Interesting Psak: Using child gemach as babysitting service

In Israel there are gemachs for just about everything. I remember when I first learned of the "child gemach". Based on the normal usage of the gemach, it sounds like this would be a gemach you would go to when you need to borrow  child for a while. I later learned that this gemach, common at least in Haredi neighborhoods, is for lost children - if you find a lost child wandering in the streets or in the park and cannot figure out where the child is supposed to be, you can drop the child off at the child gemach, and the parents will go to the child gemachs looking for their missing kid, and the gemach people will also spend time looking for the parents. I learned about this many years ago in Har Nof when we found such a child and were directed to such a gemach. The lost child and the parents were reunited a few hour later.

Kikar is reporting about a case in which a mother needed to go out but could not find a babysitter to watch her child. She came up with a brilliant but devious plan. She brought her child to the child gemach claiming she had found the child. She left the child there urging them to watch the child until the parents could be located.

Sure enough, a while later, after "mom of the year" finished her errands or watching her movie or suntanning on the beach or dancing at her friends wedding, she decided to pick up her child from the gemach. But she couldn't. The benevolent people running the gemach would realize what had been done, and nobody wants to look bad like that.

So, mom sent an older daughter to pick up her lost kid from the gemach! Baruch Hashem the child was found safe and sound!

The article does not say who said what to who and how the story became known, and that is a point I would really like to know. Did the gemach people find out they had been grossly taken advantage of? Did mom feel bad about what she had done and want to know how to make it right and if it was really so bad? Did the older daughter tell her friends and then word spread? Somehow else?

The cased was brought to a few rabbonim. The question asked was if it is ok to use such a gemach for such a purpose. In the halachic paper in which it was published, the case is made that it is clear one cannot take advantage of other people's chessed in this fashion. The question remaining open though is if mom would need to pay, after the fact, for the babysitting services she took advantage of, and if yes, how much - at what rate?

Rav Nussbaum, Rav Stern, and Rav Klein all paskened that mom must pay the going rate for a babysitter. The chessed family was not offering to provide free babysitting services for moms in need - they only watched this mom's kid because she falsely presented herself as having found a lost child.

Rav Yitzchak Zilbershtein paskened the same question differently. Rav Zilbershtein, Rav Weiss and Rav Monderer paskened that she does not owe them any money.

I would like to know the logic behind each opinion. I suspect the opinion to pay is based on the halacha that you have to pay for services you received, even if there was no agreement of purchasing said services. The opinion to not pay might be based on the fact that the only service offered is a free service. This is only a guess and I would like to hear more details to explain.  Personally I would think such a mother taking advantage of such a service like this should be fined by a beis din and have to pay even more, both as punishment and as a deterrent from turning it into a babysitting service.

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