From the 'truth is stranger than fiction' department: The Israeli descendants of the Iraqi-Jewish Levy family, who settled in England in the 19th century, have so far failed to find any trace of their vanished fortune. Haaretz reports:
Many Jews who have immigrated to Israel from Iraq over the past several decades are convinced they are descendants of the Levys - an Iraqi merchant family that amassed a fortune in England at the beginning of the 19th century.
Every few years an additional piece of information comes to light about the dynasty's history, sparking new hope in tracing the family's fortune allegedly held at the Bank of England, only to be dashed again.
Sasson Aboud, a Tel Aviv insurance agent and the treasurer of the heirs organization Aga Levy, was close to desperation this week.
He had asked more than 750 families, all claiming to be related to the Levys, to raise NIS 500 each for yet another effort to track down the "Iraqi treasure," but only 25 of them paid up.
"People have lost faith in finding even a pound of the money," Aboud said.
According to one version, Elazar Levy was the father of Yair Refua, who had two sons - Elazar and Zecharia Levy. The two brothers were making a living selling scrap metal and junk in Iraq when they found a small package of precious stones in one of the old objects they were selling. They took the stones and settled in Venice, where they became wealthy merchants.
At the beginning of the 19th century they moved with their families to London, where they established themselves in senior government positions and even in the royal palace.
Aboud believes the brothers lent money to the royal family, enabling the digging of the Suez Canal. Another tale has it that the brothers had sold or lent the diamonds in Queen Victoria's crown. Some say they owned houses and land in the London and Kent area and that billions of pounds in their money, jewelry and gold are lying in Bank of England coffers.
A former Israeli government minister, attorney Moshe Shahal, was one of Aga Levy's founders. He wanted to carry out his late father's request to trace Aga (meaning "lord") Levy's property. "It's like a soap opera," he said this week.
Since the organization was set up in the early 1990s, it has tried to establish whether various people of Iraqi origin were related to the Levy family of London. Among those who helped was a man from the Netherlands who promised to provide documents and information, for a price. He found that one of the brothers had married a daughter of the Montefiore family who converted to Christianity and changed his name to Lawrence.
Shahal traveled to London several times in vain, at his own expense, to try to trace the family and its assets.
"For a week they let me check thick books a meter long and a meter wide, in handwriting, of all those who died in the London area. It was a mission impossible," he says.
The Bank of England provided a list of 13 banks, some of them no longer operating, in which the family allegedly had funds. But it was expensive to check their records, so Shahal gave up.
Around two years ago an Israeli Arab was recruited to go to Iraq to uncover the family's genealogy.
The envoy returned with documents purporting to be from the Iraqi population registry, but this only complicated things, adding another generation to the family tree that the descendants had outlined over the years.
The organization also enlisted a British private-investigation agency, which found that in 1930 16,000 pounds had been withdrawn from one of the accounts allegedly belonging to the Levy-Lawrence family.
"I don't believe we're going about it the right way," says James Becker, a professor at Ben-Gurion University who was once active in Aga Levy. He says that even in the best-case scenario - that Aga Levy has a treasure at the Bank of England - the organization's members have no proof the treasure belongs to them.
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