Saturday, January 7, 2012

Israel Stamps



This postcard showing Tribes of Israel stamps is one I recently received through Postcrossing. It was published by Palphot and is similar in design to the Red Sea Fishes stamps postcard I featured in a previous post.

There are twelve stamps in this series, representing the Twelve Tribes of Israel. The tribes are named after the twelve sons of Jacob. These stamps were issued in 1955 and 1956. The tribes, colors, and denominations on the stamps are as follows:
10 green - Reuben
20 dark lilac - Simeon
30 blue - Levi
40 brown - Judah
50 turquoise - Dan
60 gold ochre - Naphtali
80 violet - Gad
100 red - Asher
120 olive - Issachar
180 magenta - Zebulun
200 bottle green - Joseph
250 gray - Benjamin

Two recent Israeli stamps were used for postage on the back of the postcard, and they arrived uncancelled. The stamp on the left is the Torah Crown, Aden, Late 19th Century, part of the Festivals 2008 Torah Crowns series. The stamp on the right is Rabbi Shlomo Goren (1917-1994) issued in 2011. For more information on the subjects of these stamps, see the articles on Torah Scroll Crowns and Rabbi (Major-General, Res.) Shlomo Goren on the Israel Philatelic Federation website.





I am participating in Sunday Stamps at Viridian's Postcard Blog





7 comments:

  1. The list of tribes remind me of all those begats in the bible. How interesting that each tribe has its own symbol.

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  2. a great card to share. thank you for including the link to the rabbi's accomplishments.

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  3. I've learned a lot from this post. I now know the 12 tribes - I would have had to guess at their names before. The Rabbi has a superb beard,

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  4. What a life that rabbi lead - and saved.

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  5. Wow! How very interesting. The color palette is very attractive too.

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