Rosh Hashanah Greetings, Yiddish-Style

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We no longer send many Rosh Hashanah greeting cards to each other. Once, in the days leading up to the holiday, the mailboxes were clogged with them. Now, if we send them at all—and why bother, when we’re in constant email, WhatsApp, or Twitter contact with those who might receive them?—they often go electronically.

And yet there was a time when such cards were as much a part of the weeks before Rosh Hashanah as the shortening of the days and the first hints of autumn. While many are old enough to remember them well, few have memories that extend back to their real heyday. That was in the first half of the last century, when an entire industry of such greeting cards existed in America and Europe, much of it in Yiddish. These old Yiddish greetings, a large number of which can be viewed at various online sites, are fascinating to look at, not only because they are generally more imaginative and creative (not to say more sentimental) than their blander counterparts today, but because they remind us of how varied and multifaceted was the world of Yiddish-speaking Jewry in the decades before World War II.