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?


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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.