Jewish Volunteers Travel 300 Miles to Upstate Landfill to Find Prayer Bag Lost in Brooklyn

WILLIAMSBURG, NY — A massive search party of over 100 people made it their mission to find a missing tallis bag, and volunteers traveled more than 300 miles from Brooklyn to upstate New York to search for the prayer garb through piles of garbage this week, according to two Jewish news outlets in Brooklyn.

A Williamsburg man was dealt a devastating blow when his fully loaded Orthodox Jewish tallis bag — including his tallis and two pairs of tefillin — went missing.

The man placed his tallis bag into a storage cubby at the Brooklyn Satmar Lee Gardens synagogue on Lorimer Street — and when he came back to retrieve the bag, it was gone. After the man reported the missing tallis bag, he got word that the surveillance video at the synagogue caught footage of the bag falling directly out of the cubby and into an adjacent trash can.

It was discovered that the trash from the synagogue trash can was in one of the 32 containers en route to Waste Management's Fairport landfill southeast of Rochester. The trash was mixed into thousands of tons of other garbage from New York City, The Yeshiva World reports.

On Monday morning, thirty volunteers and 40 temporary workers geared up in protective suits and embarked on a journey to search for the tallis bag through massive piles of trash. By Tuesday night, the group had gone through 16 containers of waste with no tallis bag in sight, according to VIN News.

On Thursday morning, 15 volunteers and 50 hired workers trekked back up to Rochester to continue the hunt for the missing tallis bag.

“We’ve had folks from the local community reaching out and offering their help,” said Nicole Fornof, a communications manager with Waste Management. “We have also had people from other religious communities offering to do whatever they can, people offering hospitality and hotels offering accommodations. We have even had people walking in and asking if they can help search. There have been a lot of people who are willing to chip in.”

There's a $1,000 reward offered for the person who finds the tallis bag.

Photo via Google Maps