Let's face it. Do we really want to get on a flight where they drop the temperature so low that icicles form on your nose and you have to wear a mask throughout the flight while your legs are dangling in the aisle because there is no leg room? Well, of course we do. It is the quickest way to get somewhere, although the most uncomfortable.

Since 9/11 or it should be 11/9, the security checks are long and since corona, the corona check is even longer. But since the early seventies, Israel-bound flights were always under the highest security. There was always the risk of a terrorist attack or a hijacking.

However not every airline took the same precautions. November 21 1974 British Airways flight BA870 flew from London to Brunei via Beirut, Dubai, Calcutta and Singapore. The flight had about 48 people on board, crew and passengers. At Dubai, four Palestinian terrorists, members of the Abu Nidal Organization, disguised as airport workers, approached the aircraft firing weapons, shooting an Indian stewardess who was standing on the plane's steps. The terrorists forced their way on to the aircraft and threatened to destroy the aircraft and kill the passengers, demanded that the aircraft should be refueled. With the agreement of the Dubai authorities and of British Airways, the aircraft was refueled and permitted to take off from Dubai. They wanted to return to Beirut, Lebanon but were refused entry with the excuse that the airport was closed.

The aircraft flew directly to Tripoli, Libya, where it landed and was refueled and took off bound for Tunis, arriving there on 22 November 1974. No one knew what they were demanding. In Tunis the hijackers finally made their demands:

• The release of Palestinian terrorists held in Cairo, Egypt.
• The release of two jailed Palestinian terrorists in Holland.
• An admission by Britain that the establishment of Israel was a crime.

The Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) after it split from the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1974, over a dispute regarding the establishment of diplomatic ties with Israel. The ANO wanted Israel destroyed! Abu Nidal is the alias name of Sabri al-Banna. His nom de plume actually means "father of the struggle" in Arabic.

Egypt and Holland did not immediately negotiate and the hijackers stuck to their demand for the release of 7 Palestinians held in Cairo and Holland. They set a deadline of 24 hours and promised to execute a hostage every two hours past that time. When no progress was visible after 24 hours they murdered a German Banker and dropped his body to the ground from the aft passenger door. Negotiations resulted in the Cairo-held Hostages being brought to the plane in exchange for 7 Hostages. The terrorists held in Egypt where actually only under house arrest in Cairo for the firebombing of a Pan American 707 jetliner at Rome Airport the previous year in which 32 people were killed.

The terrorists held in Holland were serving five‐year prison sentences for another hijacking, almost a slap on the wrist. When the two terrorists from Holland arrived, the remaining hostages were released, leaving only a three member crew.

The hijackers were informed over the radio that all Arab governments as well as the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) had condemned their action and they became desperate,. They then requested political asylum in Tunisia which was rejected. They were ordered to surrender. The hijackers refused and set two deadlines for their demand for asylum to be met otherwise they would blow up the aircraft and their hostages. Time passed and deadlines went but the crew was still held inside with various explosives set around the cockpit.

After an ordeal totaling 84 hours a hijacker came to the cockpit and informed them that they had decided to surrender. It was over!

On board was a huge amount of mail, about 2.5 tons, most originating from the the UK between the 16th and 20th November 1974, and was destined for the Far East and Australasia. The mail was undamaged and returned to the UK onboard. Strangely only mail destined for Western Australia, received a two line instructional message: "Delayed en route -Aircraft Hi-Jack". This was probably added in Perth.

Less than 50 covers are known with this message and to date it is the only known message for a hijacking.



For more information see:

December 25th, Christmas Day, a time for rejoicing for the entire Christian / Catholic world (some celebrate a week or so later, like in Georigia). Despite being Jewish and not celebrating Christmas, it is nice to see the spirit of Christmas and the many pretty stamps that are issued all over the world.

Ireland innocently brought out a set of stamps, or adhesive labels for Christmas 2021. The set includes four stamps for local postage with the words "Peace and Joy", "Naughty or Nice?", "Ho Ho Ho" and "Sending Hugs" and two stamps for international postage for "Nollaig Shona" (which means Merry Christmas in Gaelic Irish) "Love". It was the local stamps that invoked the ire of the public. Who would have thought that these stamps would have invoked such feelings?

The outrage began with a call to a popular program named Liveline where someone emailed them to pent his frustration at the choice, saying that the stamps used for Irish addresses were secular and didn’t include scenes from Jesus’ birth, such as the Nativity scene or anything that wasn't to his liking.

He made a claim that instead of the Nativity scene, local stamps had phrases such as ‘naughty or nice’, and ‘ho ho ho’. This was actually a part of the problem.

As stated in the title, there is just news today.

You remember I asked you to vote for me last week? The PTS (Philatelic Traders Society) awards ceremony to announce winners of the People's Choice is today. If I win, it is thanks to you, if I don't, well at least we tried. Thank you very much for your votes, much appreciated.

On the 20th November an exhibition was held in New Zealand for Philatelic Literature and I entered this Website. I received a Large Silver award. I think that is quite good for a new site. I need to find out how to improve though.

I have been nominated for a PTS Award. This year they are giving the general public the chance to cast their vote. 

Who has heard of Rhodesia? Raise your hand. You have? You are showing your age. Today people know it as Zimbabwe.

We will use Rhodesia from here on because philatelically that is where the fun is. Now we all know that the Digital Philatelist and his award winning site was once head of the Rhodesian Study Circle so why the great interest? The truth is that first and foremost there are not many issues and second of all the name changes make it an exciting period of history to learn and enjoy.

Through no fault of his own, Cecil John Rhodes was born with a weakness of the lungs and so was kept at home and also stopped him from going to university. His father sent him to South Africa to join his brother, out of sight, out of mind perhaps? Anyway Cecil got involved in the diamond industry there and with some friends created a mining company which turned out to be very successful.

He believed in the British Empire and had dreams of building a railroad from Cape Town to Cairo. I dream of going to Australia but I am not doing anything about that. However others also had designs on the middle of Africa - the Germans, Belgians, and Portuguese. But to start with, he had to go through the area now known as Zimbabwe. Somehow he got King Lobengula, the head of the local tribe,  the Matabeles, of the southern part of Rhodesia,  to sign a treaty with him giving him full rights and he convinced the British government, to grant a charter to a new company, the British South Africa Company (BSAC), to develop the new territory. Poor King Lobengula did not really know what he was signing away.

Now what do they need? Mail! The first post was established by the British South Africa Company (BSA) consisting of a route from Bulawayo to Mafeking. Initially British South Africa Company stamps were not recognized for international mail but this was changed a year after the first stamps arrived. Over the next few years the area the BSA had control of increased and included land north of the Zambezi River, an area known today as Zambia.

Around 1923 Rhodesia was divided into two and the Zambezi River was the separation point, Southern Rhodesia and Northern Rhodesia.

In 1953 The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was created which included Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. This ended in 1963 when Northern Rhodesia gained independence from the United Kingdom becoming Zambia and Nyasaland became Malawi. At this time, Britain, France and Belgium were speeding up their withdrawal from Africa believing that colonial rule was no longer sustainable in Africa. Southern Rhodesia was left out of this and was still controlled by the British.

Southern Rhodesia wanted independence from Britain but all Britain had to offer was a deal on par with Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The British refused to offer independence and the Rhodesian were a tad angry. World opinion was not exactly with Britain but they were in a quagmire because if they offered independence, then this would have a domino effect throughout the commonwealth.

In 1964 Ian Smith became prime minister and here is when it gets juicy. In June 1964, Britain informedSmith that Southern Rhodesia would not be represented at the year's Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference. How insulting can you get? Southern Rhodesia held a referendum and there was a majority of support for a declaration of independence from Britain.

Cutting out a lot of politics, Rhodesia declared independence in 11th November 1965 which was actually Armistice Day. This became known as the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). This was condemned by
the UN as well as the Security Council and sanctions were imposed. Southern Rhodesia subsequently renamed itself Rhodesia.

So what about the stamps? After all this is a blog about stamps! As part of the sanctions, Rhodesian postage stamps were considered "illegal" and therefor "invalid" and that mail carrying the invalid stamps was treated as if they were posted without stamps.

Mail arriving in England and some other commonwealth countries were subjected to additional payment. They received a cancel of "Stamps not valid" and the amount to pay. This means that the letter was paid for twice, once by the sender and once by the person who received the letter. 

I haven't written a blog for a few weeks. Sounds like an apology but it isn't, it is a statement of fact. I am trying to broaden the amount of people who view my channels, not for me, but for all of us. There are many videos out there about stamps and you get the feeling that they are technical, oh this stamp is expensive or this stamp was issued on and is part of a set, blah blah. I don't want to do that. I explain that in my message to people who have not subscribed. Check it out here:



I had a lot of good feedback from my last video as it is a subject that people did not know about. I also believe that there are many judges who look at a modern cover and give it a snarl, kind of like saying that it is not worth anything. That may be true, but there is a story behind it and the story is worth telling.

Today I am adding a new video about the Victory. Yes, I did a blog post about it, view it here, however I found new information and wanted to tell you about it.



Please watch to the end, subscribe, comment and like, we need to get more people involved, it is important to all of us.

 OK, you are right. I haven't written a blog for a few weeks. There is a reason for that. I believe that the way to get others involved in my work of love is by short videos.

So here is one about a Postal War. I hope you enjoy it. Please watch to the end so that YouTube will acknowledge it as well

Second episode. I hope you like it. 

We learned from a previous post Jerusalem is under siege that from December 1947, Jewish Jerusalemwas under a de-facto siege. At this time there were about 100,000 Jews and about 65,000 Arabs living in Jerusalem, but the vast majority of those Arabs lived in the old city. (Jerusalem is the small red blob on the middle right edge of the stamp).

Transportation to the city from the Jewish area was limited to the only road in existence, and that road was under constant attack. Supplies were in short supply.

The British had enough problems. They had had enough. It was just three short years after the end of World War II; India had their independence and they were already out of there and the Palestine mandate was drawing to an end, so why would they want to get involved and help Jews; despite their requirement under the mandate.

The British had announced that they were closing down their postal services in Jerusalem as of May 5th. However on April 20th, Arabs ambushed a huge 350-strong vehicle convoy on its way to Jerusalem. Many soldiers and passengers were killed. What was the British answer? To close the postal services! As of April 25th there were no more postal services to and from Jerusalem.

Now from other posts in this blog we know that the Jewish community created their own postal system. Read here. This was supposed to take effect as of May 2nd. Houston we have a problem, there is no way to get the stamps to Jerusalem, the roads are closed!

There was heavy fighting between Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem and it wasn't exactly safe to get to a post office anyway. May 8th the Jewish forces seemed to overcome the Arab forces in the Jerusalem area and a semblance of peace evolved. So what do we do now? Let's call our family and let them know. Problem is that this is 1948 and there were very few phone lines and the only method was writing.

Now there is a new problem, they had no stamps as supplies were not coming through. There were also no JNF stamps on hand to use and overprint. So what were they to do?

You know the Partition Plan JNF labels? Well the printer of those stamps, Haoman Press, still had the printing plates. Problem solved, let us add the word Postage and the face value of the stamp. OK then, they decided to issue three values, a 5mil for the printed letter rate, a 10mil for the regular rate and 25 mil for registered.

So Haoman Press printed the stamps and to speed up the process, they had Lipshitz Press add the overprint. This went on sale on May 9th. Amazing, from idea to store within 24 hours! Looks like they really wanted to send mail.

There were long queues of people who wanted to buy these stamps, many of them as souvenirs, and supplies ran out within a few hours. But as it turns out, Haomnan was still printing sheets, but this time they were adding the overprints themselves, in the same process. However they added the overprints in a different way. In the first issue, the word Postage was added at the top and in this issue, they were added at the bottom. This issue was put on sale on May 10th. Collectors know these as First Issue and Second Issue, I wonder why.

May 14th Israeli statehood was declared and on May 16th the Doar Ivri stamps went on sale, except in Jerusalem. A war? A siege? Both.

Pressure was on to open the main post office in Jerusalem and because they were running out of the 5mil stamp, they ordered a reprint. The post office was opened on May 21st and the new overprints were delivered on May 24th. Problem was that the 5 of the 5mils was slightly different. So what name do we give this issue? Third Issue, right? Actually the also became known as Jerusalem Locals I, II and III to differentiate them from the Palestine Mandate overprints.

The history of Jerusalem is always exciting, but the study of stamps in the framework of the struggle makes it more enjoyable.

This is my first attempt. I hope you like it.

 

Today I have another surprise for you. Another very good friend has volunteered to write something for us. So thank you Jean Wang for joining us.

For collectors of medical philately, the pandemic has provided lots of fodder, with so far over 100 official stamp issues, slogan machine cancels and meter marks, pictorial postmarks and postal stationery, among others. The stamp issues have covered a wide variety of pandemic-related themes, including thanking essential workers, promoting public health measures, spreading messages of solidarity and support, and more recently promoting vaccination. Among these, two issues from Austria stand out: a semi-postal souvenir sheet issued in October 2020 and a stamp issued in September 2021.

Both of these COVID-19 issues are made of unusual material, something for which Austria Post has developed a reputation. They have previously issued stamps made of porcelain, leather, glass, fabric, plastic, wood, and an aluminum plastic composite (ski tip), as well as stamps with crystals, seeds, pearls, or rock dust affixed.

Austria toilet paper souvenir sheet

Their first COVID-19 stamp issue, a souvenir sheet titled “Distance that brings us together”, promotes social distancing and depicts a baby elephant (printed in silver foil) as a way to help people judge a distance of 1 meter. To provide perspective, the sheet also illustrates a small insect (1 mm), a fly (1 cm), and a mouse (1 dm - a decimeter is 10cm) (note – objects are not to scale!). Why a baby elephant, you ask? During the first wave of the pandemic, Austria encouraged (and later legally required) people to stay ‘a baby elephant apart’. This symbol of social responsibility was quite popular – in fact, ‘baby elephant’ (or ‘Babyelefant’ as it is commonly written in German) was named Austria’s word of the year for 2020.

What makes the souvenir sheet truly unique, however – and a mandatory item for collectors of unusual stamps – is the material on which it is printed. Austria Post has a somewhat irreverent sense of humor (see, for example, their Brexit stamp on the left, which poked fun at the delayed withdrawal of the UK from the European Union). As a nod to the panic buying of toilet paper that occurred at the beginning of the pandemic by people worried about the impact of lockdowns on their personal hygiene, this souvenir sheet is printed on actual 3-ply toilet paper. The postal agency teamed up with a toilet paper manufacturer to plan and test the production process over many months. To overcome the obvious problems of the material’s fragility and its assured destruction upon getting wet, a self-adhesive film was laminated onto the back; just peel and stick, no licking necessary. 

Some religious people say to you, "May the Lord be with you" or "Go with God", which is pretty nice but if you are a Star Wars fan, you probably say "May the Schwartz be with you". But this is a blog about philately and so we will leave the Force and the Schwartz alone.

Some of us who collect prephilately, whether it is our main topic or just because it fills our thematic collection, have often noticed some letters or abbreviations on mail, often on maritime mail. It is bad enough trying to decipher the address itself but then you get letters that you scratch your head wondering what they are.

Today we look at a letter and quite often we don't give a thought to how the letter arrived, if we are luck enough for it to arrive. Very often our main mode of communication is WhatsApp or something similar or even an email, although sometimes our mail goes into a spam folder.

But this was not always the case. Are any of you marathon runners? Have you ever given any thought to its origin, and no it is not because of the Olympics; that only started in 1896 at the first Olympics. Well way back before then, there were no computers or smartphones and very often no writing paper or people who could read or write, so what happens if you need to bring news to Athens of an important victory over an invading army of Persians? Well the legend says that in 490BC, an ancient Greek messenger raced from the site of Marathon to Athens, a distance of about 40 kilometers and hence the marathon was born. Personally I don't even feel like driving 40km but I am not a Greek messenger. Apparently after giving the message, the poor exhausted messenger simply collapsed and died.

Legend or not, it shows how important a message is and hence our story of the day. We will fast forward almost 2000 years to the Republic of Venice. The Republic of Venice realized early on that they also need to transfer messages to other cities, in Italy and elsewhere and they allowed for a courier service. Venetians were merchants and traded all over Europe. News regarding prices, goods, merchants and others was very important to get the best deals. The earlier the news arrived, the better the result. This is actually not much different from day, but the Venetian Courier service filled a void!

The service started off as a private service but in the 14th Century, the Great Council decreed that all couriers operating in Venice were subject to the control of their supervisors and also on rates. So the service became an official postal service. I actually have not found any information on the rates but if someone knows, I would be happy to update this post.

So now you employ the service to take a message from Venice to somewhere else, say Verona and you want it to get there quickly, so you pay extra and a notation of "cito" or "haste" is added to your letter. A horse was almost always used in mail but if the mail has the notation of cito, it means the horse must run. I have no idea how long it took the Greek messenger to run 40 km before he died, but Venice to Verona is about 120km, meaning treble the amount and a trot or a run can take ages. So you can pay extra by adding "cito cito cito" would mean fast, fast, fast, in essence no resting and top speed. There is little documentation about this service only in the age of customer service did people realize that you need to document a service so that people can ignore it.


Now we have couriers carrying important messages throughout Europe and who are the messages of interest to? Your rivals, meaning other merchants. So you need some security, some insurance, right? A hangman's gallows was added to the letter threatening death by hanging to anyone interfering with the mission. I have seen two gallows on a letter, not sure what that would mean, you can't exactly kill someone twice, can you?


For more information see:

Today I have a surprise for you. A very good friend has volunteered to write something for us. So thank you Yoram Lubianiker for joining us.

On November 29th 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution (#181) for the termination of the British mandate. Palestine was to be divided into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem as a Special International Regime. The resolution was accepted by the Jewish side with great enthusiasm.

One of the manifestations of this reaction was a label issued by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), entitled “The Jewish State” which shows the map of the partition plan. The Jerusalem area is marked in red, and is completely surrounded by Arab territory. 

Throughout history Jews have always been the scapegoats for everything. Hitler found it easy to gain support by blaming the Jews. The anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer often wrote, "The Jews Are Our Misfortune." So why not blame the Jews for Hitler's mistakes and failures during WW2?

Remember the cute story of Operation Cornflakes? If not, you can get a reminder here. However this was not the first Allied propaganda attempt. In 1943, parodies of the 6-pfennig Hitler stamps appeared instead a portrait of Heinrich Himmler. Who was Himmler, you ask? In brief he was a leading member of the Nazi Party of Germany a main architect of the Holocaust. I could go on and on about him but maybe another time.

The Gestapo collected the parodies and forwarded them to Himmler. When he saw the stamp, he was personally insulted and wanted to his own back. How to get back at those insolent Brits? Hmmm, good question. Better question, how to also blame the Jews?

So Himmler meets with Hitler who was complaining that their overseas propaganda was a dismal failure. Himmler apparently replied that he remembered a report entitled showing that there were over ten million stamp collectors throughout the world! But here was an opportunity, fight fire with fire or fight parodies with parodies.

The German Propaganda Ministry jumped on the chance to lower British morale. They wanted to sell to the British that they would gain nothing by the war. They selected the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp near Berlin for the project and elected S.S. Major Bernhard Kruger to head the team. Kruger was already running Operation Bernhard out of the camp where a Jewish counterfeiter, Salomon Smolianoff, was already producing counterfeit pounds which were difficult to detect. The aim was to put billions of pounds on the British markets to weaken the UK economy and create inflation.

Kruger already had a team of Jewish prisoners of the concentration camp working on Operation Bernard and set them to work on the new project. They were selected because they had skills in composing, engraving and printing. They were separated from other inmates and were given special privileges. Clean uniforms, decent food, anything to keep morale high otherwise how would they produce good counterfeits? I suppose threats would also have worked.

Their guidelines were that genuine British postage stamps must be used and and the basic design and color must be retained. Jewish and Communist symbols must be also be incorporated into the design. The intent was to imply that Britain was under the influence of both Judaism and the Soviet Union. This was not the first time that the Nazis tries to connect Judaism with Communism.

The first project, my own favorite, was the parody of the 1/2d. Silver Jubilee issue of 1935 where they replaced the profile of King George V with that of Joseph Stalin. Two Star of Davids were added in the top corners. Instead of Silver Jubilee, it read: “This is a Jewsh War” (a missing I). Was this sabotage by the Sachsenhausen inmates? I doubt it as they would have been killed. Bear in mind that the S.S. had quality control over the propaganda parodies and somehow this slipped through. This parody was an attempt to blame the Jews for the war. 

We recently spoke about the Israeli interim period in which the British had not yet left, but were still playing games with us and one of those games was interefering with the transfer of mail. I wrote two posts about this, one "When a label is not a label" and the other "Whiskey Mail". Here comes another in this fascinating period in our postal history.

The story is about a city called Rishon Lezion. I would not want to live there but I am in the minority because it is among the largest cities in the Israel currently one about a quarter of a million inhabitants. I know that is small by most countries standards but we are a small country, about the size of New Jersey in the USA. For us Rishon as it is known, is so large that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish its border and the neighboring town known as Holon.

But Rishon Lezion was not always so big. In 1882 about 10 pioneers together purchased about four acres of land to establish the city. The city grew, of course, and other cities were established around it, such as Tel Aviv, Holon, and a city called Nahalat Yehuda, north of Rishon, which today is part of Rishon Lezion itself. However in 1948, Rishon Lezion had about 12,000 inhabitants, 5% of its size today. In those days between Rishon Lezion and Tel Aviv there were orange groves, sand dunes and two hostile Arab villages, Beit Dajan and Yazor.

Remember the post about Safed and the problems it experienced in 1948? The Whiskey mail post? Not only Safed suffered, there were battles all over the country and of course the British, like today, did nothing to protect the Jewish inhabitants. The Arabs from the villages around Rishon Lezion began attacking Jewish vehicles traveling between Rishon and Tel Aviv. Shots, stones and ambushes were daily occurrences and as you can imagine it was exactly a pleasant time.

Some citizens took an initiative and made home-made armored vehicles. Basically they took a bus and added steel to it, and the buses accompanied the cars that were on the road. Until in one ambush seven people were killed near Yazur and all traffic to Tel Aviv was stopped

Like today, Tel Aviv at that time was the center of business (not our capital), trade, post office, supplies, etc. and people had to get there and back. They had to find a way to get there and they did. They found a way that passed through fields, dirt roads to Holon and from there to Tel Aviv. Instead of 20 minutes to get to Tel Aviv, it just took about two hours. Something I learned from spy movies, is that a route must be changed so that no one could study and ambush them. So the drivers did that, especially taxi drivers, every day they found a different way between the fields, the main thing that the belligerent Arab units would not learn the route.

Contact with Tel Aviv was also problematic. There were no phones to speak of and the official mail services of the Mandate were not regular, only once or twice a week, and people need to be in contact.

Here's a thought. If there are cars making trips back and forth, why can they not take and fetch mail? So the local council convened and decided to set up its own postal services. Of course it was not legal because there was supposedly still the Mandatory Postal Service, so as always happens, they decided to set up a committee to deal with the issue and make sure that the committee had no connection to the local council, wink wink.

The committee convened and decided on the design of a stamp for the service, a stamp showing the armored vehicle that was in service from Rishon LeZion to Tel Aviv. Since this was a local postal service of Rishon LeZion, the service started in only one direction, from Rishon. 

What is amazing here, is that from the moment of approval, stamp design, stamp printing until the moment the first letters came out, only eight days passed. All this in an emergency when surrounded by hostile villages. Which committee would have been successful today where most committees decide not to decide, especially if it is the UN.

The service operated similarly to a courier service. Someone who needed to post a letter would buy stamps at high prices (someone had to finance the service) and bring the stamped letter to a specific restaurant in Rishon Lezion. A courier would collect the letters at eight in the morning and travel to Tel Aviv with an armored taxi. In Tel Aviv, he would take the stamped letters to recipients and return home.

As soon as people saw that the service was successful, neighboring Nahalat Yehuda also joined the service. Of course Tel Aviv merchants also joined in and the same courier would collect the mail from an agreed collection point in Tel Aviv and would return with the mail.

The service operated for about a month and was stopped on May 6th when the postal services of the People's Administration went into operation.

Of course collectors and stamp dealers liked the service and saw potential and they also sent letters as curiosities, but that is life.

I was preparing a page for my exhibit and trying to think of what to use and I cam across the stamp on the right. The stamp shows the coat of arms of a Czech town called Česká Třebová situated on the border of Bohemia and Moravia.

According to the information sent to me by their webmaster, the name of the town is based on the old Czech word triebiti meaning chop down because at that time the entire area was covered with forests which needed to be cleared before settling there. The town received the addition of Česká so as to distinguish itself from other areas named Třebová.

Enough of that, let us look at the coat of arms. During history Česká Třebová was a town of potters, weavers and peasants. A simple clerk took care of the town's official seal. Not sure why but he pledged his life for its safety and guarded it very carefully. Unfortunately for him and despite his best efforts, the seal disappeared. Both he and his wife searched everywhere for it, his life was at stake. But it was no where to be found.

The poor guy was arrested and put in jail. He was able to watch in despair  as the carpenters build the gallows where he would be hanged. They took this very seriously. His faithful wife continued the search but with little hope. She looked out the window and saw a rooster standing in the yard, clutching something under its claws. Running out she found that the bird had the seal in his claws and she managed to rescue her husband at the very last moment. To commemorate this event they changed the coat of arms to be a rooster with a human head.

Now we get to the human head which is what caught my eye in the first place. Throughout medieval Europe, there were many anti Jewish laws in place. Jews seemed to be the scapegoats for anything including the Black Death. Anything bad happened, blame the Jews. Today it is blame Israel, same thing but off topic.

So now the question was, how to identify who is Jewish so that people can decide whether they want to do business with them or not. The Nazis used a yellow badge in the form of a star of David. In ancient times it was a piece of clothing. In German-speaking Europe, as early as mid 13th century, there was a requirement for Jews to wear a Judenhut which was a cone-shaped hat, such as the one in the Česká Třebová coat of arms! On the left you can see similar hats. Check this for more information on the Jewish star.

The coat of arms of Judenburg in Austria also has the head of a Jew wearing the funny hat. Now the question is why were the Jews of this small town in the Czech area subjected to wear this hat. According to their museum this was not intended as a symbol of anti-Semitism. Jews were among the most educated sections of their society as they were one of the very few who could read and write. This was custom dress for a Jew. They claim that it was a sign of respect.