Description
Rare - free mail postal concession of the German Holy Land post office: 3 June 1914 postmarked stampless cover sent locally within JAFFA, addressed in German to a Mr. Harari ("herrn Harari") at the English Girl's School ("Engl. Madschenschule"); backflap missing.
A rare example of civilian free mail - not stampless "official mail" - offered by the German post office: this is as yet an undocumented service/rate observed offered by the German post office and its purpose has not been established; Jurgen Falk classifies this as unofficial free local post (inoffizielle portofreie Localpost) & Steichele writes that local mail in Jaffa was delivered free - though in any case very few examples are known.
This cataloguer disagrees with both Falk & Steichele, as some local mail is observed franked, and believes that the concession was based on the status of the sender or addressee: first-hand accounts as cited in the Hebrew press & Yehoshua Ben-Arieh only document free local mail by the Austrian post office, as well as price reductions on stamps offered by some of the other foreign Holy Land post offices to institutional bodies - even the esoteric mail delivery service organized by the "Herzl" student association at the Gymnasia Herzliya covering Tel Aviv & the nearby settlements. Here, based on the few examples of stampless German mail not addressed outside Jaffa this cataloguer believes this concession was made for non-bank businesses and institutions (or expressed differently, "local"/non-foreign businesses).
As regards this cover in particular, the likely addressee was Dr. Haim Harari (1883-1940), a prominent intellectual and popular teacher at the Herzliya Gymnasia, a founder of the High School Teachers Union (1912) and one of the 66 founding families of Tel Aviv (1909). Tidhar's encyclopedia reports that he and his wife left for Paris in 1913 for his continuing studies but press reports from 1913 and 1914 show he was still in Palestine active in the local community; eulogies for him suggest that he was among the Jews expelled from Palestine by the Turks in Dec. 1914. The referenced Girls School in the address may have been the one at Neve Zedek established (1909) and run by his wife, Yehudit.
Ironically more free civilian mail by the German post is known to locales outside Jaffa (eg. Rishon Le Zion & the German Templar/religious settlements) than within - of which only 2 are known to this cataloguer (the other is in Steichele's collection, addressed to the owner of the Kaminitz hotel at his establishment); a similar postage-free cover within Jerusalem shown in Falk p.166 is addressed to a hospital. This cover is being the latest dated known within Jaffa. Backflap missing.
