1976 newspaper article about Israeli specimen coin
desslok
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A fellow collector recently sent me a newspaper article from a collector magazine in Hebrew. The title of the page is “In Short” and features 3 brief anecdotes. The middle one is about an Israeli Specimen 1 Pruta coin, which I translated below
“When Jack quit his job at the giant ICI Mint in London, he had in his possession many special things. Because he needed money, he decided to rummage through the accumulation and dig up something special. In the pile he found a coin struck as a sample in 1949 for a newly founded state called Israel. Jack remembered that the proposed design was eventually accepted, but the coin he kept featured the English word “SPECIMEN”. Jack also remembered that most of the samples were destroyed and only a few survived, so he hurried to a coin shop around the corner. Jack and the coin shop owner whispered quietly for a while and eventually Jack sold the coin for 1000 Pounds Sterling. The British coin dealer took the coin to a numismatic convention in New York held on December 10-12th, 1976, where it was purchased by William Rosenblum, a coin dealer out of Colorado. Within a month, Rosenblum had sold the coin to a private collector for $7500. Indeed a very special Pruta.”
Aftermath:
So here we are 44 years later, William M. Rosenblum is still a semi-active coin dealer and one of the foremost experts on Israeli numismatics. The ICI Mint went through a series of mergers and acquisitions, becoming part of the Kings Norton Mint and eventually filing for bankruptcy in 2003. The liquidation of its belongings brought many sample coins to the market, including at least seven 1-Pruta Specimen coins that were subsequently graded by PCGS. One such coin can be seen here
Comments
Come to think about it, $7500 in 1976 should be worth the equivalent of $34,000 today, according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/