Powerball Hoax Ruins Jewish Nursing Home Owner’s Lottery Mitzvah
Shlomo Rechnitz and his Pomona, Calif. nursing home. Image by Google Earth/Wikimedia
A 56-year-old nurse at a southern California nursing home thought she scored a slice of the big prize after the facility’s Jewish owner bought thousands of tickets for employees — but it turned out to all be a hoax.
The nurse’s son told her she was one of three winners of the giant $1.5 billion windfall and even sent a Photoshopped image of the supposed winning ducat.
He later admitted the claim was a practical joke, the New York Daily News reported.
“It’s a joke. It’s a prank…by my brother,” the nurse’s daughter Jennifer told the paper Thursday night. “It’s embarrassing. This is too much for us.”
The hoax ended a brief period of euphoria at the Pomona nursing home where the woman works.
It also put a sour note on what seemed like a remarkable mitzvah by nursing home magnate Shlomo Rechnitz.
Rechnitz, the largest nursing home provider in California, said he had bought over 15,000 Powerball tickets for all employees and residents at his facilities as a morale-booster.
Along with the ticket came cards reading: “We will provide the ticket. You provide the dream.”
The manager of the Pomona facility, David Levy, told the New York Post that it was pandemonium when people thought the nurse had won.
“Her reaction was that she didn’t believe it. She then pulled out her ticket and reviewed it with two other nurses — number by number,” he said.
Then the mom of seven finished her shift and went home just before midnight, reported the Post.
His boss, Rechnitz, is known for bursts of unusual philanthropy. He paid the mortgage for a financially troubled Los Angeles Chabad house and gave $1 million to Hurricane Sandy victims.
A spokesman for Rechnitz told Buzzfeed: “If it is indeed the case that someone pulled a prank on her, that’s reprehensible. She’s a wonderful lady, and an incredible employee.”
He once forked over $50 to each of hundreds of U.S. servicemen stranded at an Ireland airport.
Rechnitz has had brushes with controversy too.
His nursing homes received poor ratings in an extensive investigative report by the Sacramento Bee newspaper. And the FBI raided offices at one home in 2014 in an ongoing probe into suspected criminal activity, the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles reported.
Three ticket holders in all with a claim on a record $1.6 billion Powerball jackpot were laying low on Thursday, their identities officially still a mystery even as lottery officials revealed the retailers in California, Florida and Tennessee that sold them the lucky tickets.
Each of the winning tickets is worth $528.8 million to the holders, lottery officials said in California, one of 44 states plus Washington, D.C., and two U.S. territories that sold millions of Powerball tickets.
The winning numbers of 08 27 34 04 19 and Powerball 10, picked in a drawing on Wednesday night, appeared on tickets sold in three stores: a 7-Eleven convenience store in Chino Hills, California, a Publix supermarket in Melbourne Beach, Florida and Naifeh’s Food Mart in Munford, Tennessee. The jackpot winners overcame odds of 1 in 292 million.
“The Chino Hills winner has not come forward yet,” California Lottery said on its Twitter feed.—With Reuters
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