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TRabbi Noach Muroff 31 Atlanta Georgia

The Muroff Moment

The moment I became a household name

 Three years ago my wife Esther and I bought a desk on Craig’s List and brought it home. It didn’t quite fit into my office so we had to take it apart. When we did we found a shopping bag behind the file cabinet drawers in which there was $98 000 in cash! Patty the woman we bought the desk from had told us she’d purchased it at Staples and assembled it herself so we knew right away it was her money. I had learned the different halachos of aveidas akum and it was clear I had to return the money to make a kiddush Hashem. I also certainly wanted to avoid the potential for a chillul Hashem.

We called Patty right away at 11 that night. She was totally blown away and in tears. She couldn’t believe that we called her — it was her inheritance and she hadn’t been able to find it because it fell behind the drawer. The next morning we went to return the money and took along our four children as we saw this as a unique chinuch opportunity. We kept the desk of course.

That would have been the end of that. But a few months later we met Rav Shmuel Kamenetsky at a regional Torah Umesorah convention in Boston and told him what happened. He said we should publicize the story. So I called the local CNN and they sent down a camera crew to interview us.

In the beginning

I grew up in Ottawa Canada — not your typical Brooklyn guy. I learned in Eretz Yisrael as a bochur and then stayed for kollel. After that we moved back to the States where I took a job teaching ninth through twelfth grade at a small yeshivah in Connecticut. The desk story happened just as we were starting our fifth year there.