The Marcus Family's $400 Million Gift to an Israeli University

choi

Seth M Siegel, After Fleeing the Nazis, A Legacy That Won't Run Dry. The frugal couple bumped into a young Warren Buffett. Now they've left millions to Israeli water research. Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2016 (op-ed).
http://www.wsj.com/articles/afte ... -run-dry-1466722996

Note:
(a) "Howard and Lottie Marcus * * * would end up giving what is likely the largest single charitable gift in Israel's history—$400 million—to be announced June 24."
(i) Lottie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottie
(an abbreviation for Charlotte)
(ii) Her maiden name, according to her obituary, was Blumlein.

(b) " In 1934, after Nazi goons murdered her brother outside their home in Linden, Germany, the 17-year-old Lottie persuaded her parents to allow her to go to the U.S."

There are several place names in Germany with the name Linden. See Linden
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linden
(c) Lottie got "a job on Wall Street. There, she met Benjamin Graham, the legendary 'father of value investing.' Graham soon became smitten and proposed to her. Lottie—20 years his junior—declined. Even so, the friendship endured until Graham’s death in 1976."

Benjamin Graham
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Graham
(1894 – 21, 1976; born Benjamin Grossbaum; a British-born American economist; began teaching at Columbia Business School in 1928; section 1.4 Personal life: "According to The Snowball" [see (d)] )

Quote: "Buffett, who credits Graham as grounding him with a sound intellectual investment framework, described him as the second most influential person in his life after his own father. In fact, Graham had such an overwhelming influence on his students that two of them, Buffett and [Irving] Kahn, named their sons Howard Graham Buffett and Thomas Graham Kahn after him.

(d) "The Marcuses lived quietly and frugally. Their small indulgences included an occasional ski vacation with Ben Graham and his girlfriend (and future wife). One day, they asked their friend for investment advice. Graham told them about a student of his at Columbia Business School, a young man he thought a prodigy. He invited that student, Warren Buffett, to meet Howard and Lottie. They put most of their nest egg in Mr Buffett's new partnership, which later became Berkshire Hathaway.  With annual compounding, that investment grew"
(i) The clause "his girlfriend (and future wife)" is a lie.
(ii) Alice Schroeder, The Snowball; Warren Buffett and the business of life. Bantam Books. 2008
http://www.riosmauricio.com/wp-c ... r_The-Snowball-.pdf

Quote:

In August, 1950 (a month before the classes started), Buffett wrote an application to department of finance, Graduate School of Business, Columbia University. "Whatever the reason, after the deadline, and without an interview, Warren was accepted by Columbia." last sentence of Chap 15. (The en.wikipedia.org in the Buffett page states he "earned a Master of Science in Economics from Columbia in 1951")

"Warren was so excited about being hired that he arrived in New York on August 1, 1954, and showed up at his new job at Graham-Newman on August 2, a month before his official starting date. There, he discovered that a week earlier, tragedy had struck Ben Graham. Four weeks shy of his own twenty-fourth birthday, Warren wrote his father: 'Ben Graham's son Newton (26) who was in the [US] Army in France committed suicide last week. He had always been a little unbalanced. However Graham didn't know it had been a suicide til he read it in the New York Times on an Army release, which of course is really tough.' When he went to France to collect his son's remains, Ben met Newton's girlfriend, Marie Louise Amingues, known as Malou, who was several years older than Newton. He returned a few weeks later but was never quite the same afterward [due to his son's death]. He also began to correspond with Malou and made periodic visits back to France."  Chap 20

"In the mid-1960s, Graham had proposed a novel arrangement to his wife, Estey, in which he would live half the year with his deceased son Newton's former girlfriend, Marie Louise Amingues, or Malou—ML, as she was called by the family—and half with Estey. Marriage was a concept that Graham had always honored more in the breach than in reality, but Estey had her limits, and had reached them. Ever since she said no, the Grahams had been separated but they never divorced. Ben and ML were in La Jolla and spent part of the year in Aixen-Provence. Estey lived in Beverly Hills. Ben felt perfectly friendly toward Estey, and ML was content to live without marriage. Graham had succeeded in maintaining both relationships in name only, however [It is unclear what this means]