 edera, located in the Judean foothills near the Arab village of Catra 8km south of Rehovoth, was established in 1884 by ten BILU pioneers. BILU - the acronym for "The sons of Jacob let us go" was a group of idealistic Russian Jewish university students who came to the Holy Land in 1882 for the purpose of establishing
an agricultural colony.
 |
Figure 1 |
|
March 3, 1914. A postcard sent from Gedera to California, posted through the Austrian Post in Jaffa. The postcard, written by Y.S. Hazanov, one of the 10 original settlers of Gedera, is to his only son Amram, the first student from the Holy Land to be sent abroad to study agriculture. Amram attended the University of California at Berkeley. Less then 10 examples survived of the bilingual cachet "Doar Gedera (in Hebrew) - Poste Catra". |
For the first two years they worked and studied agriculture at the Mikveh Israel Agricultural School near Jaffa. In 1884 the Ten BILU pioneers founded Gedera, where they lived at first in a cave.
 |
Figure 2 |
|
November 1st, 1914. The same correspondence as in Figure 1. Because the date of posting was after the closure of the foreign post offices in the Holy Land following the outbreak of WW I, the postcard was posted through the Turkish Post Office in Rehovoth. There are four recorded examples of the Catra
cachet mailed through the Turkish Post.
|
|
