The mother of two students at the Hebrew Day School in Scranton is asking for the public’s help in locating several valuable religious items which she believes were inadvertently picked up from the school’s curb on Friday morning.
Students were returning to the school at 530 Monroe Ave. at about 7:30 a.m. after a camping trip and were unloading chairs, sleeping bags, coolers and other items from the van.
As each item was set down on the curb, someone would scoop it up and take it into the building to be reunited with the student who owned it.
But during the Friday unloading, one last item sat on the curb looking simply like a blue and white Igloo cooler.
After less than a minute, a blue Toyota Corolla stopped in front of the school and a woman emerged, picked up the cooler and put it in the trunk of her car, according to Rebecca Fink.
Shown is a woman who picking up a blue cooler from outside the Hebrew Day School in the Hill Section at 7:49 a.m. on Friday, June 5, 2026. The cooler contained religious items which the owners are hoping to get back. (SUBMITTED)
What the woman could not have known is that the cooler contained two sets of phylacteries — small, black, leather, cube-shaped cases containing scriptural passages written on parchment, with leather straps to bind the boxes to the forehead and arm of observant Jewish men during morning prayers.
Fink said she has no bad feelings toward the woman, who she believes was just picking up a cooler she thought had been discarded.
But now Fink and her two 13-year-old twin boys are without the phylacteries necessary for morning prayer, as well as two personalized velvet bags and a prayer shawl that were also in the cooler, which together cost about $2,400.
She is asking anyone with information to call her at 614-325-0342 or to return the items to the school.