JEWISH NATIONAL COUNCIL. Gilyon minhelet ha-'am : tsaṿim ṿe-hoda'ot. [Orders and Notices.] Tel Aviv: 10 May 1948.

Fine copy of a very rare list of decrees and ordinances published by the Jewish National Council just prior to Israeli independence.

8vo (238 x 171 mm.) 28pp. Stapled self-wrappers (red underlining to title and imprint).

Founded in 1920, the Jewish National Council (JNC) was an unofficial Jewish organisation that in effect shadowed the British bureaucracy of the Mandate. It conducted Jewish communal affairs, and formed one of the three main organisations that shaped the Jewish community in Palestine, alongside the Jewish Agency (responsible for immigration into Palestine), and the Haganah (the paramilitary Jewish defence force).

As the Jewish population in Palestine grew, the JNC adopted more functions, including departments responsible for Arab and British relations, education, health care and welfare services. Thus the JNC became a ‘state within a state’, and enabled the Jews to establish an effective, working provisional government upon the declaration of the independent Jewish state of Israel on 14 May 1948.

This collection of announcements, orders, regulations and ordinances, decreed at various times by various JNC institutions during the latter days of the British Mandate, was published just four days before the declaration of independence, and thus bears witness to the transition from foreign imperial power to independent Jewish rule in Israel.

ONLY 5 COPIES CAN BE TRACED WORLDWIDE in libraries: National Library of Israel (2 copies), Harvard, Johns Hopkins University, and Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati.

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