Before Israel Had a Name, It Already Had Stamps

The Friday That Changed Everything

It was Friday afternoon, May 14, 1948. The city was under threat of air raids, and civil war was already underway.

Inside the hall of the Tel Aviv Museum, prepared for guests in just one day, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. A few hours later, Shabbat began — and so did the First Arab–Israeli War.

Doar Ivri — The Postal Service of a State That Had No Name Yet

Already on Sunday, May 16, the postal service of the new — restored — state began delivering letters bearing the Doar Ivri stamps, meaning “Hebrew Post.” The stamps had, of course, been printed before Shabbat, during the final days of the British Mandate, hurriedly and in secrecy.

The postal service became one of the very first real institutions of the new state. Yet the word “Israel” did not appear anywhere on those first stamps.

The reason was simple: the decision to proclaim independence had already been made, but the country’s official name — Israel, Eretz Yisrael — was chosen only hours before the declaration itself. Other proposed names included “Judea,” “Zion,” and “Ever.”

Otte Wallish — The Legendary Designer of… Everything

The Doar Ivri stamps were created by Otte Wallish, the official graphic designer of the Yishuv — the Jewish community in pre-state Palestine. He used images of ancient coins from the First Jewish–Roman War and the Bar Kokhba revolt as a visual bridge between ancient Judea and the newborn state.

The stamps featured a ceremonial cup, a palm tree, grape clusters, citron blossom, and willow branches — symbols of unity and gratitude.

During those days, Wallish barely slept. On the morning of May 13, he was summoned to the Tel Aviv Museum and tasked with preparing the hall for the independence ceremony within 24 hours, while also designing the Declaration itself. Due to shortages and urgency, furniture for the ceremony was borrowed from local cafés and the windows were blacked out because of the risk of air raids.

He managed to do it all.

The Revival of Hebrew

The Zionist movement increasingly believed that the future Jewish state needed a shared modern language — one connected to historical tradition, yet not tied to the diaspora. That language became Hebrew.

Hebrew needed to be renewed and expanded with words that had never existed before — words like “newspaper” or “ice cream” — and then brought into everyday life.

Under the British Mandate in Palestine (1920–1948), Hebrew became one of the three official languages alongside Arabic and English, and stamps were printed in all three languages. In this way, the postal system became one of the first places where modern Hebrew materialized in daily life.

And this brings us to another story connected to Hebrew and the birth of Israel.

Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Writer

The future Nobel Prize laureate was born in Buchach, now in western Ukraine and then part of Austria-Hungary, and moved to Palestine in 1908. In the 1920s, he settled in Jerusalem, where his home became a meeting place for intellectuals, writers, and scholars.

Agnon belonged to the generation that created the cultural foundation of the future state — modern literature, a renewed language, and a shared memory of collective experience.

Through Agnon’s works, readers discovered that Hebrew could be used for modern prose, to describe cities, love, and the tensions of changing traditions — in other words, to create a national literature.

In 1966, Agnon was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first Israeli writer to receive the honor.

These are the kinds of stories we love to discover for Postmark — small stories through which you can glimpse an entire era through the lens of mail.

Read our blog — there are many more fascinating postal stories from Ukraine and around the world ahead.