Some 100 "shanah tovah" postcards and greeting cards sent by Jewish Holocaust survivors or printed in Europe after the Holocaust. Germany, Austria and Italy (several postcards from other places), mid-late 1940s.
Most of the collection is dedicated to greeting cards printed in DP camps, with pictures of the senders and various illustrations: letter-bearing doves, illegal immigrant ships, flag of Israel, ram's horns and flowers. The greeting cards were sent from DP camps such as Traunstein, Leipheim, Landsberg, Bergen-Belsen, Föhrenwald, Eschwege, Ulm, Lampertheim, Feldafing, Palese, Barletta and others. One postcard is particularly rare, and was sent for Rosh Hashanah 5706 (1945) from Beijing, China.
The collection also includes several postcards issued by institutions, personalized postcards and postcards with images memorializing the Holocaust, including: • Two postcards issued by the JNF Central Bureau in Germany. • "Shanah tovah" card from R. Bernstein and Aryeh Becker. • Yizkor 6,000,000" – color postcard designed by Pinchas Schuldenrein. • Card with a picture of illegal immigrants in camp uniform on board the Mataroa (photograp by Zoltan Kluger). • And more.
Approx. 100 greeting cards and postcards. Size and condition vary.
Provenance: Collection of Dr. Chaim Grossman.

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.