Jewish Gymnastics Club Bar Kochba Berlin

On 22.10.1898 the philosophy student and later rabbi Wilhelm Lewy founds the Jewish gymnastics club Bar Kochba Berlin with 47 other followers. It is the first Jewish sports club on German soil after the Jewish Gymnastics Club of Constantinople (1895) and the Zionist Gymnastics Club of Plovdiv (1897). Previously, Max Nordau and Max Mandelstamm, among others, had advocated a Jewish gymnastics club at the 2nd Zionist Congress in 1898. The club was named after Simon Bar Kochba, the leader of the Jewish uprising against the Romans (132-135 CE). Within the next three decades, the Bar Kochba Turnverein grew into a worldwide organization after Jewish sports clubs were founded all over Europe following the Berlin model. After the November pogrom in 1938, the club was dissolved by the Nazis.