100 Pruta Emergency Fractional Issue

Israel's 1952 fractional notes exist because the new state simply could not produce coins fast enough to meet demand at the lower denominations. The Pruta coinage program was chronically behind schedule, and these paper stopgaps were printed locally — a rare instance of the Israeli government bypassing its usual foreign printing arrangements for a circulating issue.

The series was always intended as temporary, and most notes were destroyed once coin supplies caught up. That disposability, combined with the small format that made individual notes easy to lose or discard, accounts for the genuine scarcity of high-grade survivors today — not collector hoarding or wartime disruption, just ordinary attrition of a note nobody expected to keep.