Obj. ID: 55529
Sacred and Ritual Objects  Sisu ve-Simchu be-Simchat Torah, Vilnius (Vilna, Wilno), circa 1870

The following description was prepared by William Gross:

Just after the festivals of the Jewish New Year in the fall of the lunar calendar is the holiday of "Simchat Torah" , celebrating the end of the yearly cycle of the reading of the entire Torah and the beginning of the new cycle of that reading. It is customary during that celebration to dance ia circle around the synagogue carrying the Torah scrolls with great joy and song.  The Torah scrolls themselves were too large and too heavy to be carried by children. The custom developed of having the children carrying flags relating to the holiday during the celebratory dancing with the Torah Scrolls. These flags were made of paper and often decorated and attached to a stick to serve as the flag pole. In older times, an apple and a small lit candle were placed on top of that stick above the flag. The printing of such flags rather than hand-crafted flags appears to have developed in Lviv, Vilnius and Warsaw in the second half of the 19th century. Since the flags were used by children on one day a year, were made of paper and were snot gently treated during the celebrations, most were destroyed ordiscarded. As true examples of ephemera, early examples are very rare. Since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, a large variety of such flags have been printed there.

This is an early example printed by either lithography or wood block. Depicted are scenes of the celebration of the holiday in the synagogue with the Torah Scrolls, celebrating with a drink, a deer and lion of the four animals, and the building of the Sukkah which begins soon after. There is no place or printer indicated, although it is probably, as most flags of the period, from Lithuania. The extraordinary aspect of this paper is that it is a printing sheet with four flags printed on it. This fact, along with the early date and interesting imagery, made this a true rarity.