Description
Jordanian postal boycott of Israel: 21 JAN 1955 British Air Letter postal stationary cover with 19.1.55 dated message in Hebrew & German, from EAST FINCHLEY LONDON to JERUSALEM "Israel", whose country of destination was apparently overlooked & the cover misrouted to Jordanian EAST Jerusalem via AMMAN, where the arrival was backstamped on the cover (see below); lacking further Jordanian postal markings the cover was not transmitted further to East Jerusalem (as such mail normally was, prior to being returned via Amman) & no refusal of service informational marking was applied (eg. the Amman PO Type-II boxed "No Service to Israel" instructional marking); here, returned to the UK undelivered.
The cover was resent (without additional franking needed - as per UPU regulations), whereupon on reaching Israel it was enclosed with the rare JERUSALEM post office informational mimeograph Type M2, postmarked & handstamped 15 FEB 1955 & addressed by hand to the addressee Dr. Schlesinger, in which the post office manager Girassi apologizes on behalf of the Manager of the London Post for delayed delivery as the cover was "erroniously sent from England to the Old City of Jerusalem which is presently occupied by the enemy".
At this time the Jerusalem PO had no access to the Tel Aviv post office's Type M1.1 "mail delayed, misrouted to Arab country" boxed handstamp and so used this personalized mimeograph - rare, only 4 of this type known issued, here on the last known date of use.
Of note & possibly a discovery: the addressee details in the mimeograph match those on the cover however the AMMAN arrival postmark is dated "(?)3 OCT (no year)" - perhaps a clerical error or the postmark only served to identify the local and not the date (a practice sometimes observed on certain types of mail); on other covers shown by Kibble the Amman arrival was roughly a week after the original dispatch date of the affected cover. Although Kibble documents 15 February 1955 as the latest recorded date of the Israeli mimeographed IM, this cataloguer feels the Israeli postmark itself is mimeographed (based on its impression on the front & lack of ink seeping through the back of the paper) and that the dating including the handstamp may have been applied ahead of time for future use: in other words, the letter may well have been processed in Jordan in October (1955) and reached the addressee sometime later with a pre-dated Israeli explanational form attached. If so, this would dramatically change our research of the usage of similarly postmarked Israeli mimeographed instructional markings.
