemporary observers named problems with unflinching clarity, even resorting to exaggeration, because doing so could serve as a rhetorical spur for improvement. The tone of despair and hopelessness that occasionally surfaces in these writings can strike modern readers as jarring, especially when it clashes with the idealized depictions offered by Holocaust survivors in Yizkor books, memoirs, or oral history interviews.6 In those testimonies, the shame of survival and mourning for the murdered and the lost world often leave little room for overt criticism. Christopher Browning has also noted that the destination of one’s exile or emigration shaped how the European Jewish past was remembered: those who moved to Palestine or Israel tended to describe their European lives as particularly Zionist, while those who emigrated to the more progressive North America framed theirs as deeply rooted in Jewish tradition—even as backward. According to this thesis, such narratives not only strive for coherence but also anticipate and internalize the expectations of their respective audiences.
 
The high degree of politicization within Jewish community-building initiatives in the interwar period—especially in Poland—has often been emphasized, and it naturally extended to the realm of sports.7 On the contrary: many clubs were explicitly affiliated with political movements or parties, and the relationship ran both ways. Morgnshtern—also known as Jutrznia—was the sports organization of the Yiddish-speaking socialist Bund, a party committed to Jewish life in the diaspora. The source on women in sport, which is referenced here,8 comes from its 1938 annual report. The example of Ha-Po’el, by contrast, points to a new dynamic in the transnational development of Jewish sport. Ha-Po’el, the sporting arm of the Zionist socialist workers’ movement, had an established presence in Poland by the mid-1930s. Whereas the Maccabi clubs had replicated (Zionist) diaspora models in Palestine, Ha-Po’el marked the first instance of a sporting organization from Erez Israel making its way back to Europe.9 In Palestine, the ongoing and bitter rivalry between the Maccabi and Ha-Po’el federations posed a major obstacle to international recognition of the Jewish sports movement under the Mandate. In Poland, however, this antagonism was only one among many overlapping and often chaotic lines of conflict: between Zionist and non-Zionist socialist clubs, between competing factions within Zionism itself, and not least, between Jewish and non-Jewish workers’ sports associations—just to name a few.
 
At the same time, the political alignment of sports clubs was not always clear-cut—or even relevant. Beyond the notion of neatly defined political affiliations, clubs sometimes only developed a political orientation in the course of becoming formal associations—or even afterward, as shown in one example from Lwów. In some cases, that orientation could change repeatedly, often driven more by pragmatic considerations than by ideological convictions. Robert “Benio” Adler recounts the political odyssey of his initially informal street football team. First, they accepted an offer to become a workers’ sports club in exchange for gear and funding—but this affiliation ultimately prevented them from joining the football association and participating in league matches. As a workaround, they aligned themselves with the local Morgnshtern club, which then led many of the revisionist (i.e., Zionist) members to leave. It was only through this new structure—and his contact with committed Bundists—that Benio, previously politically indifferent, began to take an interest in politics. This telling example illustrates how sport was pursued primarily for personal reasons, and that political labels often had limited meaning in practice. Still, involvement in a sports club could serve as a gateway to politicization. At the same time, political allegiances shaped the sports landscape in return, giving these affiliations broader societal influence. Benio’s account also reveals the link between the fluid formation and re-formation of clubs in large cities and the often short-lived nature of many teams. Within a short time, his club and its splinter groups operated under at least four different names. This helps explain why amateur sports historians on online forums have counted 108 football clubs in interwar Lwów—many of which, judging by their names, were Jewish.10 
 
The tension between imagined ideals and lived realities in Jewish sports clubs is further highlighted by the case of the athlete Lea, a working-class runner from  who was scouted by the local Maccabi.20 Although she was warmly welcomed and achieved athletic success there, she—and those around her—struggled to identify with the club, which was seen as bourgeois and out of step with her social and cultural background. Yet Maccabi Poland—the largest member of the Maccabi World Union (MWU), with some 30,000 members—brought together the majority of Jewish athletes in Poland. In many places, its clubs were the only available option for Jewish sport. “Give me a workers’ sports club and I’ll leave Maccabi tomorrow,” Lea once responded to critics, underscoring how little choice she had.
 
The divergent social and political contexts of Jewish communities in Poland and Western Europe led to fundamental differences that were also reflected in the realm of Jewish sport. This contrast is particularly evident at the  conference of 1921, where the Jewish sports association was reconstituted as the Maccabi World Union following World War I. The full minutes of that gathering portray Maccabi Poland as a unified organization whose members reflected wide-ranging political and social diversity. This stood in sharp contrast to Western, especially German, clubs, where the existence of a Jewish—and particularly a Maccabi—club was almost always associated, either implicitly or explicitly, with a Zionist orientation. Against this backdrop, the refusal of Polish athletes to commit ideologically, organizationally, or financially to Zionism was met with incomprehension.
 
It is precisely sources like these—highlighting tensions and conflicts—that attest to the richness and vitality of the Jewish sports movement in interwar Europe. Without them, the idea of a Jewish sports boom in that period would remain empty of substance.