The blue box. Say the phrase to Jews of my generation, and they’ll most certainly respond with memories of dropping coins into a tin box intended to go toward funding the planting of trees in Israel. As Tu Bishvat approaches, it seems most appropriate to review this simple item, which, over time, has become a powerful symbol of Zionism and the return to the Land of Israel.
The idea of a tzedakah box or charity chest is nothing new. In fact, it is written in Kings II [12:10] that the priest Jehoiada “took a chest and bored a hole in its lid” so that whoever brought silver to the Temple could throw the silver into it. The pieces of silver were made into coins to pay the craftsmen to repair the Temple.
During the Talmudic period, the sages established a rule that in every city, a collector would be appointed to collect charity from community members and store it in a special box. Later, Maimonides codified this rule into law, and so, traditionally, synagogues across the Diaspora had rows of tzedakah boxes embedded in their walls, each labeled with an inscription specifying the intended use of the donated funds.
Rabbi Sholom Dovber Schneersohn, the fifth Chabad-Lubavitch rebbe, was the first to initiate the removal of charity boxes from their original location in synagogues and study halls and introduce them into the Jewish home. Thus came about the tin box with a slit on top known as a pushke (the Polish word for “box”), which enabled individuals to make donations in private, with boxes later collected by the relevant organization.
The blue box of KKL-JNF
The blue box as we know it has been part of our modern reality since the turn of the last century, with the founding of the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund. According to the KKL-JNF website, “Professor Zvi Hermann Schapira…presented as early as 1894 the idea of a tin box nicknamed “pushke.” He encouraged his friends in a meeting of Workers of Zion to put coins in it for the sake of reclaiming the Land of Israel and assisting Jewish immigration to it.
“The first boxes were ready for distribution in 1904, and one of them was placed by [Theodor] Herzl himself in his office.”
The KKL-JNF, of course, has an extensive collection of historical blue boxes, ranging from the original pale blue ones, like the one on Herzl’s desk, to blue carton cylindrical boxes from 1960s America.
My own memories of the blue box begin in 1945 and 1946 when my father was overseas in the Pacific. My mother and I lived with her mother – my bubbie, Frieda Birshtein – and my Uncle Easy in Norfolk, Virginia, in the old family home where my mother grew up. My grandmother and I became quite close. She gave me baths and tried to teach me Yiddish because that was all she spoke.
My bubbie gave a lot of tzedakah, so those traveling around soliciting always knocked at her door. The tinkle of coins falling into the blue box deposited there by my bubbie is a memory that lives deep within me.
The sound of coins sliding into the blue box my mother had was always softer.
In actuality, I was born into the tradition of the blue box. When my father, Louis Geffen, was a boy in Atlanta, Georgia, he would go from house to house with his blue box collecting funds, something he would do from age 5 to 15 years old, from 1911 to 1921. The money went toward planting trees – “making the desert bloom” – in the Land of Israel.
The tradition accompanied us through the years. When my mother-in-law, Frieda Feld, died in New York 24 years ago, my wife inherited her blue box, but it had no key. We were able to pry it open and discovered it was filled to the brim, amounting to about $500, proof positive of the amazing capacity of these small, unassuming boxes. We brought it back to Israel and donated the contents to the Hadassah-University Medical Center in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem.
For me, that is the spirit of the blue box. Not everyone can give millions of dollars, but everyone can put a few coins each week into the blue box.
