This is a Shana Tova postcard from the 1960s with an image of Theodor Herzl in his famous posture, originally captured on the balcony in Basel after the First Zionist Congress. In this picture, however, he is overlooking Haifa harbour as a ship, the Theodor Herzl, comes into port. The Theodor Herzl is pictured here as a large luxury liner decorated with festive flags. To the left of the ship part of a crane can be seen. Two smaller ships are also in the harbour. The ship pictured here is the second ship to be named for Theodor Herzl. The first was was used to bring Holocaust survivors to pre-State Israel as part of the Aliyah Bet.
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The Theodor Herzl ship – The Theodor Herzl was named after the Zionist visionary, Theodor Herzl, and after the original ship with that name that was used to bring Holocaust survivors to pre-State Israel as part of the Aliyah Bet (or “illegal immigration”). The first Theodor Herzl was bought by the Mossad for the purpose of bringing 2,641 refugees from France to Eretz Yisrael. The ship left France on April 2, 1947. On April 13, the ship was intercepted by the British, and a battle ensued in which three passengers were killed. The wounded passengers were taken to Atlit in northern Israel, where they were kept in a British detention camp; the rest of the passengers were deported to Cyprus. The second Theodor Herzl , which is pictured in this postcard, was owned by the Israeli shipping company Zim. It was built in 1957 and paid for by the German reparation funds. Its first voyage was from Hamburg to Haifa via London. When it arrived in London, the ship received an official welcome in honour of Israel’s 9th anniversary. Before it left the port, the captain received a bomb threat. Not wanting to worry the passengers, he carried out a discreet search and discovered the threat to be unfounded. The ship sailed safely to Haifa. The Theodor Herzl was the first ship to sail into San Francisco harbour with an Israeli flag. The ship was sold in 1969 to an American company and operated until 1993.
Theodor Herzl – Theodor (Binyamin Ze’ev) Herzl (1860–1904) was the visionary behind modern Zionism. Zionism was a political movement with the goal of re-establishing a Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael. Herzl, born in Budapest, was a journalist and playwright. He was very affected by the events surrounding the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in France in 1894, which he covered as a journalist. Witnessing the anti-Semitism around the Dreyfus affair, which included a mob yelling “Death to the Jews,” Herzl became convinced of the need for a Jewish state. In 1896 Herzl wrote The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat), and the following year he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, with the aim to begin creating a modern, secular Jewish state. Herzl proposed that Jews around the world raised money for the Jewish State. The delegates of the First Zionist Congress adopted the Basel Program and declared that: “Zionism seeks to establish a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law.” The World Zionist Organization was formed as the political arm of the Jewish people, and Herzl was elected its first president. Herzl convened six Zionist congresses between 1897 and 1903. At the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, Herzl proposed the Uganda Plan which stated that a temporary Jewish State would be created in Uganda for Jews in immediate danger. Although Herzl stated that the Uganda Plan would not replace the goal of creating a state in the Land of Israel, the idea was very controversial and nearly split the Zionist movement. After Herzl’s death, his Uganda Plan was officially rejected at the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905. Herzl died in 1904 in Vienna where he was buried. In 1949 he was reinterred on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.
Shana Tova Cards - The earliest instance of a written “shana tova” greeting is a fourteenth-century letter written by the Ashkenazi rabbi known as the Maharil (Jacob ben Moses Moelin). This letter affirms the existence of this custom in German Jewish communities at the time. In the eighteenth century, the custom began spreading beyond the German-speaking realm to other large concentrations of Jews in Eastern Europe, especially Poland. By the end of the century, Shana Tova cards began to take on distinct characteristics, such as special writing paper, with the custom spreading throughout the entire Ashkenazi world during the nineteenth century. The postal service emerged around this time, and in the 1880s, Jewish entrepreneurs began to print commercial greeting Shana Tova cards. By this time, Shana Tova cards constituted the main body of postcards sent by Jews, and this would remain so for around 100 years.
Between the end of the nineteenth century and the end of First World War, a time known as the “Golden Age of Postcards,” the vast majority of the mail sent by Jews in Europe and America consisted of Shana Tova cards. Today, in the digital era, cards sent by post have given way to text messages and emails.
