The Morgnshtern, ("Morning Star" in Yiddish, also known by its Polish name Jutrznia), was the sport organization of the Jewish Labour Bund in Poland between the two World Wars.  Founded in 1926 as the Polish-Jewish section of the Socialist Workers' Sport International (SWSI), the Morgnshtern achieved immediate popularity, boasting 5,000 members and more than 170 branches in cities and towns throughout Poland.  In the 1930s, it was the largest Jewish sport organization in Poland.  The aim of the Morgnshtern
was to put in practice the key Bundist principles (socialism, working-class consciousness, internationalism, Yiddish culture, and the rejection of militarism and nationalism) in the specific area of sport.

The Morgnshtern's activities were inspired by the theory of workers' sport formulated by the Austro-Marxist Julius Deutsch, at the time chairman of the SWSI.  In 1928, Deutsch published Sport and Politics , a manifesto of workers' sport, soon translated into Yiddish and most other European  languages.  Deutsch was a Marxist, but he was neither deterministic nor overly optimistic: he believed that socialists must organize the masses of workers, especially the proletarian youth, and prepare them for the class struggle through education.  For Deutsch, there was no greater error than to believe that the proletariat would bring the class struggle to a victorious end regardless of its moral and cultural situation. Thus, the first tasks of the socialist movement were to free the proletariat from the prison of ignorance in which it was kept by the bourgeois order, and to counteract the influence of bourgeois values transmitted through the media, the compulsory school system, the arts, etc.  The beneficial effects of sport activities on a mass scale would have a significant impact on the ongoing class struggle in society.

Class contradictions were evident in sport just as in the rest of society. Deutsch stressed that bourgeois sport reflected bourgeois culture and bourgeois ethical principles.  Under bourgeois hegemony, sports were
becoming increasingly competitive, individualistic and professionalized. Notions of quality and return in sport paralleled those of the stock market.  Moreover, bourgeois sport federations at the time were becoming increasingly nationalist and combative. In  many countries sport clubs were coming to resemble fascist parties and even creating fascist militias, attracting some "naïve" workers.  Bourgeois sports organizations tried to promote a false sense of harmony between labour and capital and blamed the organized working class for disrupting "national unity".

Deutsch did not condemn professional athletes as individuals; on the contrary, he believed that they might be honest people earning their living in an honourable way, like artists or musicians, but that their performance was meaningless.  The professional athlete could impress the audience, but not act as its role-model, since his or her achievements resulted from exceptional physical characteristics and specialized training, and this special training was not desirable for everybody, since most professional
athletes developed some muscles at the expense of others.

Thus, Deutsch concluded, it was imperative to create separate proletarian sport organizations that would develop sport activities under completely different principles: workers' sport must be "collectivist," and seek
improvements in performance by means other than competition; it should not focus exclusively on the training of potential champions, nor make record-breaking its main goal, but offer everyone the possibility of
practicing sports. Workers' sport must have as its ideal the harmonious development and strengthening of the whole body; it should be practiced in a communal and friendly atmosphere free from any manifestation of violence or brutality.  Strategically, a crucial goal of proletarian sport was to mobilize the masses of young workers to join the socialist movement. 

The Morgnshtern tried to organize its activities according to Deutsch's principles in the context of Polish Jewry.  Though decidedly Jewish, the Morgnshtern was a secular institution.  Many of its activities were held on Saturdays and Jewish holidays, which was understandable in an organization of workers with little leisure time during the week.

Bundists rejected any nationalism, including Jewish nationalism. Throughout its existence, the  Morgnshtern produced no formulation equivalent to Max Nordau's famous call for a Muskuljudentum (muscular Judaism).  The Morgnshtern membership-male and female Jewish workers engaged in physical work- did not need to prove their muscular and physical skills to counteract an abstract conception of Jews as spiritual or intellectual persons with weak bodies.  Moreover, neither the Morgnshtern nor the Bund wanted to transform the Jews into a warrior-people: they rejected both nationalism and war, promoting international solidarity and the creation of a healthier and fairer society for both Jews and non-Jews.

Bundists saw Zionism as a manifestation of bourgeois nationalism and thus refrained from any collaboration with its organizations. The Morgnshtern was openly hostile not only toward the (Zionist) Maccabi, but also toward the (Labour-Zionist) HaPoel. The Yiddish editor of Deutsch's Sport and
Politics greeted Deutsch's relative sympathy toward the activities of the HaPoel in Palestine in the 1920s with an ironic remark: "the 'facts' provided by the author -that HaPoel also comprises Arab members- are as accurate as the 'fact' that Jewish trade-unions in Palestine struggle for, and together with, the Arab workers."  The irony would not have been lost on Bundist readers, well aware that the Histadrut, the Zionist workers' federation, not only did not represent Arabs but, on the contrary, actively sought to take jobs from Arab workers and give them to Jews.

The Morgnshtern emphasized participation in non-competitive activities, and the majority of its membership belonged to its non-competitive sections. The most popular activity was gymnastics, and after it, the overwhelmingly female-dominated eurhythmics [ritmika].  The incentive for the participants in these activities was not competition but self-improvement.  The ritmika report for 1937 stated its main aim as the democratization of physical activity by giving children who could not otherwise afford it access to physical education.  In the summer, the Morgnshtern rented a swimming-pool during certain hours to offer swimming lessons to its members.  A popular winter activity was glitshn (ice-skating), and lessons were also offered at accessible prices, especially for children.  Every year from 1933 the Warsaw Morgnshtern rented a skating-rink for its members.

The biggest event in the Morgnshtern calendar was the turnfest, a sport and cultural holiday in which displays of harmonic movement of hundreds or thousands of gymnasts represented the proletarian force, unity and sense of solidarity.  The program of the 1932 turnfest in Kutno offers an indication of what these turnfests might have looked like.  During the event, all the different gymnastic groups, from the youngest to the oldest, and alternating groups of males and females, performed gymnastic exercises in various styles. The last groups to perform were the adult men-performing the same program presented by the Morgnshtern one year earlier at the Workers' Olympic Games in Vienna- and adult women, who performed a series of exercises to the rhythm of popular Yiddish songs ("der rebe elimeylekh" and others).  In the last part, all groups together performed a gymnastic piece called "der eybiker korbn" ("The Eternal Victim"), which represented "a symbolic image of the struggle between labour and capital." Another major event in the life of the Morgnshtern was the International Workers' Olympic Games, organized by the SWSI. 

These massive events are today almost completely forgotten.  Still, in the 1920s and 1930s, their popularity matched that of the "bourgeois" or "official" Olympic Games (organized by the International Olympic Committee, or IOC).  The Second Workers' Olympiad took place in Vienna in 1931, with the participation of 100,000 worker-athletes from 26 countries.  By comparison, in the IOC-organized Olympic Games in Los Angeles one year later, only 1,408 athletes participated.  The Vienna Workers' Olympiad attracted 250,000 spectators, and it easily surpassed its rival, the IOC Olympic Games, not only in the number of competitors and spectators but also in the many cultural events it included.  Unlike the bourgeois Olympic Games, the Workers' Olympiad stressed workers' internationalism, solidarity and peace, and did not restrict entry on the grounds of sporting ability but invited all athletes, encouraging mass participation. The Morgnshtern sent 300 worker-athletes to the Vienna Olympiad, who proudly marched along the avenues of "Red Vienna" displaying their Yiddish banners.  An even more monumental Workers' Olympiad was planned for Barcelona in 1936, in opposition to the Nazi Olympics in Berlin.  However, the Barcelona Workers' Games never took place due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War almost exactly at the same time the Olympiad was scheduled to begin.  Thus the Third Workers' Olympic Games were rescheduled for the following year in Antwerp.  Despite intensive preparations, the Morgnshtern was banned from participation in this event by the Polish government.

In its early years, the Morgnshtern, while actively opposing competitive or violent sports (in particular boxing and soccer), had simultaneously to deal with their increasing popularity, in Poland as everywhere else.  In the 1929 Congress of the SWSI, the Morgnshtern proposed a total ban on boxing in all the affiliated federations, and, in parallel, proposed that new rules be set for soccer to diminish its competitiveness and escalating violence. The proposal was that, in soccer competitions, the winning team
would be decided not only on the basis of goals scored but also through a system of points rewarding "aesthetic and fair play" and "nice combinations."  In this way the increasing brutality of bourgeois soccer
would be avoided, and the game would be played according to humanist and socialist principles.

A passionate argument arose in the Congress around this issue.  The opponents of this proposal thought that soccer in its existing form should be used as a means of bringing the proletarian masses into workers' sport organizations.  Besides, they claimed, soccer was so popular among workers that if the workers' clubs did not organize it, they would lose their members to the bourgeois clubs. Similar arguments took place within the Morgnshtern and eventually, as many times before and after, purist ideals were set aside under pressure from below.  The "soccer question" was resolved by the Central Organizing Committee of the Morgnshtern in 1930. In the text of the resolution, the leaders of the Morgnshtern rationalized
that soccer-with the appropriate approach, organization and treatment-can help unfold the collective and solidarity senses of the athlete.  Soccer greatly captures the interest of the young workers and it is possible to use it to draw the great mass of young workers into the socialist movement.

Following this precedent, other competitive sports were gradually incorporated into Morgnshtern activities, including ping-pong, handball, basketball, volleyball and even boxing. To be sure, regardless of these
changes, the non-competitive activities always attracted the participation of larger numbers of people. But Morgnshtern competitive sports teams tended more and more to participate in the general leagues in Poland.  Some of these teams reached remarkable achievements ; for example, a Morgnshtern member was part of the Polish national team in the ping-pong World Championship in London in 1938.

By the early 1930s there were several Morgnshtern soccer teams in the Warsaw area alone, some representing different Jewish workers' unions.  In 1929 the Bundist daily Naye Folkstsaitung sponsored the soccer tournament among the various Morgnshtern teams, offering as a prize the Naye Folkstsaitung Trophy: a bronze sculpture of a worker by a famous Polish sculptor.  The winner of the tournament was the Czarny, the soccer team of the union of commerce employees.  Two thousand people came to see this
tournament.  The Bundist press covered each game using the enthusiastic style that had become typical of this kind of reporting (but in Yiddish, of course).  This is how the game between the soccer teams of the Warsaw (Central) Morgnshtern and the Kraft-Morgnshtern was presented: "Kraft played with extraordinary ambition [mit oysergeveynlekher ambitsie] and dominated the field throughout the game.  It was possible to see among the players a friendly, collective and cooperative style of play [a khaverish un kolektiv tsuzamenshpiln]; on the other hand, the Morgnshtern played chaotically, without any system, purposelessly kicking the ball around [stam gekopet di pilke arayn] and reaching nowhere. "

Regardless of style and aesthetic, the Warsaw Morgnshtern team won 1:0, because they managed to score a goal in a "suicidal" shot at the last minute of the game, when both teams were exhausted, to the great dismay of our unnamed reporter, who as early as the 1920s preferred controlled and tactical play over players' skills.  The reporter of the Arbeter sportler concluded with disappointment that the Kraft deserved at least a draw. As late as July 1939, a new soccer team was organized in the Warsaw Morgnshtern, and in the following weeks it played several friendly games with other Morgnshtern teams from Warsaw and Vilna. The team showed great promise. On August 8, 1939, it won two games against the older and strongest Morgnshtern teams, Czarny and Veker.  A month later, Poland was under Nazi occupation.  The Morgnshtern membership would share the fate of the rest of Polish Jewry.

RONI GECHTMAN is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at New York University. He grew up in Argentina, studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and now lives in Vancouver, B.C. He is currently writing his dissertation on the Bund in interwar Poland.