Saturday, October 31, 2015

Getting into Trouble

We noted that Adrian (or, in the source quoted, Avraham) Schwarz had played in a tournament when he was a deserter from the IDF, and MPs came to catch him at the tournament; it turns out that the exact tournament was the youth test tournament of July 1963. Schwarz 'registered to the tournament despite the fact that his legal standing vis-a-vis the army's command does not allow him to play or to guarantee his attendance' -- that is, he might be thrown in jail for desertion if caught -- and that 'he is responsible for the disruptions caused when the police terminated his participation', which 'brought chess into disrepute'.

Quite apart from being pursued by MPs, then, Schwatrz had to deal with him severely: a one-year suspension from chess tournaments. That, hoped the ethics committee of the ICF, will 'keep him from loving chess to a degree that causes dereliction of his national duty' [to serve in the IDF].

The sordid details are found on p. 9 of Shachmat, vol. 2 no. 9 (21), April 1964. We are not clear why he is named 'Avraham' (i.e., Abraham) here -- is this due to the common (at the time) practice of changing names to "pure" Hebrew ones, or are we in fact (which seems unlikely given my sources) dealing with two different people?

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