56 Days
Every Zionist bookshelf should include a thick tome called "O Jerusalem" by Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre. Chapter 1, describing the birth of the State of Israel begins as follows:
"In the afternoon of Saturday, November 29th, 1947, in a cavernous gray building that had once housed an ice-skating rink, in Flushing Meadow, New York, the delegates of 56 of the fifty-seven members of the General Assembly of the United Nations were called upon to decide the future of a sliver of land set on the eastern rim of the Mediterranean."
Fun fact: Be'er Sheva (population = 186,000), with its eight grandmasters, has more chess grandmasters per capita than any other city in the world! George Koltanowski, one of the greatest chess promotors of all time, has a blind chess (players play blindfolded) record of 56 simultaneous games - he won fifty of them after almost ten hours of play. Koltanowski, who used to play in Coney Island, Brooklyn, with such interesting fellows as the actor Humphrey Bogart, wound up in America by fortunate circumstances: a Jew, he was saved from the Holocaust because he happened to be playing a World Tournament in Buenos Aires when the war broke out and he didn't return to Europe. Another famous Jewish grandmaster, Mikhael Najdorf (who set the blind chess record before him, with forty-five games in 1947), also escaped the Holocaust by playing in the same tournament.
__
New marching band to appear in the 2010 Parade - the Washington Showstoppers from Washington, DC! To watch the band in action, click here.
1 Comments:
Great blog concept :-)
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home