(Rabbi) Card Crazy After All These Years

Boris Weintraub

“I was one of Maryland’s first major collectors of baseball cards,” says Arthur Shugarman as he strokes his graying beard and adjusts his yarmulke.

“I had more than 100,000, and by my teen-age years I was becoming a dealer. But in my 20s, I became, let’s not say “ultra-Orthodox,” but strictly Orthodox. And as baseball became more about money and as I learned more about Orthodoxy, my heroes switched from baseball players to rabbis. In 1982, I sold most of my collection.”

But the collecting urge, and the fascination with trading cards, never left Shugarman. Six years after selling his baseball cards, he started selling his own creation: Rabbi Cards. He has put out six sets, from 24 to 80 different cards in each, with pictures of Orthodox rabbis on the front, their stories on the back.

“We’ve sold about three million cards,” he says. Numbers matter to the middle-aged Shugarman. Professionally, he is a certified public accountant. His business card notes that he specializes in the “3 R’s: rabbis, retirement plans, refunds,” and adds that his firm is “honest and aggressive.” Its office shares a well-worn duplex with the Rabbi Cards headquarters and the Shugarman home in a heavily Jewish, synagogue-filled Baltimore neighborhood. Matching doormats provide guidance: “Shugarman home,” says one, pointing to the door on the right, where he lives with his wife, two sons and two daughters, ages 10 to 19; “Shugarman office,” says the other, pointing to the door on the left.

The cluttered office is staffed by serious-looking, primly dressed young women, and equally serious-looking men who, like Shugarman himself, sport beards and wear black yarmulkes, white shirts with dangling tzitzit and black pants. Shugarman, who seems to know where everything is, navigates a dimly lit room where filing cabinets filled with Rabbi Cards are kept, passing tables stacked high with folders and boxes that nearly obscure his younger brother Laibel, toiling away at a corner computer.

Before Shugarman began turning out Rabbi Cards, photographs of prominent Orthodox rabbis were sold in Jewish bookstores, primarily in New York and in Israel. These moment/images, generally taken at public events, were sold without the rabbis’ permission, for about two dollars apiece.

“I thought that was expensive,” Shugarman recalls, sitting at a large table in his office’s minimally decorated conference room. “There was no identification, no information; people just collected pictures of rabbis they knew.”

He decided he could do better by providing information about each rabbi pictured, cutting the price to four-for-a-dollar, mass-producing the cards and distributing them throughout the United States and in Canada.

His first series—no, no bubble gum then or since—featured glossy photographs of the most popular rabbis of the day, as well as some who had recently died. He made a point of seeking the approval of his living subjects, though some initially balked. One suggested he picture only dead rabbis; Shugarman convinced him that since he hoped the cards would lead children to think of rabbis as heroes, it wasn’t a good idea to suggest to kids that one had to be dead to be a leader. Another humbly objected to having his picture distributed. Look, Shugarman responded, “your face is already in every store because the photographer took the picture without asking. At least I asked!”

The first series, and a second starring 75 more rabbis, provided biographical information and interesting details, both in Hebrew and English. For example, the card bearing the stern visage of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein notes that he was born in the Jewish year 5655 and died in 5746, was a Posek Hador (decider of the generation), and says that “after coming to New York in Kislev, 5697, Reb Moshe became the leading halachic authority of the generation.”

Shugarman makes it clear that the subjects of his cards are not defined by being “best” or “smartest” or anything other than popular. Popularity in the Orthodox world, as he describes it, is based on the number of students a rabbi attracts.
“Nobody elected these people; they were popular because people went to them to study with or ask questions,” he says. “Almost all our rabbis have white beards; it takes years to build up a following, but it’s a form of pure democracy.”

The second series of cards took up so much time that Shugarman summoned Laibel back from an Israeli yeshiva to help. Eventually the pair ran out of popular and published a series that elucidated such themes as Jewish unity and holiday celebrations on the back. The most recent series features nearly 80 of the Torah’s 613 mitzvot, based on their relevance to Jewish life today and on whether they are positive—things one should do, not those one shouldn’t. “For example,” Shugarman explains, “give a stolen object back, return a lost object, get married.”
So who buys Rabbi Cards? Shugarman says his prime audience is children but generally, adults—parents or teachers—do the buying. “In a lot of cases, they don’t have TV, and parents say this is a way for their kids to have kosher fun,” says Shugarman, who hopes the cards help build Orthodox Jewish children’s self-esteem. “Teachers and parents use them as incentives: ‘Do your homework and I’ll buy you some cards.’ I’ve heard of a camp that gives out these cards to kids who come to special learning programs.

“One teacher takes his class to see a famous rebbe in Brooklyn who has tens of thousands of followers every year. After the first set of cards came out with that rabbi, the excitement of the kids was greater, because they had his picture. The picture made him come alive. It was like when I was a kid and saw a famous ballplayer, like Hank Aaron, and got his autograph. To see someone you’ve gotten to know makes a bigger impression.”

Shugarman is tossing around ideas for future series—maybe on themes of hospitality or prayer or a new biographical series focusing on rabbis who’ve grown to prominence in recent years. Whichever direction he takes, the next cards will still feature only Orthodox rabbis.

“A lot of my volunteer work goes into this, and other kinds of rabbis are not where my feelings are,” he says delicately. “But also, I’m not sure there would be the same kind of appeal. My sense is that few people would want to know about other Conservative or Reform or Reconstructionist rabbis besides the ones who know them. Within the Orthodox sector, we specifically have an interest in what other rabbis are doing.”

The veteran collector looks forward to the day when his Rabbi Cards will be considered true collectibles. He won’t reprint any of the older series, though his inventory is running out, because doing so would lower their future value. He sells the first two series only in complete sets, and notes that the price he charges has tripled.

“I expect it will take 10 years for these to become valued collectibles; it took baseball cards maybe 25 years to become established,” Shugarman says. Then his eyes twinkle. “I’ve heard that some of these cards are for sale on eBay.”