Maccabiah III (1950): A Victory in Itself

Emerging from the shadow of the Holocaust, the third Maccabiah was also the first to be held in the newly independent State of Israel. Attendance was down – 800 participants, compared to close to 1,300 in the second Maccabiah in 1935. Given the events of the intervening 15 years, however, and the hardships facing a new country struggling to survive in a hostile environment, the fact that the Games were held at all was a victory in itself.