Man Saved 1980’s Rebbe Trading Cards, Thinking They’d Be Valuable Someday

Neighbors bought Upper Deck baseball cards, but Sam and his classmates latched onto a more Jewish equivalent that teachers had encouraged them to collect.

Teaneck, July 19 – A middle-aged man took a rueful look at several boxes in his storage unit today and voiced his disappointment that an investment he made as a boy, buying large numbers of trading cards featuring the faces and some information about certain prominent Jewish spiritual leaders, has not borne the fruit he anticipated at the height of the trading card craze.

Sam Olnik, 47, came across two shoeboxes full of “Gadol Cards” he amassed in the mid-late 1980’s as he rummaged through his basement storage room this evening. The educator and father of five took a break from his search for various boxes and bags of hand-me-downs for his younger children to sift through the collection, which, for reasons still unclear to him, has failed to appreciate in market value since he bought his first Rav Moshe Feinstein in 1986.

“Ooh, I forgot I had a Chazon Ish!” he exclaimed, referring to Rabbi Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz (1878-1953) by the title of latter’s magnum opus, a common practice in Jewish tradition. “I though I’d traded it to Yitz Bergman for a Rav Aharon Kotler,” (1892-1962), the founder of the famed yeshiva Beis Midrash Gavoah of Lakewood, New Jersey.

Olnik pulled out his phone and did a quick internet search to determine the resale value of his precious cards, with no results.

“Huh,” he stated, nonplussed. “That can’t be right.”

Olnik began his “Rebbe card” collecting when other children his age in the mid-late 1980’s, and into the 1990’s, focused more on baseball cards. Neighbors of the Olnik family bought packets of 10 Upper Deck baseball cards in 1989, hoping for a Ken Griffey, Jr., rookie card – but Sam and a handful of his classmates latched onto a more Jewish equivalent that some teachers had encouraged them to collect: The Munkaczer Rebbe (Chaim Elazar Spira, 1868-1937 “Minchas Elazar”); the Ohr Sameach (Meir Simcha HaKohen of Dvinsk, 1843-1926); and the especially rare Beis HaLevi (Yosef Ber Soloveitchik senior, 1820-1892), a great-grandson of Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin, founder of the eponymous yeshiva in Lithuania and disciple of the Vilna Gaon.

“I never actually got a Reb Chaim of Volozhin,” lamented Olnik. “Feivel Katz had one though. Lucky jerk.”

Upon finishing his rummaging task and putting the boxes and bags back in some kind of order, Olnik sat down for a less perfunctory round of googling, with similar results.

“Can’t be,” he mumbled. “These things have to be worth a fortune by now. Who wouldn’t want a Belzer Rebbe card? It ways here he knew the whole Talmud by heart by the age of ten. Well, to be fair, I think it says that about every single one in the collection.”

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