UNITED STATES
Nonprofit Quarterly
WRITTEN BY RICK COHEN CREATED ON WEDNESDAY, 23 OCTOBER 2013
In the Jewish Daily Forward, Josh Nathan-Kazis takes on the subject of the spate of scandals that have hit a number of prominent Jewish charities. “One Jewish charity CEO hid allegedly stolen cash in his apartment closet. Another had an affair with his assistant while the assistant’s son-in-law stole from the CEO’s organization. A third covered up sex abuse charges for decades.”
The big scandals he’s discussing are Yeshiva University’s former president, Rabbi Norman Lamm, admitting to two decades of covering up sexual abuse of high school students; news that top officials at the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany had been told eight years earlier of a multimillion dollar scam; the firing of the CEO of the 92nd Street Y—after an affair with his executive assistant—whose Y-employed son was charged with taking kickbacks from vendors; and the firing of William Rapfogel, the CEO of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, on charges of participating in a two-decade long $5 million kickback scheme.
Those are just the recent scandals. Nathan-Kazis also notes that Yeshiva University and the Met Council were also too close to the Madoff fraudulent investment scheme. Madoff was the chairman of the board of the University’s business school, and one J. Ezra Merkin on the university’s investment committee fed funds to Madoff—and negotiated an investment for the Met Council with Madoff that lost $1.4 million.
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