Israel Stamp Reviews

Apples in Honey (Festivals 5780) | פרחי דבש The last thing a new stamp wants to be is forgettable. When it comes off the press and makes its way to post offices around the country, the new stamp wants to stand out and be meaningful. It wants to be in demand, to trend on social media, to have a shelf life that extends beyond the arrival of the next new stamp. What is the formula for achieving this dual goal of popularity and longevity? How can a stamp both capture the public's attention and then retain that attention once it has it? "Apples in Honey," a three-stamp set issued as a souvenir minisheet by Israel Post on September 18th, 2019, struck me early on as a forgettable issue. Designed by Baruch Naeh and Sharon Israel , the set depicts three honey flowers common in Israel -- sage, citrus and eucalyptus -- with each flower enclosed in an apple-shaped outline and surrounded by the colors purple, light blue and peach, respectively. The words " THAT WILL BE R...

The Sehrane Festival | חג הסהרנה The Kurdish-Jewish Sehrane Festival, more commonly known as the Saharana , was the subject of a stamp issued by Israel Post on September 18th, 2019. Designed by Mario Sermoneta and Meir Eshel, it was the second in an Ethnic Festivals in Israel series after a Mimouna Festival stamp issued on May 1st. The Sehrane stamp depicts two men standing in the foreground, each playing a traditional Kurdish musical instrument and dressed in festive clothing, while behind them seven dancers in a field are swinging their legs to the pair's music. Blue, gold and green are the prominent colors of the stamp, and the attached tab features a Kurdish Torah scroll case. In the pamphlet issued as an accompaniment to the stamp, this is the explanation given in English for the Sehrane festival's origin: The Sehrane Festival stems from the Jewish community in Kurdistan, where it was celebrated annually in the springtime, on the day after the last day of Passover....

It's still early to call myself a stamp collector; but if ever that does happen, the catalyst for it will hark back to September 18th, 2019. That was the day I made my first visit to the main branch of the post office in Jerusalem and purchased a 3×5 sheet and first-day cover of the Sehrane Festival stamp (shown below). That post office visit prompted a two-week binge of stamp collecting videos on YouTube, which in turn prompted me to go out and buy a used stamp album and a handful of running- and language-themed stamps from a local dealer. Prior to September 18th, I'd had virtually zero interest in stamps. I was gifted a first-day cover of a Yitzhak Rabin stamp after the prime minister's assassination in 1995, and in 2014 I purchased a special Rabbi Ovadia Yosef album that the postal service issued on the occasion of the rabbi's passing, but those stamps constituted the full extent of my collection -- until the summer of 2019. In July of that summer I was in El Sal...