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The Powerball Feel-Good Story That Wasn’t

An Orthodox Jewish health care magnate bought over 15,000 tickets for employees and residents at his nursing homes. The media, taken in by a hoax, wrongly reported that one of them won.

by
Yair Rosenberg
January 15, 2016
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Shutterstock
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Last night, three tickets won the record $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot. The media quickly reported that one of the winners was a nurse at a California nursing home, a mother of seven children. And at first, it seemed like there was even more to the already-remarkable story.

According to the Jerusalem Post, the ticket in question was purchased by the woman’s employer, Orthodox Jewish healthcare magnate Shlomo Rechnitz. Rechnitz, the owner of Brius Healthcare Services, the largest nursing home provider in California, had bought over 15,000 Powerball tickets for all employees and residents at his facilities. Attached to each was a card with the words, “We will provide the ticket. You provide the dream.”

The story was particularly compelling because this wasn’t Rechnitz’s first foray into creative philanthropy for his charges. Before the drawing, local news station Fox26 reported on Rechnitz’s purchase of the tickets, and spoke to residents at the Health Care Center of Fresno:

One woman who lives at the center says this isn’t the first time the owner has done something generous.



She says during Christmas she wanted to buy gifts for her grand kids but didn’t have the money.



“They said they were going to give me a shopping spree for my grandkids, and they gave me a thousand dollar shopping spree. I was so grateful so thankful and blessed.”

This past November, Rechnitz made headlines when he bought dinner for 400 U.S. soldiers on layover in an Ireland airport. Rechnitz, who was on his way to Israel with his family, noticed the soldiers eating meals out of paper bags, even as other travelers ate at the airport’s restaurants. He then offered up to $50 for each of the 400 to buy themselves dinner.

But as delightful as the Powerball feel-good story was, it wasn’t actually true. Not because Rechnitz didn’t buy the tickets, but because none of them won. The nurse in his California facility did indeed celebrate her victory with her co-workers, in a scene captured in multiple media reports. But as The Daily News reports, she had been pranked by her son, who sent her a photo of a winning ticket that he claimed was hers.

So even as the heartwarming story of her boss’s bankrolling her victory ricocheted across social media, and began trending on Facebook, she was returning to another day at work.

Yair Rosenberg is a senior writer at Tablet. Subscribe to his newsletter, listen to his music, and follow him on Twitter and Facebook.