50 New Sheqalim Shmuel Yosef 'Shai' Agnon - 50th Anniversary of Israel Issue

Shai Agnon won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966 — the only Hebrew-language writer ever to do so — and this commemorative issue marks both his presence on the standard 50 Sheqalim series and the state's fiftieth anniversary. The Canadian Bank Note Company had been the primary printer for Bank of Israel notes since the 1980s, and Eliezer Weishoff's engraving work appears across much of that relationship, giving the series a visual consistency unusual for a central bank that changed printers several times in its early decades.

The look-through register feature, relatively modest by late-1990s security standards, reflects a transitional moment before polymer and holographic strip technologies became routine in Israeli currency.