Tel Aviv rediscovers an old flame

Three years ago, during restoration work at an old printing press in central Petah Tikva, Shai Farkash, an expert on preserving wall paintings, came across an obscure sign.

This was not the first time he had encountered a metal sign on the wall of an old building. In most cases, they helped him find the original layers of paint behind them, but normally he would ignore them.

This time, however, he noticed there was something written on the rusty sign and decided to investigate.

After cleaning off the rust, he saw the name Generali on the sign. His investigation revealed this was the name of an Italian insurance company that was established in the 19th century in Trieste and that the sign served as a "fire mark" - a metal or enamel sign placed at the entrance to a building to identify that it is insured against fire.

He soon found that fire marks - which bear the emblems of all kinds of different insurance companies - today serve as collectors' items and have an interesting history of their own.

In Israel there appears to be only one collector specializing in fire marks: attorney Uzi Zack. Zack became acquainted with fire marks while studying insurance at the end of the 1970s in London. He joined up with a group of collectors headed by the Tenth Duke of Rutland, Charles Manners and accompanied them in their searches for fire marks near the duke's ancestral home.

On his return home, Zack began scouring the country for such signs, driving around in his old Subaru with a creaky ladder. His search revealed some 50 fire marks that had been hanging in buildings which were insured by companies from Palestine and abroad. The collection is now being exhibited at Discount Bank's HerzLilienblum Museum of Banking and Nostalgia in Tel Aviv.

"Most of the signs that were in Israel and that I and a friend removed had been hung in old and dilapidated buildings and had been painted over. If we hadn't taken them down, they would have disappeared like all the others," Zack said this week.

He believes they were left on the walls by painters who, instead of removing them, simply plastered over them and painted them.

"Contrary to England, where our activities were welcomed, here in Israel we had to find all kinds of excuses. We said we were students from the Technion who were doing research on rust, or that we had come from the municipality to remove the mark because they had not had paid the tax for signs, or that we had come from the insurance company to take down the sign since the premiums had not been paid," he said.

The reactions were typical, he said.

"Some of the people asked if they could participate in the experiments, others asked us for insurance offers," he said. "Some asked us to fix the wall if we were already there and others simply chased us away."

Sign of the times

As someone who understands insurance, Zack can provide insight into the meaning of the large number of fire marks in Israel.

"This is an indication of the strength of the economy at a time when Israel was an immigrant society," he said. "The fact that people insured their property indicates processes of growth and investment as well as sophisticated business management."

The exhibition includes an explanation of the history of fire marks. The first signs were hung in London after the Great Fire of 1666 in that city. Groups of Londoners realized that it was worth their while to join forces to protect their properties and to pay a premium to the insurance company which would send firefighters to a building it insured and pay them compensation for damages if necessary. The fire marks at that time were the actual policy and the firefighters used them to identify the buildings where they had to go into action.

Later the insurance business spread and the signs were sent all over Europe and other parts of the world. The sign then became a means of marketing the insurance firm. They started showing up here at the end of the 19th century and continued to be hung also during the first half of the 20th century.

Altogether some 55 kinds of fire marks were hung here - a relatively high number. They include rare signs.

"In this country, they were a public relations device and had no connection to the fire brigade," Zack says. "The signs were hung as proof that the insurance existed. The firefighters did not belong to the insurance company and the signs were merely used for publicity."

Farkash, who initiated the exhibition, says that the first building to which the fire mark was returned was the old printing press in Petah Tikva. It is clear to him that the signs must go back to the buildings as part of the restoration. The marks are restored with the use of catalogs, he says.

Tamar Tuchler, director of the Tel Aviv region of the Society for Preservation of Israel Heritage Sites, says this is the first time that the fire marks are being brought to the public's attention.

"It has aroused a great deal of interest," she says. "We have got feedback from people who have fire marks or who have seen them."

She asks that anyone who has details about the signs inform the SPHS because they would like to investigate more thoroughly and put out a catalog together with the insurance companies.

The exhibition is on display at the HerzLilienblum Museum in Tel Aviv until February 25. It was made possible through cooperation between Discount Bank and the Council for the Preservation of Historic Sites in Israel.

The exhibition also includes authentic fire fighting equipment from the early days of the state - donated by the Fire Fighting and Rescue Authority.