Thursday, March 14, 2024

Postcard from the past - Jews are unwanted

Would you believe it? Back in the late 19th century, there was a lot of prejudice against Jewish people. Surprising, right? Well, meet Wilhelm Marr, a German journalist who actually came up with the term "antisemitism" in 1879. He used this fancy term to describe hostility towards Jews. He introduced it in his publication, "The Victory of Judaism over Germandom." So, it all started with a book in Germany in 1879! Quite the scientific term compared to simply calling it Jew-hatred, don't you think?

This prejudice was so prevalent in German society that it gave rise to antisemitic parties like the German Social Party (DSP), founded around the same time as Marr's term. Led by Adolf Stoecker, a Protestant pastor, this movement blended conservative, nationalist, and anti-Semitic ideas. They claimed that Jews held too much power in finance, commerce, and the media, which they believed was harming German culture. They even advocated for legal restrictions on Jewish economic activities and university enrollment, similar to Nazi ideology later on. As we all know, the same idea of Jews controlling everything still prevails today. Today people actually believe that Israel controls almost everything, including using birds and sharks as spies!

Responding to this growing antisemitism, the Zionist movement emerged, aiming to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This idea was met with some support within antisemitic circles, suggesting that maybe it would be a good idea to expel Jews.

Here we see a postcard from around 1900, titled "Die Zukunft" (The Future) which shows German soldiers forcing out a large group of Jews, who are following a route indicated by the sign "Nach Palästina" (To Palestine). The exiled Jews, portrayed with stereotypical negative attributes such as deformed bodies and enormous noses, are pictured leaving a lush landscape and crossing into barren desert land, which was how Palestine was seen. Unfortunately this postcard is not mine.


This postcard below, also from around 1900, shows the expulsion of Jews to where they originally came from, Palestine. Apart from To Palestine as the previous card, the text says "And when they are inside, shut the gates and there will be peace throughout Europe". Jews must be expelled because they are greedy money lenders as shown by the images at top left.


 
;I am not sure whether they want us to go to Palestine which is where we came from or as today they are saying get out of Palestine as we are colonialists here. I am confused.

Thursday, February 1, 2024

The stamp that created the Panama Canal


Back in the day, some American bigwigs wanted to dig a canal to connect the two oceans, but they couldn't agree on where to do it – in Panama, or in Nicaragua. A lot of them thought Nicaragua was a better bet, because the French had been trying to make a canal in Panama for like 20 years, and they sucked at it. They had to deal with a lot of rain and nasty diseases that killed people.

There was also this drama with Panama breaking up with Colombia and becoming its own country in 1903. If America went with Panama, it could piss off Colombia, who wouldn't be happy with America doing business in their ex's land. Nicaragua, on the other hand, was chill and had a lake that would make the digging easier.

This whole thing was a big mess for Congress for a long time. In 1902, this French dude named Philippe Buanu-Varilla decided to convince Congress to stick with the Panama Canal, instead of starting over in Nicaragua. Buanu-Varilla was actually an engineer and an investor in the French Panama Canal project, so he wanted to save his work and money. He teamed up with an American guy named William Nelson Cromwell to lobby Congress to go with Panama.

One of their tricks was to send every senator a specific stamp from Nicaragua, the 10c stamp depicted on the right. The stamp, which was part of a series, showed the railroad industry in Nicaragua, with a volcano named Mt. Momotombo in the background. The problem was, the volcano looked like it was about to blow, with smoke coming out of it!

The smoking volcano Mt. Momotombo was something that Buanu-Varilla wanted to use, to make Congress think that building a canal in Nicaragua was risky. This was even worse (or better for him) because of a volcano that exploded on an island called Martinique in 1902, killing 30,000 people. This made people scared of volcanoes.

Congress finally voted to keep working on the Panama Canal for many reasons – such as how long it would take to cross the canal, how much land they needed, and yeah, even volcanoes. Since most of Washington D.C. had been rooting for the Nicaragua canal for 10 years, Buanu-Varilla and Cromwell's six months of work in 1902 to get Congress to change their minds was pretty impressive.

A stamp helped make history!

Sunday, January 14, 2024

Using QR Codes in Exhibits and in your own collection

A philatelic exhibition has three main viewers, whose aims are different, but you have to capture the attention of all three. These viewers are: the judges, the public and you.

When it is you, at least in my opinion, there is a lot of satisfaction in working for months, and then seeing your work displayed for all to see.

For the general public, they will pass through an exhibit and if it is an interesting subject for them, they will spend more time on it than on others. If the exhibit was awarded a very good medal, same thing, more time than on others. Many may use it to get ideas from for their own exhibits or collections or sometimes just to write an article about this. Actually some viewers may have more knowledge than you do on the subject and may find mistakes in your knowledge, or know of material that you are unaware of. I found that issue when viewing a particular exhibit at Capex22.

For the judge, poor guy, he has less than half an hour to check out your exhibit and decide what you get. Some judges are very knowledgeable, and have a wide range of knowledge. With the limited time that a judge has, he is not able to read every page and view every item. Of course the bigger the item, the more the eye will be drawn to it. It also matters where the page is on the frame. However if you have an 1870 Queen Victoria ½d Bantam stamp, where the size of the stamp is half the height of a Penny Red and that stamp is in the bottom row, then good luck to you.

So the idea is that you need to make your pages eye-catching and eye-pleasing, you need to make all viewers WANT to look at your pages and you need to direct them to special items. How do you do that? The jury is still out on that.

In my exhibit I have some stamps that I need to write a philatelic explanation of them and the philatelic explanation will be a lot bigger than the stamp itself. Exhibit regulations state that:
The presentation and the accompanying text of the exhibit should be simple, tasteful and well balanced. It should add information to that provided by the material and show the level of understanding of the subject and the personal research of the exhibitor.

Let me give an example of the dilemma. Suppose you want to use the Sachsenhausen Concentration camp parody of the Great Britain 1935 Jubilee issue. In this case, the forgers wrote “This war is a JEWSH WAR”. Here is an example of what I would like to write in the philatelic text:
Heinrich Himmler came up with the idea of counterfeiting British postage stamps in order to convey that the war was a Jewish conspiracy and an attempt by them at world domination. Forgeries of the Silver Jubilee issue of 1935 were prepared at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Changes included the insertion of Jewish and communist emblems, placement of Stalin's head, and an inscription "This war is a Jewsh war". The years were altered to 1939-1944
If I used regular A4 paper, it would take up the width of the page. Will this catch the eye of the reader, probably, but who would want to read all that text? In my own opinion it is a presentation problem and then again, partially a development problem because most of the width is taken up. Can the text be more concise, probably a bit? Where is the problem? Not everyone knows the story! Some judges and viewers may not know of this and think that is a nice story. The exhibitor has to get the information across because although this is modern material, it is not readily available, maybe more ready today than in the past, but this falls into the category of philatelic knowledge.

Another example is the set of stamps issued in 1946 by Austria for the "Never Forget" ("Niemals Vergessen") exhibition on the crimes of Nazism. 8 stamps were designed, prepared and printed for the exhibition; however most people don’t know that at the last minute, the Allies placed a veto on two of the stamps, including this stamp on the left, as they were considered to have upsetting or unsettling imagery. Most copies of this stamp were destroyed upon orders of the allies, but of course some had already been sent to dealers etc. The stamp shown here and another was vetoed and were replaced by other stamps and the set was issued. The stamp is not a big stamp, and once again the philatelic text will be long. Again the question is, how do you both tell the audience what they need to know and at the same time, brag, after all this is not common knowledge and nor are the stamps cheap.

The solution is to use a QR Code. Most people already know what a QR Code, we get them on our monthly bills, but for those who don’t a QR code, or quick response code, is a type of barcode that can contain information. It can point to a website, an image, an audio file, send email, be a business card etc. A QR Code can be read by your smartphone camera and immediately direct you to the information. How does that help out? Again I am giving my own solution. I have a blog and a YouTube channel called “Stories Behind the Stamp” and I try to tell the reader or the viewer, the story behind the stamp. This is especially fun when dealing with PostKrieg as many don’t know the stories. So what you can do is to write a blog post and have your QR Code point to that blog post or YouTube video.

Here are two QR codes, the first pointing to my video about the German parody stamp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AicEw-mpeco and the second the blog post about the withdrawn Austrian stamp: https://stampandstories.blogspot.com/2021/08/never-forget.html





I generate my codes from various websites on the web, including https://www.qr-code-generator.com/. Now that we have the codes, what do we do? By the way if you are using white pages, all good, but if your page is a different color, make sure that the image is transparent. Here are the two examples:
There are advantages to this method in that the viewer can take a scan of the QR Code from his phone and then it is saved in his phone’s browser. He can then read in his own free time. In addition the unexpected image next to the item, draws your attention to the item. I have used QR codes whenever the amount of text I want to write starts making the page look full of text, irrespective of the size of the item. The example I have provided are valid for your own collection as well and the use of QR codes in your collection is entirely up to you.

Note: I wrote this article almost two years ago and I was hoping it would be published in TC News but there hasn't been one!

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Tuesday, September 12, 2023

Going over to the dark side, the Jewish Stereotype

Yes, I went over to the dark side! I became a deltiologist! What a strange word, right? But it is simple, it is a person who collects postcards. Where did they come up with a name like that? Well it turns out that the word originated in 1945 from a collaboration between Professor Rendell Rhoades of Ohio and colleagues at Ohio State University, who am I to disagree.

On the other hand deltiology is the study and collection of postcards. The study is where I come in, because research is what I love. As some of you may know, about a year ago I started investigating the Jewish stereotype on picture postcards and I discovered a new world. My interest was sparked when my best friend asked me to write an article about what does a Jew look like, for a philatelic magazine, and basically there is little!

My research reminded me of times, such as when I was at school and a friend asked my father where he hid his horns, or a time when I went to London and saw a sign, "No Jews or dogs allowed", and this is not so long ago. I decided to research both the postcard and the publisher / artist, wherever possible. This information is very difficult to find and even when you do know the name, little information is available.

New website

I decided to upload all the information I had gathered and I am still gathering, into a new website: https://thejewishstereotypes.blogspot.com in which I try to connect the dots. Please help me out by sharing and commenting on the site itself and if anyone wants to help support me by being me a cup of coffee, then there is a link there.

Thursday, August 3, 2023

YouTube shorts

In case you haven't heard the news, in IBRA in May, I got my very first international Large Gold. This is something I have been working towards for decades, literally, so I am a happy chappy!


As far as my YouTube channel is concerned, I have started doing some shorts which range from less than a minute to two minutes. I am posting some of them here.

Feel free to support me by buying me a cup of coffee. The link is here.




Sunday, June 25, 2023

Throw away or keep?

We as stamp collectors deal with stamps, that is why we are known as stamp collectors. As children and many adults, when we get a letter, we tend to remove the stamp from the envelope and put the stamp in our albums and that's it. So what happens when we find a letter like this? As a stamp collector, this letter seemingly has no value. It's missing a stamp. But wait, is it really worthless or should we look into it further?

This letter was written to a woman by the name of Sarah Kalach. Sarah was born in 1928 in Safed and she belonged to a very, very, very old Safed family. They probably got to Safed after the Arab massacre of the Jews of Safed in 1834 which began on June 15th, yes 189 years ago.

As a child, Sarah joined the Etzel movement. Etzel stands for "Irgun Tzvai Leumi" (IZL) which translates to "The National Military Organization in the Land of Israel". As we all know, the British were in control of what was then called the British Mandate for Palestine and the the IZL organization was labeled a terrorist organization by them.
Guerrilla warfare are actions taken against basically military targets, while terrorism is practiced against civilian targets.
That means that Sarah basically belong to a terrorist organization as far as the British were concerned, so her days as a free person were numbered. Sarah was living in Haifa and she got word that the British authorities were looking for her. So she moved to Tel Aviv and after about the year she moved back to Haifa to take care of the branch since many of her colleagues had already been taken prisoner.

In June of 1946 the IZL took part in the King David hotel bombing. The British obviously saw that as a terrorist act, but the IZL group claimed that it was a legitimate target because that was the the British Army Headquarters. Now after this, the British started to crack down big time on the IZL members. As as I said before, Sarah was living in Haifa and somebody spilled the beans and informed the British CID, the Criminal Investigation Department. Heinz Reinhold snitched on her to the CID and he actually told them exactly where to find Sarah.
Sara Kalach, is on the left
On the 29th of October 1946, the British authorities raided the apartment and took her and her brother Shlomo into captivity. Shlomo was actually expelled to Africa, to a detention camp in Kenya. He remained there until after Israeli independence had been declared.

Sarah was sent to the Woman's Detention Camp in Bethlehem and this letter was sent while she was imprisoned there. She was released in March of 1948, along with other woman prisoners, not long before the British left Palestine. Don't worry about her. She got married in 1952 and now has children and grandchildren.

Back to the letter. It was written to Sarah in 1947 when she was in the detention camp, and it was written to her, by her father, Yakov, or they also called him Yankele. The British CID removed the stamp. Why? Because they suspected that messages were written on the back of the stamp. This practice had been in use by the British themselves during the Second World War, So they were aware of the system and they were making sure that messages sent to Sarah didn't bypass the censor of the censor.

And that's the story. Take a simple letter, which you know nothing about, that most people would throw away. I would have, if I didn't know history. This is a lovely case of social postal history.



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Monday, October 24, 2022

Undercover mail from Iran

Israel always had good relations with Iran during the regime of the Shah. Iran was one of the few Middle Eastern countries that had any relations with Israel. Mail passed freely between the two countries. When the Ayatollah Khomeini took power in 1979, mail from and to Israel was no longer handled. Mail to Iran was stopped in 1983. Mail from Iran addressed to Israel was returned to sender and received an instructional marking of "There is no postal relations between Iran and Israel". Israel was suddenly cut off from Iran. Note: The actual message was: "Thereis no postal relations between Iranand Israel".

Postcard sent from USA to Israel that was routed in error to Iran. 


In the 1980s, I had a huge interest in mail from Arab countries with no relations with Israel. Items such as the one above were the most difficult to find seeing as how these were pre-Internet days. However I saw an auction lot showing letters from Iran, addressed to Geneva, and it had Hebrew writing on it. This really piqued my interest and I purchased the lot. In those days I worked in a company where there was an Iranian ex-pat and I showed her the lot. She looked at it and said the postbox number looked familiar, so I decided to do some digging.

As I said, there were no postal relations between Iran and Israel, meaning that Jews in Iran couldn't send letters to relatives in Israel. The Israel Broadcasting Authority attempted to fill this void. The I.B.A. set up a post office box in Switzerland (P.O. Box 152, Geneva) which was meant to receive mail sent from Iran. Every day, the I.B.A. broadcast the news in Farsi to listeners in Israel and out of Israel. This transmission was broadcast as far away as Iran. The gist of the broadcast was that listeners could write to "Radio Israel in Farsi" at the given address.

Mail leaving Iran, generally to non-Moslem countries, was often censored by the Iranian authorities and as a result people sending to this drop box did not put a return address on the envelope. Very often people did not even put stamps on the envelope so that they would risk entering a post office. This mail was then taxed by the Swiss Postal Authorities.

Since this service was quite open, there was always the possibility of terrorists using it to send letter bombs. As a result, when suspect mail arrived in Israel's hands, it was screened for letter bombs and "Checked" hand stamps were applied. The security officer who checked the mail signed the hand stamp as proof of its authenticity.


In theory, this could be used by Jews in all countries having no postal relations with Israel, although there were very few as many had been expelled from their host countries.

It is impossible to know how many letters were sent via this method as the Jewish community in Iran is not large and no records are available but it helped Jews in Iran who had no other way of getting word to Israel.


  • "Undercover mail with Iran" ~ Lawrence Fisher, HLPH 57 -58



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