We are all familiar with the traditional greeting Le’shana tova tikatevu (“May you be inscribed for a good year”). That particular wording dates back to the Talmudic period in Babylonia, and the early mahzorim (High Holy Day prayer books) include that familiar phrase at the end of the evening service on the first night of Rosh Hashanah.
When people lived close by, there was no problem personally expressing that felicitation to family and friends. When Jewish people lived in different countries and on different continents, thousands of miles apart, it became necessary to create High Holy Day cards to ensure that everyone could convey their good wishes.
The verses of poetess Emma Lazarus, whose words captured the spirit of the then-new Statue of Liberty, were created in New York in the 1880s. Almost at the same time, American High Holy Day folk art was born in the form of a greeting card. Today, with the advent of the Internet, you have to work hard to find the authentic High Holy Day cards of the past.
We turn now to the eminent scholar whose work in this field is definitive. The most important scholar dealing with the creation of these seasonal holiday cards is Prof. Jenna Weissman Joselit. She discusses the origins of the printed and illustrated High Holy Day cards in her book The Wonders of America. Initially, our American Jewish communities were small, so “personal greetings could be transmitted by word of mouth,” she notes.
With the mass immigration to the US from 1881 through 1924, “American Jews came increasingly to rely on the mails to convey the appropriate seasonal sentiments.” As this custom of using the post for greetings expanded, High Holy Day cards could range from “tawdry to subdued, restrained, in a variety of motifs: handshakes, floral garlands, evocation of the ‘alte heim’ old country... scenes of smiling multi-generational families gathered round the holiday table,” she writes.
What was most important, Joselit stresses, was that “the Jewish greeting card at its peak bound together the family with memory and Jewish tradition, even as it popularized the connection between them.”
Childhood memories and reflections
One of my wonderful memories as a boy, be it on the south side or the north side of Atlanta, Georgia, was my task of addressing “shana tovas” for my Bubbie, Sara Hene Geffen. Over the years, she had built up a list of people to whom she sent annually whatever High Holy Day card she was using that year. Since the envelopes for the cards had to be addressed in English, I received that honor when my penmanship, originating at the James L. Key school just below Georgia Avenue in Atlanta, became good enough.
I recall addresses in Winter Haven, Florida; Birmingham, Alabama; Chicago; many locales in and around New York and New Jersey; Fitzgerald, Georgia; Spartanburg, South Carolina; Norfolk, Virginia; and in and around Atlanta itself. Then came the immediate family homes in Minneapolis, St. Louis, and New Orleans. My grandfather wrote aerograms in Hebrew to our family in Israel for the holidays.
My Bubbie Geffen had her list, which over the years she had carefully developed. I had the task of transferring those names and addresses to the envelopes so that they went to the right individuals. On the cards, in Yiddish, she inscribed her message for the New Year. It could be that High Holy Day card collectors have some with her personal greetings.
A few years ago, a close friend of mine, Rabbi Richard Hammerman of New Jersey, told me about a Jewish bookstore that was going out of business after being in existence for more than a century. He said that a friend of the owner had some High Holy Day cards from the store that he wanted to give away. The hope was that the official closing could generate a story about American Jewish culture – and it certainly did.
At the Rabbi Sky Hebrew Bookstore in Maplewood, New Jersey, High Holy Day cards, Judaica items, and books were sold with great pride for 105 years. Established in Newark, New Jersey, in 1904, the store was moved to Maplewood in 1970 by Sky’s son, David, who had worked in the business from the age of 12. David died in 2005, and in 2009 his widow, Feige, decided to close the well-known outlet on Springfield Avenue.
Rediscovering vintage holiday cards
At the store, the third-oldest of its type in the US when it closed, thousands of shana tova cards from the 1950s and 1960s survived in the basement, attic, and cupboards. Feige donated them to museums, institutions, and synagogues in the US and Israel. I received about 20 of these cards, which offer insights about the decades when they were printed in the US or Israel.
The American ones have a personal flavor. Since there were many more Yiddish speakers and readers in the 1950s, the cards contain greetings and blessings in English and Yiddish. The Israeli cards are mostly in English with a few Hebrew words.
There is a drawing of a pastoral scene from an Israeli kibbutz dramatizing the building of the country, which was very energized in those early years of the Jewish state. Also, there is a card that has a depiction of the map of Israel before 1967. Around the map are Israelis of different ages, some wearing the garb of the country from which they made aliyah.
I am familiar with the map on the card because my late wife, Rita, and I studied in Israel in 1963-1964, when that was the map of Israel. Rita and I bought several challah knives as gifts. Some of them were adorned with the map of Israel at that time. Since I have been blessed to live in Israel since 1977, I am familiar with the current map of the nation, which presents a different geography.
Ten years ago, Nina Ben Zoor, a historian of High Holy Day cards, who lives in Haifa, offered a few of her insights. “Cards reflect the society that produced them,” she noted. “This is true in terms of both time and geography.” After the founding of Israel, Ben Zoor stressed, “the pride of sovereignty was so palpable that there were cards with military themes.”
She offered this contrast of the two countries, Israel and the US, which have the two largest Jewish populations in the world. “From early on, the American cards were more ornate than those produced at the same time elsewhere.
These can be seen at the National Library in Jerusalem; the Library of Congress in Washington, DC; the Jewish Theological Seminary of America; and other archival facilities in the US. About 20 years ago, a large group of original cards was reproduced. They all sold out quickly, since American Jews of this generation were so thrilled about possessing them.”
In 1989, in a Jerusalem Post High Holy Day article, there was a strong critique of what the cards had become. “Our cards cater to a lower and lower common denominator. As the layer of glitter on the Israeli cards thickened, the next step taken was to place Boy George [a British pop singer who made his debut in 1979] and Michael Jackson in sight and make them representative of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur,” wrote Carol Novis.
Novis, a Canadian writer who had made aliyah in the 1980s, provided her readers with her joy and her anguish. “It is my custom to send Rosh Hashanah cards to my friends and relatives. When people don’t respond, my feelings are hurt. Last year, 2005, someone had the nerve to reciprocate to my card by sending an email card in which an apple hopped around the screen!” Now, of course, 99% of shana tova greetings arrive by email.
Le’shana tova tikatevu.