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500 Pruta
| Issuer | Bank of Israel |
|---|---|
| Year | 1955 |
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| Composition | Log in to see details |
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| Shape | Rectangular |
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| Obverse description | Central vignette of the ruins of the ancient synagogue at Bir'am in Upper Galilee, rendered in intaglio in red, with a large gnarled olive tree to the right and a hilly landscape in the background. The issuer's name בנק ישראל (Bank of Israel) is inscribed in bold Hebrew lettering across the upper field, with the denomination 500 פרוטה in the upper left and חמש מאות פרוטה along the lower right. A cyclamen flower underprint appears in pink and green at the upper right, with two facsimile signatures and their Hebrew titles below the vignette, and an ornate foliate border framing the entire composition. |
|---|---|
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| Protection type | Watermark |
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| Comments |
The 500 Pruta occupies an awkward place in Israeli monetary history. The pruta-based system, inherited from the British Mandate's mil coinage, was already showing strain by the mid-1950s as inflation eroded small denominations into irrelevance. This note was issued just three years before Israel's 1960 currency reform replaced the entire pound-pruta structure with the new Israeli pound at a 1,000-to-1 ratio — meaning the 500 Pruta was, in practical terms, already half a unit of the incoming system before it was even withdrawn.
De La Rue's single watermark security was modest for the period, though consistent with the lower-value notes in this series.