1/2 Lira Feast of Purim

Issued to mark Purim, one of the most publicly celebrated holidays in the Jewish calendar, this piece belongs to a short run of commemorative fractional coins produced by the Bank of Israel in the early 1960s when the young state was still actively building its numismatic identity through holiday-themed issues. The series drew on a roster of Jewish festivals as a deliberate cultural project, not a monetary one — circulation was never the point.

KM#31 is frequently encountered with uneven luster from inconsistent planchet preparation at the Berne mint, where several Israeli issues of this period were produced under contract.