Sports & Chess

A specially designed gallery will be filled artifacts related to the accomplishments of Jewish sports figures. They will be displayed in cases designed as lockers. Seating will be on locker room benches.

The gallery will put on display the sort of timelines and statistics that obsess sports fans everywhere. Objects and images, and hall-of-fame plaques will be exhibited, depicting and describing the accomplishments of boxers like Benny Leonard, Barney Ross and Max Baer, basketball players like Dolphe Schayes, baseball players like Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax, football players like Sid Luckman, tennis players like Pete Sampras, sports writers like Shirley Povich, coaches like Ray Arcel, Red Auerbach and Red Holzman, and philanthropic team owners like Abe Pollin and Dan Snyder. So too the extraordinary breadth of accomplishments of Jewish athletes elsewhere — from Austria to the former Soviet Union — will be recognized.

There will be a biennial induction dinner into the National Jewish American Sports Hall of Fame, which will be the centerpiece of the Sports Gallery’s fun and excitement.

The exhibition will include the mental sport of chess. Major Jewish chessplayers, such as Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Tal, and Judith Polgar, the highest ranked female chess player in the world, will be recognized.

The visitor, a serious chess player, visits one of the viewing rooms in the section of the museum celebrating the accomplishments of Jews in that game. He finds a list of names of great champions of chess projected on the wall. He selects, for example, Bobby Fisher. A chess board appears on the wall, and the visitor is invited to play a game against Fisher.