During my time in rabbinical school, we had short seminars called “minimesters” that gave us an opportunity to grapple with issue in depth that could not be covered during our regular curriculum. For a week or two during semester breaks we would learn about clergy boundaries or couples’ therapy. One minimester dealt with ethical issues rabbis and cantors might face.
During one session, the head of fundraising at the Jewish Theological Seminary spoke to us about thorny issues around money. She told us the story of Ivan Boesky, the 1980s Wall Street businessman convicted of insider trading. Boesky was a trustee at the Seminary at the time of his legal troubles and president of the JTS library. In fact, the new library was named after him and his wife.
The JTS fundraiser posed the ethical dilemma to us: what would you do if a major donor and leader of your organization was accused of a crime? In this case, the money that he had given to the institution was the direct result of his illegal actions. I don’t quite remember exactly what we said, but I am sure we idealistic rabbinical students said of course the money should not be kept by JTS.
Whether it should be returned is a separate matter. On the one hand, do you really want to return the ill-gotten gains to the criminal? He shouldn’t be rewarded for his misdeeds. On the other hand, who would be the victim to whom you could return the money? With insider trading it is hard to tell. Is it other wealthy Wall Street firms? Is it institutional investors who saw their portfolios dip? Is it everyday people who invested their nest egg?
Even if the victim is your average Joe or Jane, how would you possibly return to them the $2 million Boesky pledged to the Seminary? How would you find them? How would determine how much to give them? In the end, according to contemporary media reports, while JTS removed the bronze letters of his and his wife’s names from the library, they didn’t return the money.
Was JTS’s decision ethical? The money certainly went to a good cause – preserving the literary and cultural heritage of the Jewish people in the most extensive Judaica library in the Western hemisphere. But it was also not a great look for the school, which is why Boesky’s name came off the building. Boesky also withdrew a $750,000 pledge to the Center for Jewish Life at Princeton University.
So much has changed in the nearly 40 years since. That library from the 1980s no longer exists, replaced by a smaller structure which is controversial for a different reason. Some scholars are upset that most of the collection is now stored off-site and researchers must request those volumes rather than find them in the stacks.
Boesky died this week at the age of 87. After serving 18 months of his prison sentence in the 80s he lived a quiet life in California. While dramatic, his story was not nearly as tragic as the Jewish Wall Street scandal a generation later. Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme had very clear victims, some of which were Jewish non-profits themselves. Many never recovered. The lesson in all these stories is that those entrusted with money of others, whether the financiers or the fundraisers, have a sacred duty to do their business with the highest degree of ethical integrity.
Rabbi Adler's Study 