Commentary: Sadly, I no longer collect Israeli stamps

When this project was launched two years ago, in October 2019, it sought to develop content along two vectors: review Israeli stamps in much the same way film critics review movies, and document my experiences as an aspiring stamp collector learning to navigate the winds and bends of Israel's philatelic scene. Since that time, in line with my personal evolution in the hobby, the blog has evolved to cover a wider range of topics -- but the content that was the most enjoyable and rewarding to produce was always the stamp reviews. Why that is has to do with my opinionated nature and penchant for writing. Stamps offer a steady stream of new material to critique, and blogs are a convenient platform for expressing views and sharing them publicly.

There were bumps in the road from the early going. Unlike the U.S. Postal Service, which issues a press release toward the end of every year highlighting stamps the public can look forward to in the year ahead, Israel Post rarely engages with the public and restricts access to information about upcoming stamps to all but a select few entities. Planning for Israeli new issues is like training for a race without knowing its location, length or elevation profile, or like going to a concert without knowing when it starts or who's performing. That was bump number one. Bump number two emerged in early 2020, when Blogger began rolling out a new user interface to replace one that had been in place for more than a decade. The new interface is a dumbed-down, mobile-friendly CMS that feels like a beta version written by a programming team fresh out of high school.

Road closed

These were hindrances but not barriers. They got in the way but could be maneuvered around. When everything changed was in February 2021. On February 9th, a Tuesday, Israel Post launched its first batch of new stamp issues for the year. It consisted of five stamps and two ATM labels. I knew better than to waste my Tuesday afternoon waiting in line at the post office to buy stamps on the day of issue: it had been at least a year since new stamps made it on time to Jerusalem's main post office. Moreover, I had a sneaking suspicion, based on my experience with December 2020's new issues, that February's stamps would not arrive at all. My suspicion was confirmed in February, confirmed again in April, and confirmed a third time in June. The days of Israel Post making its stamps available to the public via the post office were over. It was now only possible to acquire new issues by ordering online directly from Israel Post or from secondary distributors like WOPA+.

To some readers, my despair, indignation and ultimate exodus may seem like an overreaction: If new issues can be ordered online, why the stubborn insistence on buying them at the post office? This was also the attitude of the head of sales and marketing at Israel Post's philatelic department when I asked him in December why the latest stamp issues hadn't been sent to Jerusalem: Why trouble yourself with going to the post office and waiting in line to buy stamps when you can purchase a subscription and get all the new issues delivered straight to your door? It did not matter to him that I have no interest in collecting every single stamp Israel Post issues and that I had recently started arranging to take my students on field trips to the post office to learn first-hand about the postal service and stamps. All that mattered to him was adding me to his mailing list and getting my credit card number. Retreating into an ecommerce cave may be an effective approach to doing business in the 2020s, but it is a business model into which my collecting style flat-out does not fit.

Post office

There are three reasons why ordering stamps online isn't for me. Reasons two and three were alluded to above and are of a principled nature, but the first reason is purely practical: my Jerusalem apartment does not have a proper mailbox, i.e. letters addressed there will be either rerouted to a random post office in the capital or chucked through an iron gate to be rained on by sprinklers, stepped on by cats, or blown hither and thither by the wind. One workaround when I need mail sent to Jerusalem is to have it addressed to my workplace -- but that has shortcomings of its own, particularly where privacy is concerned. The second reason relates to the kind of collector I was. Unlike the class of collectors committed to owning every stamp in their country's catalog, I only collected Israel stamps that appealed to me intellectually or emotionally. That meant roughly half of all the stamps Israel Post issued failed to make the cut, and I preferred to channel the money that would otherwise have been spent on them to buying full sheets and first day covers of the stamps that did appeal to me.

Reason three is all about the post office. Post offices are philatelic temples. Today's philatelists tend not to regard them as such because philately, having become obsessed with collecting and studying stamps to the exclusion of actually using them for postal correspondence, has lost sight of the roots whence it developed. For me post offices are an integral part of the philatelic experience. They are where my initiation into philately happened, first in San Salvador and subsequently in Jerusalem. Even if I'm not a postcrosser and only send letters occasionally, and even if the general population associates the postal system with wasted time and dreadful service, I nonetheless venerate post offices as hallowed ground. In my vision of philately's future, post offices are sites of philatelic pilgrimage -- where communities gather for events and parents take their kids on first days of issue. When I took my seventh-graders on a field trip to the post office in June of this year, the visit left such an impression on them that for weeks they were sending me photos every time they passed by a post office or a mailbox.

One wing airplane

What if Israel Post pledges a return to selling new issues at major post offices? Would that be enough to coax me back into collecting? There are two reasons why it wouldn't. First, I don't trust the philatelic service to be consistent and stand by its word. They offered no explanation for halting physical sales when I reached out to them in December of last year, and it's reasonable to assume they'll feel no obligation to sell new issues at post offices long into the future. The anguish of seeing exquisite stamps launched and being unable to buy them was too harrowing to go through again. Second, I started collecting stamps in September 2019. The last time I was able to buy new issues was in December 2020. I now have a gaping hole of close to a year in my collection, and that will soon be equivalent to half the time I have been a stamp collector. A plane with one wing cannot fly.

Where does Israel Stamp Reviews go from here? The backlog of reports waiting to be written is extensive and continues to grow. There are enough ideas in the pipeline to last years, and they are no less important and meaningful now than they were before. What's for sure is there will be a shift in focus away from Israeli new issues toward other areas of philately. Opinion pieces, travel reports, book reviews, news updates, and similar such philately-peripheral content will lead the charge, while content relating to philately-adjacent domains like deltiology and epistolography might also make appearances from time to time. As frustrating as it is being a stamp collector in Israel, my passion for philately is not going anywhere and neither is Israel Stamp Reviews.