Famed for piety, Jacob Merkin put faith and funds in Bernie Madoff - Jacob Merkin-- Help Fund Madoff for years

Famed for piety, Jacob Merkin put faith and funds in Bernie Madoff
BY DOUGLAS FEIDEN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Sunday, January 18th 2009, 5:24 AM

Jacob Ezra Merkin was once revered as a wizard of Wall Street, an angel of charity and a lion of Judaic studies.
Now he has earned infamy as a destroyer of wealth, a menace to philanthropy, a pariah in some synagogues and a target of a probe by the state attorney general's office.
A single unforgivable deed capsized his fortune, reputation and social standing overnight: He embraced a false prophet of profit named Bernard Madoff.
On the surface, Merkin, 55, was a gold-plated money manager who invested on behalf of banks, billionaires, hedge funds, yeshivas, nonprofits and universities.
In reality, his Midas touch was a mirage. Without telling his clients, he steered the bulk of the money into Madoff's $50 billion Ponzi scheme.
As cash evaporated though his network of hedge funds and partnerships - Ascot Partners and Gabriel Capital Corp. in midtown, Ariel Fund Ltd. in the Cayman Islands - Merkin pocketed some $30 million in annual management fees, victims claim.
"He's pious, prayerful and profound, and the tragedy is that he's turning his friends and associates into paupers," said Rafi Weiss, a retired investor who worshiped with Merkin at Orthodox synagogues in Manhattan and Long Island.
Merkin declined to comment, but his lawyer, Andrew Levander, portrayed him as "shocked and pained," insisting that Merkin and thousands of other battered investors were "fellow victims" of Madoff's massive fraud.
"His personal losses are in the many tens of millions of dollars, and he has seen friends and charitable institutions he supports suffer terrible losses," he said. "Mr. Merkin shares the sorrow of all the investors who have been cheated by Madoff."
A growing number of victims see Merkin as anything but: He's a defendant in at least four civil suits.
Merkin's story is a tale of Shakespearean dimensions: His parents, Hermann and Ursula, were refugees from Adolf Hitler's Germany.
His father, proud of his storied rabbinical lineage, made a mint on Wall Street and the shipping industry and became an elder statesman of Jewish philanthropy, bestowing millions to build Yeshiva University and the Fifth Avenue Synagogue.
Reared on Park Avenue, Merkin, the eldest son, was trained to be so low-key on the subject of his family wealth that his younger sister, writer Daphne Merkin, would later say she grew up believing their father sold chairs on Wall Street - not shares.
The "Merkin gene for excessive discretion" embraces frugality and disdains visible displays of riches, Daphne wrote in a 1999 New Yorker article, "The Trouble with Growing Up Rich."