Half a Billion Dollars in Checks Found Stuffed Into Western Wall

Have you visited Israel lately? By any chance, did you happen to visit the Western Wall in Jerusalem and manage to stuff an envelope containing more than 500 checks, each for a million dollars, in the crevices of the wall?  Well, somebody did, and according to a report yesterday by the Associated Press,

Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, who oversees Jerusalem's Western Wall, said a worshipper found an envelope at the site Wednesday with 507 checks in the amount of about $1 million each. They were not addressed to anyone, and it's doubtful they can be cashed.

Rabinovitch said most are Nigerian. Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said some were from the United States, Europe and Asia.

Rabinovitch says he has found similar checks in Western Wall charity boxes before, but they all bounced. He says most of them were written by people from Africa.

The rabbi says he thinks the check writers "wanted to give all they had to the Creator of the universe."

But if the checks bounced, "all they had" must have been nothing.

Our first thought was how could anyone find a crevice in the wall big enough to hold an envelope with 507 checks? There's usually barely enough space to stuff a folded up piece of paper. But watching the video below we realized that it only looks that way because most of the time the crevices are overstuffed, probably with envelopes of checks from Nigeria. 

That's why the rabbi and his staff go digging before Rosh Hashanah and Pesach for the notes, checks, and whatever else is deposited in the Wall National Bank. Then they bundle them in large black trash bags and bury them unread on the Mount of Olives.

Do you think we're kidding? Watch the video below.

Shabbat shalom!

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