The Production of the Blue Box

Among the first tools that were harnessed for the purposes of propaganda were those called in the organisation’s jargon means of collection, meaning the box, stamps, and the Golden Book, whose primary purpose was to raise funds for the purchase of land in Eretz Yisrael. Over the years, and especially after the First World War, the borders between the monetary goals and the propaganda goals became blurred and the means of collection became, for all practical purposes, the central propaganda symbols of the organisation. Perceiving the box as a means of propaganda created a situation where responsibility for distributing and producing it were assigned to the staff of the organisation’s Propaganda Department. Over the years the latter constructed an entire culture around it, with the objective of serving the interests of the JNF and Eretz Yisrael; they saw the Blue Box as a yardstick to gauge the organisation’s activities throughout the world. After the Head Office moved to Jerusalem it became clear that the appearance of the box had to be refreshed and its manufacture had to be transferred to Eretz Yisrael as part of the propaganda effort and the reorganisation of the JNF. This is the subject of the present chapter.

The beginnings of the Blue Box are well documented. The initiative to raise money for the JNF by means of a collection box, like the charity boxes commonly used in Jewish institutions, came from Chaim Kleinman, a bank clerk from Galicia, who made the suggestion in a letter written to the Zionist newspaper Die Welt in 1902; he wanted such a box to be placed in every Jewish household. During the period under study, JNF historiography attributed the first box to the organisation’s founder, Herman Shapira, on account of a tin box he had placed in his house before the JNF was established.

Until the First World War the boxes were manufactured mainly in Germany; during the 1920s and 1930s other centres of production in Poland and Eretz Yisrael were added. By the end of the Second World War an estimated two to three million boxes had been distributed throughout the world, although the exact number is not known.