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 Sal...