Introduction: My journey into stamp collecting

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 Salvador as part of a four-week trip in Central America. Normally when I travel I try to visit the central bank of the country I'm in and pick up a commemorative coin as a souvenir of the visit, but El Salvador uses the U.S. dollar as its currency and consequently can't mint legal-tender commemoratives. In lieu of a visit to the central bank, I stopped into San Salvador's main post office, leaving an hour later with a 2018 stamp dedicated to Holocaust hero Arturo Castellanos and a 2007 minisheet of El Salvador's first ten presidents.

After San Salvador, the next big city I visited on the trip was San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Honduras has its own currency and there was a branch of the central bank in San Pedro Sula, but for various reasons I couldn't get to the bank and again had to settle for stamps from the main post office. Disappointingly, however, the Honduran stamps, of which I bought seven, had none of the visual appeal El Salvador's had: the prettiest in the bunch was a crude drawing of two girls playing hopscotch.

Which brings me to the purpose of this blog. For all the talk about stamp collecting's declining popularity, the Israeli postal authority still issued thirty-six unique stamps in 2018 and is on pace for a similar number in 2019. Many of these issues, like the Sehrane Festival stamp, are striking in their visual detail and emotionally evocative, but many others are head-scratchingly dull or cliche. In as much as keeping up will be possible, and with Israeli stamps being the primary focus, my goal through this blog is to evaluate the esthetic and emotional appeal of new stamp issues using a five point grading scale, as defined below:

Score	Meaning
1	Strong pass
2	Mild pass
3	Neutral
4	Mild buy
5	Strong buy

In addition to reviewing stamps, I'll endeavor to visit sites related to stamps, report on events, and comment generally on the current state of philately in Israel.