Salem —   Bernard Madoff was sentenced Monday to 150 years behind bars for swindling individuals, businesses and charitable organizations across the United States and beyond.

Executive Director Debbie Coltin of the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation, which is operating on an entirely changed landscape since Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was uncovered last December, said she doesn’t even think about Madoff. However, her face told a different story, and she often broke down in tears as she discussed what the 71-year-old investor did to the foundation, the staff’s jobs and all the people who benefited from Lappin’s philanthropy.

Now rather than create programming, Coltin raises funds. The diminished staff of several part timers, including Coltin, worked to raise $400,000 from community members to send 83 teens to Israel this year. But now, they have to begin the process all over again for the summer of 2010.

“We were on the cusp of really big — huge — things before Madoff,” Coltin said.

Youth to Israel was expanding outside of the North Shore and other Lappin programs were being replicated as well.

The Teachers to Israel program is gone, and that had captured the attention of the Israeli government, which wanted to partner with the Lappin Foundation.

“Evrit to Grow On” in which teachers taught conversational Hebrew in afternoon religious schools is gone.

Gone also is Sukkat Shalom.

The trip to Washington D.C. to tour the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has also stopped.

Seventeen programs still running. Many are alive because of collaborations with temples and other entities.

“So much good work and critical research, for what? The greed of this man — gone,” Coltin said. She counts herself among the lucky few who still has a job. She works 20 hours a week, but several others who still work for the foundation are down to 10 or 12 hours at most. Others were laid off.

Madoff’s sentencing on Monday, June 29 is “like an unveiling,” she said. Admitting to be “too busy in survival mode” to mourn what had been lost, the sentencing brings it all up again. “I think justice was served,” she said about the 150-year sentence. She is satisfied that the lengthy sentence serves as a warning to others that this is a white collar crime that will not be ignored.

Staff member Phyllis Osher thought about the long-term effects of a diminished foundation. She herself is a product of the Youth to Israel trip and she knows many people whose lives were shaped by it. Now its survival is dependent upon raising enough funds every year to bring it to fruition.

Rachel Jacobson struck a positive note saying, “I think good will come of it. From here you can just climb; you cannot go down.” Parents of Youth to Israel teens call her every day to thank the foundation for continuing to raise funds to send their children to Israel.