Million dollar mattress catches Israel's imagination (News Feature)

By Jeff Abramowitz Jun 11, 2009, 13:25 GMT

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.