Updated and corrected on March 22, 2023.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – Documentary filmmaker Matthew Mishory has done a deep dive into the background of a San Diego couple who lived quietly, scrimped to such a point that they even reused their paper towels, and through their daughter made the largest philanthropic donation to Israel in the history of the Jewish state: $500 million.
Who Are the Marcuses? tells the story of Dr. Howard and Lottie Marcus and their daughter Ellen, who decided that learning how to make water plentiful was one way to promote peace in the thirsty Middle East.
Dr. Marcus was on his way to his dental office in Germany in 1933 when he was stopped by two Nazi stormtroopers who did not recognize him as the dental practitioner. They told him, “Oh you don’t want to go to that Jew.” Nevertheless, he went to his office and waited for scheduled patients. None came. It was on that day that he decided to leave Germany. He went to Italy, where he practiced dentistry under the auspices of an Ear, Nose and Throat physician. One of his patients was the American consul general. The diplomat bent the rules and approved Marcus’s passage to the United States.
In the U.S., he met another refugee from Germany, Lottie Blumlein, who worked as a secretary for a Wall Street firm. “She was pretty and athletic and she loved to dance and she met some of the German Jewish refugees in New York,” according to her daughter, Ellen Marcus. At first, she wasn’t attracted to Howard, who proposed to her while sitting on a rock in New York City’s Central Park. “She didn’t say yes right away,” their daughter said. Lottie told a friend she didn’t think she loved the handsome dentist but she respected him. The friend said, “So get married, you can always get divorced.”
The wedding was held in August 1942. The couple lived much of their lives in Great Neck, New York, before retiring to a two bedroom home in San Diego. Their marriage lasted 65 years. Howard was 104 when he died in 2014. Lottie was 99 when she died in 2016, the same year the $500 million gift was conveyed to Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
Among the friends Lottie made through her Wall Street connections was Ben Graham, author of The Intelligent Investor. She introduced Graham to her husband. Graham recommended to Howard that he look up, and perhaps go into business, with one of his mentees, the investor Warren Buffett.
Although the relationship with Buffett resulted in the Marcus family acquiring lots of stock in Buffett-related businesses, they lived frugally and never with ostentation, according to their daughter. They gave little thought to the value of their stock holdings, which they bought and held until near the end of their lives. Ellen said rather than them leaving it all to her, she asked them to leave her enough money for her and her children to live comfortably, but to donate the rest to some charitable undertaking.
On the suggestion of Ellen Barnett of Rancho Bernardo (herself a philanthropist who has a lake named for her at the Biblical Zoo in Jerusalem), Philip Gomperts, a regional director of Americans for Ben-Gurion University, approached the Marcuses, telling them about the importance of water research.
When they agreed to make a donation of stock holdings, the amount was worth approximately $200 million. However, the value of the stocks went up and up, so that by the time the stocks were transferred to Ben-Gurion University, located in Beer Sheva, Israel, the largest city in the Negev Desert, their worth was $500 million.
Besides Buffett, a large group of people who appear on this documentary include Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, Ben Gurion University President Daniel Chamovitz, BGU’s former presidents Avishay Braverman and Rivka Carmi, Israeli authors Seth Siegel and Daniel Gordis, and various water experts discussing Israeli breakthroughs in desalination of seawater, groundwater, and the transformation of sewage into usable agricultural water. One offshoot of that research and progress is San Diego County’s own Claude “Bud” Lewis Desalination Plant built in Carlsbad by a subsidiary of Israel-based IDE Technologies.
The documentary was screened in February at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com
LOVELY STORY. Thanks for that.
All the movie be shown in other places?
https://www.whoarethemarcuses.com/screenings
Ellen Marcus, daughter of Howard and Lottie Marcus, sent in this additional information concerning the role of the American consul general in securing passage from Italy to the United States for the Marcuses:
“This is the one story in the film that isn’t fully developed and therefore doesn’t make much sense in the film. The Consul General didn’t bend the rules. He lied! My father was happy in Italy and intended to stay there, so he had not asked for a visa to the USA until Hitler and Mussolini made their Pact in 1939 and the Italian secret service began rounding up foreign Jews (and only later, Italian Jews), so my father had to escape a second time. My dad knew full well that the quota for Germans to immigrate to the USA had been closed for some time, but he was desperate, so he went first to the British Consul General–who was also his patient—because his German dental diploma gave him reciprocity with England. But the British Consul refused to give him a visa for England (he gave him one for Malta instead) because my father would be competition for the British dentists! So in desperation, he went to the American Consul General, who told my father that the quota for Germans had been closed for some time—which my father knew. But then he said, “Wait. Let me check my old appointment books, because I think the first time you asked me for a visa (a lie), the quota was still open!” So he excused himself, went to another room and checked his old appointment books to determine when he had first come to see my father. He came back and told my father that he was in luck!—because the first time he came to see my father and my father asked him for a visa (a lie), the quota was still open for Germans. So the Consul General lied and back-dated my father’s visa application, thereby saving my father’s life!”
Ellen
This is an amazing and moving story
I never knew about your parents and certainly not their philanthropy
We would very much like to see the documentary
How can we do so?
How amazing too that you ran into Jake
And he was able to send the story to us
Please be in touch
Joan Berzoff
Jberzoff@smith.edu