Trans Pacific Route From Brooklyn NY To Jerusalem, Palestine 1941

I would like to know why this cover from Brooklyn NY to Jerusalem went via the Trans-Pacific route? Was that the fastest way for the item to get there? Was there no airmail over the Atlantic due to WWII?

Thanks for any help or comments.

Good question!

What would a viable routing to British-occupied Palestine have been in November 1941?

Eastwards from Brooklyn?

UK-Egypt-Palestine would have been dicey because the war in North Africa meant that Egypt could fall at any time (a sensibly expected result), and shipping to Egypt thru the U-boat-infested Mediterranean would have been at great risk.

UK-SouthAfrica-Palestine would have been routed, well, how? Thru German East Africa?

A routing thru Hong Kong & India, OTOH, would have looked open & secure.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Good thinking, there are no transit or receiving marks on this cover which is why I asked. Thanks for your help.

That cover is a keeper!

EDIT: Perhaps of interest: http://www.jewishhistoryhhc.org/upl...f05c7cd9.pdf

http://halachicadventures.com/wp-co...zah-fund.pdf

The routing was possibly Singapore, Bangkok, Calcutta, Karachi, Bahrain, Basra, Baghdad and Jerusalem. It may have been flown by Clipper to Singapore, although there are no markings to indicate such (Pan Am operated the Trans-Pacific route during this period). Hopefully someone will have the answer.

KGB thanks for posting those great resources, I am building a collection of charity covers and it is not easy to find the enclosures with receipts or the printed matter containing solicitations for donations. I have a few outgoing covers that have the complete enclosures including unused return envelope and printed matter.

Can you tell me what the stamp labels were for? Did people purchase these and the proceeds go to the charity or were they just for publicity?

Thanks

As far as I can tell, these poster stamps were given as a kind of receipt for donations to the charity.

Throughout the war there were changes to mail routes due to the changing battle fronts. This included the long distance routes to various countries around the world. At the time this cover was mailed the trans Atlantic route to Palestine was considered to be too dangerous to be reliable so most mail was re-routed to go across the Pacific on one of Pan Am's regular trans Pacific Clipper flights and then across southern Asia. This is an example of mail that was flown on that particular route which is correct for the date it was mailed. It is too bad that this was not mailed just a couple of weeks later - if it was it would have been quite rare and valuable. What I am talking about is it would have been very cool to have been on the Pan Am "California Clipper" which departed on one of the regular trans Pacific flights from San Francisco on December 2, 1941. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7 the California Clipper was nearing New Zealand. As such, it was cut off from returning to California across the Pacific and had to improvise by continuing westward via Australia, Java, Ceylon, India, Bahrain, Sudan, Belgian Congo, across the Atlantic to Brazil, then Trinidad and eventually reaching New York City on January 6, 1942. So far, no one has found any mail that was on board that sudden improvised around the world flight back to safety.