Israel Stamp Reviews

33rd Conference of Israeli Philatelists | כנס יום הבולאות The 33rd Conference of Israeli Philatelists was held on 25 December 2019 at the Sheraton Hotel in Tel Aviv. Organized by the Israel Philatelic Federation , the event featured seven speakers and numerous award ceremonies and included a raffle and an auction. Each event attendee was given a limited-edition souvenir leaf with a uniquely CTOed 2019 Weizmann Institute stamp prepared exclusively for the event. A light breakfast buffet was laid out as guests made their way to the conference area, mingled and rushed to save seats in the conference hall. Eli Weber | אלי ובר First to address the audience was Eli Weber, president of the Israel Philatelic Federation. The theme of his talk was the future -- the future of philatelic exhibitions, of philatelic research, of authentication methods, of device technologies, and of commerce. As a potential model for the future, Weber cited an exhibition two years ago in Finland at wh...

The digital revolution of the 1990s introduced an array of challenges to stamp collecting that the hobby is still grappling with today. In particular, email's displacement of snail mail is universally regarded as the original sin from which all subsequent evils flowed. As snail mail, once the primary gateway into the hobby of stamp collecting, slipped further and further into obsolescence in inverse correlation to email's rise, a generation was born into a reality where the very notion of what a stamp is was already fading into obscurity. In the larger context of collecting generally, snail mail's decline was but one early symptom of the shift undergone in our emotional attachment patterns from physical property to digital property. Whereas prior to the digital revolution memories were preserved in physical form and it was fundamentally the physical form that was valued, the new paradigm sees less and less value in the accumulation of physical mementos when their digit...

After Hebrew, English and Russian, the most popular language in my stamp collection is Armenian. There are a number of reasons for Armenian's popularity, but the main one has to do with my place of employment for the past eight years. This place has engendered an appreciation not only of the local Armenian families with whom I interact almost daily but of their homeland, their history, their culture -- and most recently, their stamps. If last month the oldest stamp in my collection was the 1927 "Zamenhof" from the U.S.S.R., this month that distinction has passed to four stamps dating back to 1922 from the Armenian S.S.R. The stamps are part of a series identified by Stefan Berger as the " Erivan pictorials " and, having been printed with postal intent but never surcharged for actual use as postage, correspond to the second of the series' three 1922 subsets. Where I acquired the stamps was at a weekly meeting of the Jerusalem Stamp Club. It was my secon...

The Sigd Festival | חג הסיגד The Sigd Festival stamp, issued November 26th, 2019, is the third and final installment of Israel Post 's Ethnic Festivals in Israel series. The series began in May with a Moroccan Mimouna stamp, continued in September with a Kurdish Sehrane stamp , and concluded last week with a stamp dedicated to the Ethiopian Sigd. All three stamps were designed by Mario Sermoneta and Meir Eshel, who in 2014 collaborated on a series called Pioneering Women and whose stylistic imprints are readily discernible in their work. Among the Ethnic Festivals trio, "Sigd" was assigned the highest face value at ₪7.40. "Sigd" depicts five kesim , or priests, in traditional robes and qob hats standing shoulder to shoulder as a view of Jerusalem's Old City with its Temple Mount and Dome of the Rock forms the background rising behind them. Three of the kesim are holding microphones, and the rightmost among them, who is slightly foregrounded relat...