Lost -- and Found?(Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel)(Book Review)

Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel, by Hillel Halkin (Houghton Mifflin, 394 pp., $28)

Call it the romance of lost objects. A young woman's purse was stolen one day in the 1940s and turned up earlier this year, stuck behind a loose wall panel in a men's room in a diner. Evidently the thief had swiped the purse, extracted the money, then hidden the purse inside the wall. Workers doing renovations found it, identified the owner -- who was still alive, in her 80s -- and a reporter recently covered the reunion of the lady and her long-lost property.…