(Illustration)
(Illustration)Nati Shohat/Flash 90

Last week, a Belz yeshiva student found a small bag containing 130,000 shekels (over $32,600) in cash at a bus station in Haifa.

Without thinking twice, he decided he would wait for its owner while trying to come up with other ways to return the lost item should its owner not show up.

As the minutes ticked by, a secular man came to the bus stop and retrieved the bag from the yeshiva boy after correctly identifying the bag by describing it sight unseen, as prescribed by halakha when a finder attempts to return a lost object to a claimant.

The man was so moved by the student's good deed he wrote a post on Facebook retelling the incident.

"When I got to the station, a haredi boy was sitting on the bench and he asked if he could help me. I told him my story and he told me: 'I came here twenty-five minutes ago and saw the bag. I opened it and I saw quite a large sum of money. I told myself that I'll wait here for fifteen minutes and if the bag’s owner did not show, then I would leave a note with my cell number so he or she could reach me.'

'Fifteen minutes later, when no one came, I said to myself because I live in Jerusalem and because the money may be urgent to its owner, I will wait longer. I recited a verse from Tehilim (Psalms) so the owner would come soon and barely ten minutes later you arrived.'"

The secular man described in his post that he was not sympathetic towards haredim, to say the least – until now.

"Until the moment I finished counting, I could not believe I had found my money and had it all back (I ‘was’ so ‘anti-Orthodox’ up until now). I wanted to give him a nice sum, but he absolutely refused to accept anything, and said that it was his mitzvah," he wrote.