Some 400 "shanah tovah" greeting cards and letters from notable personalities. Palestine and elsewhere. Late 19th century and 20th century. Hebrew, some Yiddish, and additional languages.
Most of this collection consists of official cards – the majority bearing the emblem of the State of Israel and the name of a specific office or department – issued on behalf of Israel's leaders throughout the years of the state's existence: • Prime Ministers David Ben Gurion, Moshe Sharett, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Shamir, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon. • Presidents Chaim Weizmann, Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Zalman Shazar, Ephraim Katzir, Yitzhak Navon, Chaim Herzog, Ezer Weizman, and Moshe Katsav. • Knesset members and government ministers Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon, Abba Eban, Pinchas Sapir, and others.
Some of the cards bear brief handwritten messages from the sender, and occasionally his signature as well: Moshe Sharett, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Chaim Herzog, Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Shamir, and others (at times a separate paper bearing a signature is enclosed along with the card).
The second part of the collection includes letters and cards from a wide range of personalities: • Brief Shanah Tovah greeting handwritten by Shai (Shmuel Yosef) Agnon (on the back of a business card). • Shanah Tovah greeting handwritten by Marc Chagall, with an illustration of a hand and an "etrog" (Yiddish, 1963). • Postcard sent by the Safed artist Yosef Zvi Geiger to Samuel Straus of Karlsruhe, Germany, bearing the Hebrew greeting "K'tivah Ve-Hatimah Tovah" ("may you be inscribed and signed for a good year, " Safed, 1899). • Letter hand signed by Avraham Moshe Lunz with the greeting (Hebrew) "may he be inscribed and signed for a good year" in golden ink (Jerusalem, 1881). • Postcard bearing a new year's greeting handwritten by Rabbi Tzvi Elimelech Teicher (along with special thanks for the generosity of the Baron Rothschild). Sent from Krakow to Frankfurt A.M., 1904. • Postcard bearing a new year's greeting handwritten by the artist Salomon (Schlomo) Bernstein, along with an illustration by Bernstein (1954). • And more.
Size and condition vary.
Provenance: The Dr. Chaim Grossman Collection.
Dr. Chaim Grossman's Israeliana collection is exceptional in size, quality and variety. Grossman, an educator, historian and folklorist, was a methodical, knowledgeable and meticulous collector, and his deep understanding of Palestinian-Yishuv and Israeli material culture set the ground for a one-of-a-kind collection of mundane and less than mundane objects – from the ephemeral, the negligible, the widely available to the rare and singular.
The "shana tovah" collection left by Grossman – a considerable part of which is offered in the present auction – comprises thousands of postcards, cards, letters and other paper items made and sent year after year in, by and for Jewish communities: in Eastern and Western Europe, Palestine, Iran, Iraq, North Africa, North and South America, as part of the tradition of sending hand-written, hand-drawn or printed new year’s greetings, which originated in German Jewry but with the rise of postcards spread to most communities. The earliest items in the collection date to the 1860s; the latest were made in the late 20th century. It includes both beautifully designed, rare, early and singular postcards and cards, and mass-made, highly popular items sold in large quantities, in varying production quality and in dozens of repeating versions, each according to the technical abilities achieved by the local publication industry.
The collector's devotion to his collection is evident in the sheer number of items, in the wealth of techniques, visuals and themes, and in the thorough, intersectional categorization by period, origin, motif, technique and material. Glitter and relief embossing, scraps, lace and golden ink, lithography and celluloid transparencies, plastic, textile and metal decorations; Yiddish, Hebrew, English, Russian, French, Polish, German greetings; children, angels, families, pets, immigrants, travelers, professionals; portraits and tinted reproductions; Judaism, Zionism, the state, the army; the ritual and the mundane; any new year's greeting, in any form whatsoever, had a place in Grossman's collection and was honored as a historical testimony, as a timeless, invaluable treasure.
