Investigation file: locating the owners of the lot in the heart of the city
The asset tracking department of Focus Investigations received information about an empty lot located between buildings in a sought-after city in the center of the country. In a preliminary investigation conducted by the department’s staff, it was learned that the lot was purchased before World War II by a Jewish citizen of Poland.
The evaluation of the work of the inspection team was that the buyer of the lot perished in the Holocaust, along with the majority of Polish Jewry, and if there are any heirs, they are not aware of the existence of the lot.
Since the last name was not particularly common, the property tracing department began to build family trees of several families in Israel bearing the same name, when the goal was to locate family members – legal heirs of the lot.
After research, the researchers came to an elderly man with the same name and told that in the 1950s there was a socialite, a young bachelor, who immigrated from Poland after the war alone and lived in Tel Aviv.
By scanning press clippings from the 1950s, the researchers located a newspaper article reporting on celebrities of that decade. One of them was Shimon Rudi and his partner, a lady with the same last name as the owner of the lot, who left Israel for Europe.
Shimon Rudi was known as Rudi the “iron bender”, a thug who demonstrated an impressive ability to bend building iron in the streets of Tel Aviv – an entertainment show of that time.
The same Shimon Rudi stars in the song “The Neighborhood” by Haim Hefer performed by the Roosters “Go and call Jim and Udi Aharleh and Shimon Rudi”.
The team of investigators began looking for Shimon Rudi in Europe and from there found that he left Europe for Brazil, where he died in the seventies.
After further investigation, the team of investigators in Brazil located Rudy’s partner, the daughter of the owner of the lot, a woman over 80 years old who lives in Brazil and is the legal heir of the lot.