$1000 Dollar Reward Offered for Return of a “Holy” Dollar Bill
Materialists are often accused of worshipping money but they’re pikers compared to the congregation of the Chabad Palm Beach Synagogue in Florida. Until Tuesday night, they had a dollar bill which had been especially blessed by the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh and last leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement of Hasidic Judaism. Before his death in 1994, Rabbi Shneerson was in the habit of handing out these blessed dollar bills to visitors at his Brooklyn headquarters. Now they are prized as holy relics.
This particular one was kept in an ornate wooden donation box with Rabbi Shneerson’s picture on it… that is, as mentioned earlier, until Tuesday night when somebody broke into the synagogue and stole the donation box.
Now the Palm Beach Garden Chabad Center is offering a $1000 reward for the return of the blessed banknote and no questions asked.
As the Chabad Center’s Rabbi Shlomo Ezagui told MSNBC.com, “To the thief it’s not worth anything — no more than just $1… It’s like a (Pablo) Picasso painting. You know, to a thief it’s just a piece of canvas. But to somebody who appreciates art, it may be worth millions of dollars.”
The theft was caught on a surveillance camera and the video can be viewed in a news report here.
There’s a long history of strife over holy relics like Rabbi Shneerson’s dollar bill. In 1204 CE, for instance, the 4th Crusade, frustrated in it’s attempt to get to the Holy Land and liberate Jerusalem from the Infidel, decided to storm and sack the Christian city of Constantinople instead. Among the prized holy relics they stole from the looted churches and cathedrals was not one but two heads of John the Baptist!
Of course you don’t have to go that far back to find strife over stolen or desecrated holy objects. In 2008, Webster Cook, a student at the University of Central Florida held the Body of Christ (IE: a Communion wafer) hostage and so upset the congregation that one parishioner grappled with him and tried to pry it out of his hand. And just last year in Spain, a priest got into a 3 Stooges-style slapping fest with a parishioner over another desecrated wafer.
At least the Chabad people aren’t getting violent over their holy relic.
