A fund-raising campaign poster. Not a typical work of Moi Ver, who is best known for his photographic works.

The 'Shekel' posters were serious Zionist fund-raising campaigns from the pre-state era in Israel. These posters urged workers to buy the 'Zionist Shekel', which was a symbolic annual membership fee for the World Zionist Organisation. Paying the fee granted Jewish workers the official right to vote for delegates in the World Zionist Congress. Labour parties used these posters to mobilise working-class voters and secure political influence within the Zionist leadership. The total number of buyers served as a census to prove widespread global Jewish support for establishing the State of Israel to the British Mandate and the world. The drawing in the poster is by the Israeli painter Esther Lurie (1913-1998).

Moï Ver (born Moshe Vorobeichic, later Moshé Raviv; 1904–1995) was a Lithuanian-born Israeli photographer and painter regarded as a central pioneer of modernist and avant-garde photography. In 1927, he attended the famous Bauhaus school in Dessau, studying under influential artists like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers. He then moved to Paris to study photography and film at the École de Photo Ciné. In Paris he adopted the pseudonym Moï Ver and worked alongside contemporaries like Man Ray, André Kertész and Germaine Krull. He became celebrated for his 'New Vision' (Neues Sehen) technique - utilising extreme camera angles, double exposures, photomontages and dynamic cropping. In 1934 he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, adopting the Hebrew name Moshé Raviv. He settled initially in Tel Aviv and opened a photography studio. By the 1950s, he moved away from commercial photography and turned primarily to painting, becoming one of the founding members of the famous artists' colony in Safed in northern Israel, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

Canvas-backed lithograph print, 95 x 63.5 cm; framed & glazed.