Tel Aviv - Israelis are on a treasure hunt. Searching
however not for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but for
the mattress at the bottom of the garbage dump.
And not in order to get a good night's sleep, but because it
reportedly - if not in reality - contains a million dollars in cash.
The saga has caught the imagination of Israelis, featured
prominently in the print and electronic media, and even drawn a
comment from the normally-reserved Governor of the Bank of Israel.
It all began Monday night in the suburb of Ramat Gan, east of Tel
Aviv, when a woman identified only as Anat, took possession of her
new mattress. Getting the delivery men to help her, she took the old
one down in the street to be collected by the garbage men in the
morning, lay down on her new acquisition, and fell asleep.
'The new mattress is a good one and I'd had an intensive day,' she
explained to the German Press Agency dpa, Thursday.
Only when she awoke the next morning did she realise that she'd
forgotten to remove her life's savings - 'a large sum of money,' but
not the million dollars of some media reports - from the old
mattress.
Which, when she frantically ran downstairs, had already been
picked up by the garbage men.
A three-hour hunt through the main garbage dump east of Tel Aviv,
which receives 3,000 tonnes of rubbish daily, revealed nothing.
Searches at other huge dumps, in the south near Beersheba, and in the
east by the Dead Sea, proved equally fruitless.
Speaking to dpa Thursday, Anat said she had virtually given up
hope of finding the money.
It was possible that a homeless person had taken the mattress
before the garbagemen came, and even now was unwittingly sleeping on
a fortune.
Or it was possible - although unlikely given the publicity
surrounding the story - that the mattress lies undiscovered at one of
the dumps.
Or it could be that the money was found and taken, as word of the
the supposed million dollar mattress spread even before Anat arrived
to look for it.
The story of Anat and her mattress first appeared as a small item
on the back page of the Yediot Aharanot mass circulation daily on
Wednesday, and promptly burst into public consciousness.
It featured prominently on the evening news bulletins on
television, although Channel 10 news anchor Guy Zohar did question
some contradictions in the story, such as reports which said
variously that Anat bought the mattress for herself, and also for her
mother.
He also questioned whether the missing sum was one million dollars
in cash, as some dispatches claimed, or if it was less, as Anat
herself confirmed Thursday was the case.
Even Stanley Fischer, the Governor of the Bank of Israel, was
unable to remain aloof from the hurdy-gurdy sparked by the story.
Hearing Anat kept her money in the mattress because of a bad
experience in the past with banks, the Zambian-born Fischer was moved
to defend Israel's banks as being safe places in which to keep
savings.
Safer than mattresses, at any rate.
The milion-dollar mattress is not the first time the value of a
missing item has grown in the telling in Israel.
Around four years ago, a child accidentally threw away his
mother's basic diamond stud earrings, had bene left on a tissue. The
monetary value of the earrings was not great, but the sentimental
value was, prompting a frantic search for them in the garbage.
In the media reports, the story metamorphised into a child
throwing away a bag full of diamonds.
USA
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