In November, a 10-year-old grilled cheese sandwich bearing a likeness to the Virgin Mary sold on eBay for $28,000 and made headlines everywhere.
A month later, a religious relic of another sort went up for sale on the Internet auction site. It was a blue velvet kippah from the 1971 bar mitzvah of Jonathan Charles Levine at Castro Valley’s Reform Congregation Shir Ami.
But although the kippah was 23 years older than the sandwich, it netted less than six bucks.
Levine, now 46 and chair of the urban and regional planning department at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, is a bit miffed that a keepsake from his coming-of-age ceremony yielded the seller only 2.99 in British currency.
Actually, “miffed” may be an exaggeration. “Baffled” might be more accurate in describing Levine’s reaction to learning that a 33-year-old kippah inscribed with his name wound up in the hands of someone in Scotland.
Nonetheless, the story is being called the “Chanukah miracle” by his mother, Rose Levine of Castro Valley, the longtime docent outreach chair at Berkeley’s Judah L. Magnes Museum.
Dean Shapiro, a rabbinical student interning at Shir Ami, received an e-mail just before Chanukah, through the congregation’s Web site. The e-mail sought the whereabouts of Jonathan Charles Levine of Castro Valley.
The sender of the e-mail, who lives in Scotland, had just purchased the kippah from eBay for her son, who collects them.
But upon receiving it, she thought it might have sentimental value to the family and that perhaps its rightful owners would want it back. Using the World Wide Web, she found the contact information for the Castro Valley synagogue and sent the e-mail.
Shapiro forwarded the message to Rose Levine, asking whether Jonathan was a family member. Upon receiving it, she forwarded the message to Jonathan.
“Coming from a family with more than enough practical jokers to carry out such a stunt, I naturally assumed that somebody was vigorously yanking my leg,” Jonathan wrote in a brief story that he circulated among friends and family about the incident. “Fortunately, eBay allows users to peruse completed listings of items sold, so a quick search would surely reveal the hoax for what it was.”
But when he went onto eBay, he found otherwise.
“As you can see in the pic, this is a very nice piece,” the listing said. “This would make an excellent addition to your collection or a nice piece to wear.”
In further correspondence, the seller revealed that he had rescued the kippah from a dump in England, causing the Levines to wonder how it possibly could have landed there.
“So this was no joke,” Jonathan Levine wrote. “But the whole affair leaves more questions than answers, some of them quite unsettling to the ego of the middle-aged bar mitzvah boy: How did the item make its way to the United Kingdom? Why did the agent of its transport deem it of such little value that it should be sold unceremoniously in this global flea market, together with the other flotsam of industrial capitalism? And most unsettling: Why did it only fetch the insulting price of 2.99 pounds sterling, which the seller had set as the minimum bid for the item?”
Levine did say that he has relatives in Great Britain, so the most plausible explanation they came up with is that his grandmother brought some kippot to the United Kingdom to give to his British relatives, and perhaps the kippah landed in the dump when a relative died.
Nevertheless, his entire family has had a good chuckle over the whole thing.
And as for the kippah? The family had saved a few from the occasion themselves, so they did not want this one back. They thanked the buyer for her offer to return it, but instructed her or her son to wear it in good health.