Another Victim of Bernie Madoff: Elie Wiesel Foundation

As Bernie Madoff and his attorneys prepare to reportedly enter a plea of guilty next week for Madoff's heartless conning of billions of dollars in perhaps history's biggest Ponzi scheme, it is sad to hear that one of his victims was The Elie Wiesel Foundation. This humanitarian organization, headed by the famed Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, has lost nearly all its assets -- some $15.2 million were invested in Madoff Investment Securities.

But "victim" is not a word that Wiesel, the 80-year-old writer and humanitarian, likes to apply to himself.
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"All my life has been about learning and teaching and building on ruins," he says. "That will not change."
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"I don't want my name linked with that crook," Wiesel says, as soft-spoken as ever. "I don't want to be known as one of his victims. I want my name linked to peace and literature and human rights."
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Wiesel and his wife, Marion, started the foundation in 1986 with a portion of his Nobel award. In December, it reported it had $15.2 million, "substantially" all its assets, invested with Madoff.

Authorities have identified 13,000 of Madoff's investors, including Wiesel's foundation, which sponsors conferences of Nobel laureates and centers in Israel for refugees from Ethiopia and Darfur.

The irony has been noted: "It takes an extraordinarily heartless conman to swindle a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Nobel Peace Prize winner out of all of his charitable funds," wrote James Bone in The Times of London.

Wiesel shrugs and says, "People ask, 'How could he do it to you?' To me! As if I'm the only one. It's not about me."

Nor, he says, is it a particularly Jewish question, despite the fact that Madoff is an Orthodox Jew and that most of his investors were Jewish.

Wiesel says that in the past 20 years, he met Madoff only twice and briefly. "I was introduced by friends — friends that he also betrayed. It's repulsive."

He answers most questions about Madoff with his own questions that are left unanswered: "Was he a crook because he was a Jew? Was Ponzi a crook because he was a Christian?"

Since the foundation's financial loss was reported, Wiesel says, it has been flooded by unsolicited contributions — "big and small, from young and old, Jew and non-Jew. It's an expression of their outrage."

He says the foundation has received about $200,000 in such contributions — enough to keep its programs going. Among those who have offered to help, he says, is "my good friend Oprah Winfrey."

In 2006, Winfrey's book club chose Night, Wiesel's Holocaust memoir. In his office is a small photograph of him and Winfrey, huddled against the cold in the ruins of Auschwitz, which they visited for her show. In 2007, the Wiesel Foundation awarded its annual Humanitarian Award to Winfrey. [source]