  In this article the concept of handle element of Frobenius algebras, as in
[16], will be extended to nearly Frobenius algebras. The main properties of
this element will be analyzed in this case and many examples will be
constructed. Also the Casimir and Schur elements of symmetric algebras will be
considered ([8]) and generalized for Frobenius and nearly Frobenius algebras
showing which results still hold in this framework and which ones fail.
