Tefillin Thief Caught on Camera

By COLlive reporter

For a while now, pairs of Tefillin have been mysteriously disappearing from Chabad’s Tefillin booth at the central bus station in Afula, a northern city in Israel.

So the booth’s operator, Uri Nachum, installed 2 security cameras.

Soon enough, a man in his 40’s, wearing shorts and a Kippa, was seen approaching the stand and slipping the Tefillin into a green bag after fiddling with the charity box.

That was the 9th pair that was stolen this year.

Nachum alerted store owners in the proximity of the stand, and the station’s security guards waited for a man of that description.

“I don’t get it,” Nachum later told Israeli TV’s Channel 2, saying he does not understand how a person could do such a thing.

“How can someone come to such a state of mind. He’s must be like a child or a drunk that does not know what he is doing,” he said, trying to make sense of the thief’s motives.

The next time the man came around, he was in a jeans and a Kippa again. After he wrapped the Tefillin in a newspaper, he was held up by a guard and a local.

“I’m an old man and I came to put on Tefillin,” the thief told the security guard Eliran Dahan.

When that didn’t help, the thief begun cursing and threatening, only to later admit to the police that he sold each pair for $250.