Check-in: 33rd Conference of Israeli Philatelists (2019-12-25)

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 which iPads were distributed to judges and the internet played a central role. If fully online exhibitions are the direction we are heading in, Weber reflected, there will be no need to rent entire facilities as exhibiting and judging will be done online; but, he cautioned, the human connection in such a future will be lost. As a more traditional model of successful exhibitions, Weber cited WSC Israel 2018 in Jerusalem, which drew a vast international audience and earned high praise all around. Reminiscing on his experience visiting the Ion Chirescu museum in Bucharest, Romania, Weber ended with a prediction that philatelic exhibitions of the future will increasingly shift their focus from classical philatelic material to items currently at philately's periphery.

Ronen Goldberg (left) | רונן גולדברג

The 2019 Weizmann Institute stamp was designed by Ronen Goldberg, and he was called to the stage to receive an award and to autograph a poster-size reproduction of his stamp.

Miri Nistor (left) | מירי ניסטור

Next, Miri Nistor, who designed the 2018 three-stamp "Trees of Israel" set, was invited up to receive an award for her stamp design.

Yivsam Azgad | יבשם עזגד

Author Yivsam Azgad began his talk with a promise to explain the origin of his unusual name. After briefly introducing himself as the great-grandson of Rabbi Abraham Halevi Sochen of Lithuania, he revealed that "Yivsam" appears once in the Book of Chronicles and that he is the only known "Yivsam" in all of Israel's census records. He then showed a picture of a group of rabbis gathered around a table engaged in the analysis of a text and juxtaposed it with two other photos: swarthy young Israelis picking oranges in a field and the Weizmann Institute's ion accelerator. His argument was that in order to understand Israel's legacy of scientific distinction a-la the ion accelerator, it is vital to appreciate the roots of Jewish erudition and argumentation represented by the picture of the rabbis and the Zionist ethos of hard work illustrated by the orange pickers.

Elhanan Shapira | אלחנן שפירא

The suspense in the audience as Elhanan Shapira made his way to the podium was palpable. The reason? Shapira is the director of Israel Post's philatelic service and was about to unveil his agency's 2020 stamp program. After reassuring the audience that Israelis still make routine use of postage stamps to send mail and that the stamps issued by Israel Post still sell in the hundreds of thousands, the slideshow commenced: Attack helicopters... 100 years to Keren HaYesod... 50 years to Ben-Gurion University... 100 years to the New General Organization of Workers in Israel... Here a minor uproar broke out in the audience as vehement objections were raised against the number 100 when it was only 20 or 30 years ago that the word "New" was added to the Histadrut's name. In his defense, Shapira was quick to respond that while the objections may be valid on a technical level, his agency is required to align itself with the information supplied by the body being represented on the stamp. Raising his voice to be heard above the commotion, Shapira continued: Azriel Hildesheimer... Roses... Parrotfish minisheet featuring the primary colors of printing... Butterflies... 100 years to the Haganah souvenir sheet... Bees... 150 years to Mikveh Israel... 75 years to the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps... Good luck... Writers and poets... Summer flowers... Israel-Gibraltar joint issue... Olympic games: swimming, rhythmic gymnastics, show jumping... Holidays... Murals... Stargazing... Israel-Brazil joint issue... Nostalgia: milkman, ice, street photographer... Biblical stories... Beethoven... Museums... Israel-Czech joint issue... Transportation... Airplanes.

Moshe Rimer (left) | משה רימר

Moshe Rimer, the man behind Wikipedia's Hebrew philately portal and author of These Purim Days: A Philatelic Book of Esther (2017) and The Philatelic Passover Haggada (2019), received the Israel Philatelic Federation's Philatelist of the Year award.

Matan Ber (second from left) | מתן בר

Matan Ber's stamp-themed undergraduate seminar papers on the factors that led to the Iran-Iraq War and the role oil played in Iraq's Ba'ath regime earned him the Yirmiyahu Rimon award for academic philatelic research.

Genady Berman (center) | גנדי ברמן

Genady Berman received an award recognizing his achievement at the Christchurch Philatelic Society's 16th Philatelic Literature Exhibition in New Zealand, where he won the top honor in the form of a vermeil medal for his book Postal Labels and Forms of Israel.

Zvi Aloni | צבי אלוני

Zvi Aloni, philatelic curator of the Alexander Collection at the Eretz Israel Museum's Alexander Museum of Postal History and Philately, spoke about the history of the Ottoman postal system in the Holy Land. Aloni's lecture was what one would call "advanced," i.e. densely packed with information that a newcomer to philately would find difficult to process.

Arie Olewski | אריה אולבסקי

Controversy is not new to Israeli stamps, but no stamp has been more controversial than Israel's 2005 joint issue with Germany marking forty years of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Arie Olewski, the son of Polish survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, led the audience on a behind-the-scenes journey examining the tensions stoked both diplomatically and internally by the 2005 stamp. Before doing so, however, Olewski asked to distance himself from Israel Post's upcoming Holocaust stamp and to stress that no Holocaust survivors were consulted in developing the stamp and that it is misleading to imply that it speaks for the survivors. Back to the matter at hand, and based on official documents and correspondences he was able to obtain, Olewski cited May 2004 as the month when the joint issue was first proposed and May 12th, 2005 as the originally targeted issue date. Olewski then charted the proposed stamp's bumpy progress through a series of setbacks, including raised eyebrows over the arbitrariness of forty years as a meaningful occasion, fears over the angry backlash a German flag on an Israeli stamp would be sure to provoke, opposition among pro-Palestinian Germans to the Israeli flag appearing on a German stamp, problems with the date vis-a-vis the Hebrew calendar, a failure to involve Yad Vashem in the stamp's development, growing hostility toward the stamp in the Israeli press, disputes over what the stamp's design and message should be, and threats on both sides to back out of the joint issue or to issue a stamp unilaterally due to irreconcilable differences. Olewski showed how the joint issue was delayed from May to June, then from June to August, and finally from August to November, when it was unceremoniously put into circulation -- and the controversy did not end there, as the postmark Israel used appeared to show the German coat of arms invading and partially obstructing Israel's.

Hedy Feivel | הדי פייבל

The title of Hedy Feivel's presentation was "Fake Facts: False Messages on Stamps." Exhibit A featured Togo's 1965 Winston Churchill stamp, which showed Franklin D. Roosevelt seated with his legs crossed between Churchill and Joseph Stalin at the 1945 Yalta Conference. FDR would die later that year from Guillain-Barre syndrome, which had paralyzed him from the waist down in the early 1920s. As Feivel indicated, FDR could not have crossed his own legs at the meeting, and the portrayal of him sitting that way was most likely a deliberate choice on the part of the artist so as to convey a distorted reality to the public. Exhibit B featured an assortment of Joseph Stalin stamps, common to all of which was a portrayal of Stalin with clear, youthful cheeks. The reality that the artists sought to distort, Feivel explained, was that Stalin's cheeks were so severely scarred from a case of childhood smallpox that his actual appearance could have undermined his public image. The "Regele Ferdinand I" souvenir sheets shown in the image above were another of Feivel's examples of manipulation through stamps. In December 1993 Posta Romana issued the souvenir sheet on the left, depicting a map of Romania including territories annexed by the country under King Ferdinand I shaded brown. A month later* Posta Romana recalled and nullified the souvenir sheet and issued a new one in its stead in March 1994 that featured the same map but using a single color. As Feivel explained, the shaded area in the first sheet corresponded to King Ferdinand's annexations but in the interests of diplomatic sensitivity a less political map was favored.

Moshe Rimer | משה רימר

Making his second appearance on the stage, Moshe Rimer discussed the effect of inflation on postage rates and currencies. In the 1920s Germany was printing banknotes with a value of 500 billion marks. Hungary experienced the most extreme inflation in history in 1946. In Israel, inflation between the years 1977 and 1989 caused the postage rate to increase by a factor of 10,000. Israelis, both consumers and the postal authority, coped with the circumstances in a variety of creative ways. Rimer's talk was the most quantitative in nature of the day and, like Zvi Aloni's presentation, addressed to the advanced philatelist.

Amir Afsai | אמיר אפסאי

Yours truly did not speak at the event, but neither did he object to posing for the cameraman while he set up his equipment and adjusted the stage light.