Hadassah has successfully managed for the past several days to keep their name and potential loss from investments with Madoff off the widely circulated lists in many U.S. and international publications.
We heard rumors on Monday their exposure was as high as $300-$500 million. Now, they officially announced taking a $90 million hit. This is in addition to our post on July 18th that their dollar donations were down by 20% and whatever other investment losses they may have sustained earlier this year.
More important, in light of this announcement, what shoe is still to drop elsewhere in our Jewish world?
The responsibility of a board of directors, and the finance committee, is to ensure that investments are being held to accountability. I am disgusted and distressed that what took us 60 plus years to build, was destroyed in a matter of days. I am equally as angry at the many Jewish leaders whose job it was to oversee the investments of the charity(s). It is acceptable for us to keep these board members in their positions of lay leadership when they are as much to blame as Bernard Madoff? I hold them all accountable….
Please. You cannot blame the victim here. There was no way to know what he was doing. Some of the smartest people in the world trusted this man for years. The SEC looked into him and found nothing wrong. While this raises questions about a lack of regulations; a brilliant criminal enterprise is hard to crack; even by very dilligent boards of directors. You can be outraged all you want, but it’s not the investors fault. Overseeing investments? what you do as an investor is look at your statements. When you see 10%+ returns every year, you give more.
The only lesson for the investor here is to diversify. It’s not the board’s fault. Replace this board aas many times as you want, and given the same information any future bnoard would have done the same thing.
I hear what you are saying. My frustration comes from the fact that many, many of our lay leaders are savvy business people. Yes, diversification is a must….but, if they didn’t understand it, or if the returns were modestly high, why not ask the very difficult questions? I am very upset. What took us 60 years to build was evaporated by one of our own.
Yes this is very upsetting to say the least…but again, even asking “the very difficult questions” would not have revealed this crime…the SEC asked questions and found nothing, and dropped the case…
He is not “one of our own”…he is a criminal.