BGU&U | SPRING 2022

was coming in Germany, their early investment in Berkshire Hathaway, their awareness that climate change would make water the key to securing Israel’s future and its ability to improve the world – they always seemed to understand what other, supposedly more qualified people, didn’t. And now, their transformative gift to Ben-Gurion University will move the needle on an issue that politicians and decision makers have struggled to address, with little success.” For the Israeli-American Mishory, however, it is the couple’s approach to Israel – which they visited just once, in 2005, to attend the renaming of the BGU campus in their honor – that he found most moving personally. “Their daughter Ellen said that as a result of the Holocaust, her parents wanted to invest in the future of the Jewish people. And they recognized that the future of the Jewish people is the State of Israel.”

Most of all, however, Mishory sees in the Marcuses a rare yet consistent ability to think ahead of the crowd, sense the direction in which the world is headed, and act accordingly. Understanding that aspect of Howard and Lottie, he believes, makes the mysteries that drive

the Nazis’ grip on power made any hope of leaving too late. (In Howard’s case, both the luck and the escape were repeated a few years later, when he fled Italy for America just steps ahead of the fascist Italian Secret Service.) There was the fateful introduction to Buffet through a good friend of Lottie’s, the legendary “father of value investing,” Benjamin Graham. And there was the chance appearance, depicted in the film, of a guest speaker on water scarcity at their retirees’ global affairs discussion group in San Diego. That encounter, so goes the legend, would spark Howard and Lottie’s passionate interest in the ways that water research, and eventually water research of the kind carried out at BGU, could both help the State of Israel flourish and nurture peace in the Middle East. only accounts for part of the Marcuses’ extraordinary story – and to film director Matthew Mishory, a fairly small part at that. For the rest, he says, we’d need to look to the particular values that guided their life and worldview, such as their deep belief in living modestly, which made the news of their more than $400 million endowment for BGU come as such a profound surprise. He also points to the couple’s daughter Ellen – “the third lead in the film,” says Mishory, “and every bit the hero as her parents” – who counseled the Marcuses not to leave the bulk of their massive estate to her, but instead to use it to support something in which they believed. But of course, as was the case with Buffett, chance

Ellen counseled the Marcuses to use

the film’s narrative – Why have we never heard of Howard and Lottie Marcus? Why did they never publicly reveal their wealth, and why were they so captivated by the seemingly strange issue of water scarcity? – far less mysterious in the end. “Theirs is a once-in-a generation story that manages to intersect with many of the major milestones that defined the last century,” Mishory says. “Their recognition of what their massive estate to support something in which they believed.

The Marcus family with Prof. Avishay Braverman in 2005 on their first and only visit to BGU, at the campus bearing their name. Photo: Dani Machlis

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