Jewish organisations have criticised Fox news pundit Glenn Beck for an attack on businessman George Soros’ Holocaust record.

Mr Beck said in a documentary about the Jewish billionaire that as a child in Hungary living with a non-Jewish family Mr Soros “help[ed] send the Jews to the death camps,” and helped confiscate the property of other Jews.”

He said: “Here's a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps.

“I am certainly not saying that George Soros enjoyed that, even had a choice. I mean, he's 14 years old. He was surviving.

“But you would think that there would be some remorse.”

Mr Beck also made a reference to Mr Soros, who is worth more than $14bn as a “puppet master” and suggested he was “at the centre” of the economic crisis. He said this against an image of a Star or David.

Anti Defamation League director Abraham Foxman called the comments “totally over the top”.

He said: “For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say, there's a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, that's horrific."

The president of the Jewish Funds for Justice, Simon Greer, added: “In an effort to demonise a political opponent, Beck and Fox News scurrilously attacked George Soros, a prominent Jewish philanthropist and Holocaust survivor.

“No one who truly understands 'the sensitivity and sacred nature' of the Holocaust would deliberately and grotesquely mischaracterise the experience of a 13 year old Jew in Nazi-occupied Hungary whose father hid him with a non-Jewish family to keep him alive.”

It emerged last month that Mr Soros, 80, whose real name is George Schwartz, had donated significant funds to the dovish American Israel lobby J Street.

He supports several left wing organisations including Human Rights Watch, and in 2008 he said that Jews and Israel were to blame for rising antisemitism. It is thought that he earned £1bn on Black Wednesday in 1992.