My Lost Purse

My Lost Purse

Last week I ran into Mazal, my old down-the-street neighbor from Nachlaot.

“Jeeeny! We miss you! We miss seeing all of your kids! Now there are no kids left!”

Let me explain…In the corner of Nachlaot where I lived for the last 13 years, among the 100 or so apartments in our courtyard, there were only about 6 families with little kids. And in that whole area, we Weisbergs were the only large family, a drop in the Nachlaot ocean.

So moving to Kiryat Moshe has been a bit of culture shock for me. Here almost every single woman I pass on the street is a JewishMOM with a child or two or three (or more) at her side. Here, we ARE the ocean.

At about 5 PM this afternoon I was looking for my wallet, and I couldn’t find it anywhere.

When looking for things, experience has taught me to follow Josh’s sage advice: “Look in the most obvious place. And then, if you don’t find what you’re looking for, look there again.”

But I did look in the most obvious place, and I looked there again. And then I looked everywhere, everywhere in the house. And then I looked there again. And then I realized that my purse (containing my credit card, ATM card, cash and a lot of other important stuff) must have dropped out of the bottom of Yonatan’s stroller when we were on the way back from the playground earlier that afternoon.

So I sent my daughter to the playground to see if the purse was there. Nope. And then I walked to the playground to see if I could find it. Nope. And then I walked the few blocks to my daughter’s gan. Nope. Nothing.

And then my phone rang.

“Hi, this is Ariella. I met you at the playground a few weeks ago. You probably don’t remember me, but I just wanted you to know that someone found your handbag.”

“Wow, fantastic! Where is it?”

“A woman found it on the sidewalk outside her house and she saw it belonged to someone who speaks English, so she thought maybe I knew you…So I said I did, and then I got your number from Nechama.”

In other words a JewishMOM found my purse, and called another JewishMOM who got my number from another JewishMOM I’m friends with and called this JewishMOM and made her very happy.

And I felt thankful to no longer be a lonely drop in the ocean. To be held, finally, wrapped firmly within the safe embrace of an entire ocean of JewishMOMs.

5 comments

  1. That is one of the things that I absolutely love about our neighborhoods – hashavat aveda is taken very seriously. But these women really went all out to make sure to find you. Kol Hakavod to them.

  2. Only in Israel! 😀

  3. We also moved 5 months ago and where we moved, my family of 4 kids was HUGE.
    Now we live on a block with a family with 12, a family with 6 and lots more have more than 10 in our neighborhood! It is so different and so wonderful to be around:)
    So I don’t agree to the previous poster “only in Israel”! We have our park too where we all congregate…

  4. Our community (North Miami Beach)is very active in Hashavas Avaida. There is someone who takes the time to send out e-mails to the community for all types of things including lost objects. Me k’amecha Yisroel!(who is like your Jewish people?)

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