For many people, this would be the obvious thing to do: If you find something which is not yours, try to locate the owner and return it to him. Yet not everyone would be capable of resisting the urge to take for themselves a large amount of cash with no identifiable owner.
Last week, a Belzer Yeshiva student from Jerusalem discovered a small bag at a bus station in Haifa containing 130,000 shekels in cash (more than 32,000$). He decided to wait for the owner while trying to come up with some other ways of returning the item should the owner not show up. He reckoned that he would wait fifteen minutes and then leave a note with his cellphone number so that the owner could contact him. After fifteen minutes had passed, he decided to wait a few more minutes and to say a Tehillim in the hope that the owner would come soon, since it was a large sum of money and he was about to return to Jerusalem. Ten minutes later the panicked owner arrived to find that the entire sum was intact. The owner, who described himself as “anti- Chareidi until this point”, counted the money and could not believe that the entire sum was there. In a Facebook post published afterwards, he added that he wanted to give the Yeshiva student a nice sum as a reward, but he refused to accept any money, saying it was his mitzvah.
