The Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation operated out of a little green building on the edge of the South River. Its reach has gone far beyond its walls.

It has sent about 2,000 teenagers to Israel, supported dozens of programs at area temples and Jewish organizations, and given money to programs as far away as Texas.

It has welcomed Jewish babies born to families on Massachusetts' North Shore with gifts. It has helped non-Jewish mothers in interfaith marriages raise their children Jewish. It broke into the Guinness Book two years ago when it organized a record ensemble of 800 people to simultaneously blow shofars, the rams horns sounded at the start of the Jewish new year.

Thus, when news broke that the Lappin Foundation was shut down, a victim of the still unraveling Wall Street scandal involving investor Bernard Madoff, ripples were felt far and wide.

"This has really shaken the whole community in a very big way," said Bette Keva, editor of The Jewish Journal, which covers the Jewish community in the North Shore region, north of Boston.

The foundation's five-member staff was let go. Programs offered at its office were discontinued.

"It's very emotional," a stunned director Deborah Coltin said last Friday, one day after agents from the FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission arrested Madoff and asked a court to seize his fund's assets.

"It's been a terrible day," said the foundation's spokeswoman, Amy Powell. "We do unbelievable work, and we touch so many lives, and it's devastating to have to stop doing it."