Lotto fever has hit the country, as the Mega Millions first prize in this week’s drawing will be at least $1.6 billion, an all-time high amount. Israel offers its own lottery, known as Mifal HaPayis, with a variety of games including a bi-weekly 7-number drawing, as well as a keno-type game, a daily 3-digit game, and scratch-offs. Which of the following is a true story about the Israeli Mifal HaPayis lottery?
Lotto by Paul Sableman is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
A. The name “Mifal HaPayis” means “The Side Curl Enterprise,” referencing the side curls, or payis, of Chassidic men. The name was chosen when the lottery was first established in Israel in 1951 to provide funding for young Chassidic men who were studying at yeshivas, and who in most cases did not have income-producing jobs. (Today Mifal Hapayis supports schools, hospitals, parks, performing arts, and many other community resources).
B. Waze, the navigation app, is one of the most successful GPS applications in the world. The software was originally developed in 2006 by Israeli programmer Ehud Shabtai, as a school project at the Israeli Technion University, where he was studying. While he hoped to find funding to enable him to turn his project into a marketable application, he had been unsuccessful until he happened to win NIS 20,000 (equivalent to $5200) in a Mifal Hapayis drawing, a contest he had been entering weekly for years. He was able to utilize those winnings to set up a small company, finalize the app design, and begin offering Waze in the iTunes store. In 2013 Waze was purchased by Google for $966 million.
C. Mifal Hapayis was successfully sued by the estate of Charlie Chaplin for illegally using a “Little Tramp”-like character with bowler hat and cane in its ad campaign, plastered over billboards, buses, and elsewhere. According to Josephine Chaplin, the comedian’s daughter, “They [lottery officials] said everybody dressed that way back then, with a bowler hat and a cane.”
D. One of the games sponsored by Mifal Hapayis is the 123 Daily Draw game, in which players must correctly choose three numbers between 0 and 9, in the correct order in which they were drawn. On September 14, 2009, this game set a record for the largest number of winning tickets ever sold for a single game, as more than 629,000 people selected the winning numbers of 6, 1, and 3, causing a huge financial loss that week for the lottery. Apparently, because the numbers 6, 1, and 3 correspond to the number of commandments in the Torah, tickets with these numbers are sold in staggeringly huge quantities compared to any other number combination.
E. As in the United States, winners of huge Mifal Hapayis payouts appear on Israeli television for a press conference. However, unlike in the United States where most states require the winners to come forward publicly, Mifal Hapayis wants to protect the privacy of its prize winners, while still presenting a press conference as part of their marketing approach. Therefore Mifal Hapayis officials provide large welder-type masks to the winners, who appear live on TV wearing this strange head gear.