Tefillin Snatcher on the Prowl

By COLlive reporter

An unidentified person is apparently using the sincerity and goodwill of Lubavitch bochurim offering people the chance to do a Mitzvah for his own financial gain.

21 year old Yitzi Kaner from Baltimore, currently learning for Smicha in Morristown, had his tefillin stolen while doing Mivtzoim in Manhattan last Friday afternoon.

The young man was accompanying JJ Duchman and Avremy Kievman, both from Lubavitcher Yeshiva’s Chayolei Beis Dovid program, on a Friday afternoon Mivtzoim outing.

While standing on the corner of 54th St. and Park Avenue, four men approached the group at the same time, one speaking to Kaner and distracting him from the others.

“Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the other men pick up the bag with my tefillin in it,” Kaner told COLlive. “He then began to walk away, and subconsciously I assumed he would still be there in a moment when I finished speaking.”

But the street light changed just then, Kaner reports, and the men blended into the crowd of pedestrian traffic and were gone in an instant.

“I looked around but could not find him. He was gone, along with my tefillin,” he says.

The four guys were about 25-35 years of age, dressed in business suits, he says. The area is also an upscale one, so the bochurim felt very safe.

“I never expected anything like this to happen to us, in that particular neighborhood,” he says.

Kaner says he called the police, and they said they would arrive shortly to investigate, since the 18th precinct is only a few blocks away. It took an hour, however, for them to show up.

“I kept calling back, and they kept saying they were on their way and that I shouldn’t leave,” Kaner says. “But when they finally did show up, they were not very helpful or interested.”

By the time he had finished filing the police report, it was too close to Shabbos to drive or take the subway, so Kaner had to walk all the way back to Crown Heights, finally arriving in 770 at 7:40 pm.

When he arrived home, Kaner says he discovered that another bochur had also had his tefillin stolen the same day while on Mivtzoim, although he is not sure what time it happened.

To add insult to injury, Kaner says the police have not done much to find the perpetrators of the crime. “They said they are busy with a homicide right now, and don’t have time to investigate,” he said. “There are security cameras in the area which could be looked at, but they still haven’t done so.”

In the meantime, Kaner wants other boys who are going on Mivtzoim tomorrow to be vigilant and watch out for their tefillin.

“People should know this could happen to them, and they should not leave their tefillin alone even for a moment, if they don’t want the same happening to them.”