A Play on Words

It’s called “America’s Good Time Game,” but Israelis are wild about Scrabble too. In fact, the world’s largest Scrabble club meets in Jerusalem. Every Tuesday night, some 55 people bring their obscure vocabularies and their game boards to the third floor of the Beit Ha’am Municipal Library to lay out their wooden tiles in a fierce battle of words.

There are six Scrabble clubs in Israel, a country whose official languages are Hebrew and Arabic, not English, the language of play. This sometimes leads to laughable mistakes when someone tries to play a Hebrew word, like “tankist,” meaning a tank crew member, that sounds like it could be English, but isn’t.

Why don’t Israelis play Scrabble in their native language? Two Hebrew versions of the game do exist, but the lack of vowels in the alef-bet means that almost any string of letters (or tiles) makes a valid word. And one of the Scrabble versions leaves out the letter k (khaf).

So why do Israelis play at all? “Scrabble refreshes my English,” says David Ginsberg who attends a club in Modi’in. “More importantly, it’s social and it’s fun.”