In 1982, Arthur Shugarman, since his youth an avid collector of coins, stamps, and other items, sold his prized collection of baseball cards upon embarking on a more pious way of life. He soon discovered a new passion: creating and selling cards bearing on one side the image of a rabbi and information about him on the other. Although Shugarman was not the first to distribute such a product, his was the version that caught on and became an unexpected success in ultra-Orthodox circles—but, as Zev Eleff writes, not without arousing discontent:
Sure enough, the first 36-card series produced by [Shugarman’s] non-profit Torah Personalities, Inc. sold out in about six months. Partnering with a well-to-do kosher candy distributor, Shugarman sold 400,000 packages in a variety of Orthodox-dense locales. In Miami, for example, the owner of Judaica Enterprises found it “unbelievable how many calls I’ve been getting about the rabbi cards.” He therefore seized on the demand and ordered 288 packs. . . . Concomitantly, a Judaica dealer in Detroit estimated that among the 10,000 Orthodox Jews in his area, perhaps a little under two-thirds constituted the considerable market for rabbi cards. . . .
[Some, however], felt uneasy about injecting Jewish holiness into the collecting enterprise. A Reform rabbi in Philadelphia described it as “utter nonsense.” An Orthodox clergyman joked that “there’s nothing wrong except that it’s a form of idolatry.” From the opposite perspective, an Orthodox woman from Long Island opined that it did not redound well to rabbis to be associated with the athletes and celebrities often depicted on trading cards. In her words, rabbis had been “grouped in together with ugliness, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt the argument against the distribution of these cards.”
The Torah Personalities operation also seemed to violate the code of modesty that rabbis were expected to follow. In fact, some, like Rabbi Elya Svei of Philadelphia, were reluctant to lend their likenesses to the project, but acquiesced after it was impressed upon them that the cards carried a certain educational value. Nonetheless, the enthusiasts generally overmatched the critics. To date, Torah Personalities Inc. has sold some three-million rabbi cards.
Read more on Lehrhaus: http://www.thelehrhaus.com/scholarship/2016/10/14/gedolim-cards-and-the-commodification-of-rabbi-saints