Whiskey Mail

Our story, this time, is particularly interesting, as are all of them in my own humble opinion, and I am telling it because of a previous story and you will soon understand why. Remember there was a war of survival in Israel in 1948? So the city of Safed, which is located somewhere in the north of the country, is not exactly a new city and the fortress in the city was actually built by the Crusaders. For religious Jews, it is one of the four most important cities in the Holy Land and people who study Kabbalah, the Jewish mysticism, like the singer Madonna or Esther for you, tend to visit it, both publicly and secretly, well it is hard to do anything secretly in the modern world i.e. Facebook.

When the UN announced their Partition Plan in 1947, everyone knew there would be a war for our survival in the country and we knew it because the Arab countries said so, several times. Too bad we did not know about Daniel Webster then. Actually the war or at least the skirmishes, started in early 1948 and there were many. It was the war of the roads.

And this brings us back to the events of Safed. In 1929, in one of the riots of Arab residents, about 20 Jewish residents were murdered and since in 1948, there were 6 times more Arabs than Jews in the city, and quite a few of the Jews were old men, the Jewish residents knew they were in trouble. So what could they do? Pack up and leave? No! Stay and everything will be fine, or not. Most of them stayed and it began, and hard. Already in early January, Arabs attacked the Jewish Quarter, and in February, they attacked a Jewish bus on its way to Safed and many other incidents.

In early February, Arab forces killed a Jew at the entrance to the post office in Safed, and the British immediately closed the post office on the grounds that it was too dangerous for them and everyone else. The British army controlled Safed but did not raise a hand to stop the attacks on Jews. This meant that there were no postal services for the residents, at least not for the Jewish residents. There was some contact with the neighboring city of Rosh Pina, that Palmach soldiers came by foot through Mount Canaan to fetch mail, after all there was no WhatsApp at the time and they still had to get messages. Of course the amount of mail was limited.

In March, Jewish traffic on the Rosh Pina road - Safed Road, was attacked and as a result the road to the east was closed. From the west the road passed through two hostile Arab villages and Jews could not travel on it. So the Jewish community was under siege, difficult to enter and difficult to leave. They were dependent on the good will of the British soldiers and anyone who knows history, then and today, knows that they were never very fond of us.

Suddenly on April 15 The British announce that they were leaving. They offered to evacuate Jewish elders and women and children with them, but no one wanted to, after this was their home for centuries. "We are staying put!" The British thought the Jews would last maybe two hours after they left.

Is this the end? of course not. Palmach forces arrived to replace the British but the amount of Jewish soldiers was far less than the Arab forces and of course they had much less weapons. The Arab forces approached the Jewish Quarter and the residents felt they were in trouble. The Jewish Quarter being under siege, lacked basic products such as flour and water and more. What do we do?

As we mentioned in one of the previous newsletters, no one wanted to sell us weapons, so either we bought, steal or make our own. One of our inventions was a mortar called the "Davidka" or "Little David", so named after its inventor, David Leibowitz. Her missiles were noisy, very noisy, and very inaccurate and therefore of little value. But what to do, there are no other weapons so started using Davidka and bombing the Arab quarter in the city. The terrible noise so frightened the Arabs that they just ran away. They abandoned the city, and Safed fell to us.

Mahmoud Abbas, who was born in Safed in 1935, says that they fled in 1948 because they thought the Jews would slaughter them. Probably ran away because of the Davidka.

Well I told you a bit of the history and you may be asking yourself or not, what has this going to do with philately apart from the Davidka stamp? So, I told you that from February there was been no post office in Safed, after the British closed it, and I told you that Palmach soldiers managed to deliver some letters. But in Safed there were merchants and banks, and there was one bank, Klinger Bank, which had a local branch. That branch was attacked in the Arab riots of 1929 and twenty years later chaos returned!

The postal service was important to conserving the day to day business of the bank. How can they continue to function and communicate with the outside world, even with Rosh Pina, without orderly postal services? But what could they do, there was none, the British stopped it lock, stock and barrel.

Mr. Klinger took advantage of his good relationship with some of the higher ranks of the British military who controlled Safed and got their permission for British soldiers, who travelled freely on the road between Rosh Pina and Safed, would bring mail bags in their trucks. Knowing that they were returning home in a few months, an order from above did not mean that they would carry it out. Why take unnecessary risks? Mr. Klinger found a nice way to motivate the soldiers. I hope my managers are reading the blog right now, he promised a bottle of whiskey to every soldier that completes his task, meaning delivers the mail bag. A bottle of whiskey per bag mail that they delivered and this time the purpose of the whiskey was for drinking and not for washing hands or disinfection. Message to my boss, Blue Label is appeals to me, hint, hint...

All letters that arrived in Safed during the British Mandate between March 1 and 16 April, are known as "Whiskey Covers".

The story is taken from the book of Postal History of the Transition Period of Israel, 1948 Part I.

 

I don't have one in my collection. The item depicted here was in an auction of Tel Aviv Stamps.