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Letter - unique in content... from Binyamin, son of Rabbi Lichtenstein, gabbai of the Rabi Meir Ba’a’l HaNes charity fund in the United States, to the philanthropist Moshe Montefiore. 114 Canal Street, New York, 06/06/1855 to Grosvenor Gate, Park Lane, London. As a general rule, letters addressed to Sir Montefiore had one goal – requesting a donation – in various ways and using different words, but all, as a matter of course, for the identical purpose. In this unique letter, the gabbai tzedakah actually sends a donation to Moshe Montefiore … obviously not for him personally, but for him to transfer to the Jewish community in Tiberias. It was probably for this reason that the gabbai tzedakah dared open his letter to Sir Montefiore with the blunt assertion: “I will not beg your pardon for this imposition”! However, in the letter, the minister’s famous humility is clear, as his contemporaries did not hesitate to approach him as a messenger to transfer donations to the Holy Land. The charity administrator, speaking as one philanthropist to another, adds a request that Montefiore do him a favor and ask the people in the Land of Israel to write him letters “because letters from the Land of Israel are very precious to us.”

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