A yellowing page promised him a gold mine: 12 years later the answer arrived | Sam Siebert

Meir remembered that moment well, right after his aunt passed away. He forced himself to enter her apartment so he could go through the old belongings and the many papers in her apartment. Someday he would have to clear out the property, and there is never a good time for that. Suddenly, a yellowing page caught his eye in one of the drawers. It was a land purchase contract. The purchase was made by her father somewhere in the thirties. Which means that if this land actually exists and still belongs to the family, he might have found a gold mine.

Since then, for 12 years, this question has been sitting in his head. Where is the gold mine? The daily routine, the daily race, pushed the paperwork to the bottom of the priority list. Something in him was waiting for the day he would retire so he could really get around to it. Back then, he received legal advice that reassured him. Issuing an inheritance order is just a procedural matter. Even quite simple. The problem with it was deeper and therefore postponed. The contract had no location data. No block, no parcel. So how exactly can one realize an inheritance when there is no idea where this land is located and where the rights to it are registered?

That's why he waited. That's why he tried on his own from time to time, until Meir realized that this was probably a job for an investigator.

I met Meir at the neighborhood cafe. I wanted to see the original documents he found with my own eyes. What does a sales contract really look like when it has no identifying mark about its location? I went over the worn paper word by word and was amazed at how business was done back then. The contract spoke of a plot of land in a neighborhood that was yet to be built, and I quote: "East of Petah Tikva and south of Rosh HaAyin". That amorphous is how it was recorded, and that's all. Attached to the contract was a hand-drawn map with a division into houses, roads, and public buildings, and with a small arrow that was supposed to show the buyer where his house would be. The seller's name was recorded by surname only, not even a first name. This was long before there were even ID numbers.

Meir left me a copy and I set out. Archival files require painstaking work. It's not databases, computer screens, everything is hidden in papers that usually gather dust. But the logic of an investigation will always remain the same: if someone planned to build a huge Jewish neighborhood, there must be someone else who remembers it. The trick is just to find him.

I started with the only address that appeared in the documents. The address of the plot seller in southern Tel Aviv. I arrived at an old one-story building that had undergone massive renovations and was currently abandoned. I tried to extract historical ownership of the property, but it didn't lead me to the right person. Despite the many years that had passed, I walked down the street and knocked on the doors of old houses. Looking for the elders of the neighborhood.

Four houses away, a very elderly woman opened the door for me. She didn't remember much, but she recalled that in her youth, there was a real estate office in the abandoned building. The realtor's surname fit perfectly. She even said his first name. That person had long since passed away, but I relied on the Jewish custom of naming grandchildren after their grandfather, and after a series of targeted searches, I located the grandson.

He turned out to be a kind man. It turned out that he, too, until about 20 years ago, knew nothing, until his father passed away and bequeathed him a binder of lost documents. From the binder, we discovered some secrets from the past. The original records of these lands had been lying for decades and were registered in the Ramallah land registry (Tabu), and only thanks to his grandfather's legal persistence were they transferred to the Petah Tikva land registry.

The binder contained a lot of information, such as Kushans that were registered in Arabic, English, and Hebrew. A Kushan is the old registration that existed before Tabu extracts. A historical picture became clear. In the thirties, an initiative, quite ambitious, one might say, was launched to build a Jewish city called "Ramat Tikva". It is indeed east of Petah Tikva and such, but today one can say that it is closer to the settlement of Beit Aryeh. That realtor from southern Tel Aviv obtained, on one hand, Arab sellers who held lands there, and on the other hand, recruited Jewish buyers to fulfill a vision for them.

However, what crushed the dream was the outbreak of the Great Arab Revolt in 1936. The riots lasted for three years and led to the establishment of the Peel Commission, which legally restricted the transfer of Arab lands to Jews. The plot of Meir's aunt got stuck right in the middle. Then came the White Paper of 1939 and the Land Law of 1940, and completely froze the situation.

If that wasn't enough, then in the War of Independence, the area became a no-man's-land, and in 1967, when there was an opportunity to settle the lands, political decisions were made to leave the legal situation as it is. For almost decades, this area has simply been a black hole. It is used as a firing range for training.

I scheduled another meeting with Meir at the cafe. I had a detailed answer for him, accurate and historical regarding the location, and I also found the records in the old Tabu books. Even before it became computerized. One can say that I cracked the mystery of the lost land. He has another problem. This land has no monetary value, and there seems to be no chance of realizing it in the future.

I placed the documents I had collected on the table. Meir examined the documents, looked at me with a rather bitter smile, and said: "You know, Sam, these are exactly the cases where they say - the surgery was successful."

"But the patient died," I completed in a low voice.

The author is a private investigator. Based on a true story.