Large Handwritten Illustrated "Shanah Tovah" Greeting Card, Presented to Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski – Lodz Ghetto, 1941

Large Handwritten Illustrated "Shanah Tovah" Greeting Card, Presented to Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski – Lodz Ghetto, 1941
A large handwritten, illustrated greeting card, presented to Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski in the Lodz Ghetto. Dworska St., the eve of Rosh Hashanah 5702 (1941). Yiddish.
"Shanah Tovah" card presented to the head of the Lodz Ghetto Judenrat Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski from the "hectographic department on Dworska St." in the ghetto (where the main offices of the Ghetto management were located): "We, the management and the workers of the hectographic department on 1 Dworska [St.], have the honor of sending you our best wishes for the New Year. We, who have the honor of carrying out your orders and demands, daily admire your vigor and persistence in your work for the Jewish population. We wish you success in everything you do" (Yiddish).
Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski (1877-1944) headed the Judenrat of the Lodz Ghetto through its entire existence. Rumkowski is considered one of the most controversial figures in the history of the Holocaust and as the head of the ghetto instituted an extreme personality cult, orchestrating parades in his honor, hanging his picture in schools, issuing banknotes and postage stamps with his portrait, etc., so much that some defined his rule as "a state within a state, a corrupt Fascist miniature". Among his roles, Rumkowski was responsible for providing lists of people to be deported to the extermination camps. In 1944, he was transferred with the last inmates of the ghetto to the Auschwitz extermination camp, where he was murdered, presumably, that same day.
[1] leaf, folded in half (two written and illustrated pages), 30 cm. Good condition. Filing holes. Many stains (mainly to blank verso). Creases. Several tears to margins.