Trashed engagement ring found after frantic hunt

A wedding nightmare had a fairytale ending Sunday after a missing engagement ring was found in a garbage pile and returned to the frantic bride-to-be.

The ultra-Orthodox woman realized too late on Thursday that her engagement ring, worth tens of thousands of shekels, had gotten snagged on a trash bag she had deposited in a dumpster near her Jerusalem home just a month before her wedding.

The dumpster was shipped to the sorting depot when the Jerusalem Municipality was alerted to the mishap and directed the truck to municipal warehouses in Givat Shaul, where it deposited its contents for sorting.

Some passersby were so moved by the weeping woman that they immediately volunteered to help. Others responded to an appeal which the woman’s family posted on Facebook. One volunteer told the Channel 2 news site he saw the distraught bride-to-be and didn’t hesitate to come to help, even taking time out of work.

But the searches yielded nothing — until Sunday evening, when Channel 2 TV revealed that an elderly Orthodox gentleman spotted the gleaming band on Thursday, and put it to one side, intending to deal with it later.

The man’s wife heard about the ring saga on Saturday from friends and connected the dots with her husband’s discovery.

The jewel and its happy owner have now been reunited. It wasn’t known whether the woman’s family had honored its offer of a financial reward to the finder of the ring.