Israel FDC on "150th Anniversary of the Birth of Herzl"

First Day Cover
首日封
Sobrescrito de 1.º Dia

Israel

150th Anniversary of the Birth of Herzl

Date of Issue : 14 April 2010

The souvenir sheet design is based on scenes from Herzl’s writings and letters, as they materialized from the early days of Aliyah to Eretz Israel to the present.
The bottom margins of the sheet depict pictures of Herzl’s life (1860-1904) (from right to left): with his friend Max Mendelsman; with his bicycle; speaking at the Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland (1898); with his children in his study in Vienna; his funeral in Vienna; his grave on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.
The upper margins of the sheet feature an adaptation of the seven star flag that Herzl proposed as well as an Israeli satellite signifying technological progress.

Theodor Herzl, son of Janet and Jacob, was born on 2 May 1860 in Budapest. The family moved to Vienna in 1878, where Herzl studied law at the university. He worked as a journalist for the Neue Freie Presse newspaper and wrote a number of plays.

On 14 February 1896 a small non-bound book with a yellow wrapper called Der Judenstaat (“The State of the Jews”) was displayed in the window of a publisher’s shop in central Vienna. The book examined a proposed modern solution to the Jewish question.

Herzl assembled the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897. The idea of the return to Zion came forth from the narrow ghetto and became a global movement – a national-political movement that became linked to political entities of that time. The movement began organizing the people and created tools with which to achieve its objective. During his years of activity, Herzl assembled the Zionist Congresses, founded the World Zionist Organization and its institutions and organizations, and began establishing the Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel.

In 1898 Herzl visited Eretz Israel. Subsequent to that visit, he formulated his political, social and cultural plan and incorporated his ideas into his novel Altneuland (The Old New Land), published in 1902. The book opened with the sentence, “If you wish it, it will be no fable” and concluded with the sentence, “Dream is not very different than action, as many think. All men’s actions were once dreams; all their actions will one day be a dream.”

A very nice FDC. It seems to be my first souvenir sheet FDC from Israel.