Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland

3 Morgnshtern: A Bundist Movement for Physical Education

48 3 Morgnshtern A Bundist Movement for Physical Education The fact that a group of Polish Bundists saw fit to establish the Workers’ Society for Physical Education “Morgnshtern” (Arbeter-gezelshaft far fizishe dertsiung “morgnshtern” in poyln) can be explained, at least in part, by situating the creation of this organization in the context of the history of Jewish movements devoted to sports and physical education in Eastern Europe.1 There were several different sports movements in interwar Poland affiliated with specific Jewish political parties, all created within a short time span. The founding of Morgnshtern was one example of a more general phenomenon: the emergence of explicitly Jewish sports movements on the Jewish street. . . . Large-scale Jewish sports movements tended to emerge marginally later in Congress Poland than in Jewish communities in German-speaking Europe.2 The propensity of orthodox Jewish authorities to frown upon activities perceived as distracting from the study of religious texts, and the restrictions on Jewish organizational life imposed by the czarist regime, hindered the emergence of these sports movements on a mass scale in Congress Poland in the first years of the twentieth century. There may well have been local Jewish sports clubs in specific towns or cities.3 There were not, however, unified Jewish sports movements per se operating over a broad geographic area. The German occupation of Congress Poland during the course of the First World War created a dramatically freer atmosphere for the Jewish Morgnshtern: A Bundist Movement for Physical Education | 49 population and allowed Jewish communal and cultural groups far greater leeway than they had previously experienced. One result was the creation of these explicitly Jewish sports groups—often known as Maccabi groups—in Warsaw, Vilna, and Plock (echoing the earlier creation of Maccabi groups in Central European cities).4 The Lodz-based Jewish sports club Bar-Kochba, which allegedly affiliated with the Maccabi world union at a later point in time, also dated from this period. In 1921, a network of Maccabi clubs in Poland was officially established. Maccabi was a sizeable and vibrant movement in Poland throughout the interwar period. However, it was widely thought of, by the 1920s if not earlier, as particularly attractive to middle class and wealthy elements of the Polish Jewish community, to those Jews who spoke Polish, and to those sympathetic to the mainstream General Zionists. This perception helped to spark the creation of a number of new sports movements and clubs, each of which had ties with a specific, different Jewish political party. The movement founded in 1923 and known in Polish as Gwiazda (or in Yiddish as Shtern), for example , was affiliated with the Left Poalei Zion.5 Hapoel, which was linked to the Right Poalei Zion, also operated in Poland in the years between the two world wars.6 There were individual sports clubs, though not full-fledged sports movements, sympathetic to both the Revisionist-Zionists7 and the Folkistn.8 At least one local sports club—Skała (Rock)—consisted primarily of members of the Jewish Section of the Communist Party.9 To be sure, the range of political opinion among the leaders of the Jewish sports movements was not quite as broad as was the range of perspectives within Polish Jewry as a whole. The orthodox political party Agudes Yisreol, for example, did not create a movement of its own. Nevertheless, there were significant differences among the Jewish sports movements of Poland rooted in the differing ideologies of their leaders or parent parties. . . . Bundist-oriented sports organizations were active in specific cities, such as Cracow, long before the official creation of Morgnshtern.10 In Warsaw, for example, the gymnastics groups that met in the building of the Society for the Protection of Health (TOZ) in the early 1920s, while formally nonpolitical , were allegedly organized and composed all but exclusively of Bundists and those likely to be sympathetic to that movement.11 Morgnshtern per se, 50 | Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland however, was not officially established until late in 1926, and did not hold its first Polandwide conference until April 1929. The first Morgnshtern conference —which was held in Warsaw and which was attended by delegates representing approximately four thousand individual members12 —can legitimately be taken to mark the emergence of Morgnshtern as a full-fledged, Poland-wide organization. It was controlled by Bundists and Tsukunftistn throughout its life span.13 Unlike most other organizations promoting sports and athletics...