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Translating ‘tzedakah’ for Marylanders: Sen. Ben Cardin’s long Jewish goodbye
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Ben Cardin’s love letter to Maryland, the state he has represented in the U.S. Senate since 2007, was also a love letter to his family’s Jewish values.
In a video that Cardin released this week to announce his retirement from the Senate, he reminisced about the 56 years he has spent representing Maryland voters in various capacities. In conversation with his wife Myrna, he also reflected on the ideals that animated his work and his family life.
“We use the expression ‘tikkun olam,’ repairing the world. We use it a lot. It’s in our DNA,” Myrna Cardin says in the video. “I love the way you’ve taken that from our family, to Annapolis, to Washington. It undergirds so much of what you do.”
“It also comes back to the tzedakah part of our tradition as Jews to help those that are less fortunate,” Ben Cardin later tells his wife, as a definition of the Hebrew word floats across the screen. Elsewhere, the video shows Cardin in a kippah at his wedding, then surrounded by children including one wearing a kippah himself.
Cardin, 79, this week announced his plans to retire in 2024 from the Senate seat he first won in 2006, with commanding majorities then and since. He wants people to know: He is as much a Jew as he is a Marylander. In fact, he sees the two identities as inextricable.
“It’s been an incredible opportunity,” Cardin told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “The people in Maryland are so understanding. It’s been a wonderful state where I’ve been able to talk about and acknowledge my Jewish faith easily.”
Cardin’s legacy is shaped as much by the still waters of the Chesapeake and the protections he has secured for it, as it is by his Jewish upbringing and the far-reaching human rights law it inspired him to author.
The mention in the five-minute video of tzedakah and its explanation is striking for how casual it is. Cardin told JTA that he wanted to convey, 56 years after he was first elected in 1968 to the Maryland House of Delegates, how much his Jewish identity shaped him.
“My Jewish values are what got me throughout my entire life,” he said. ”I grew up in a very strong Jewish family and a strong Jewish community.”
“Jewish values” can be amorphous when a Jewish politician cites them as fueling his or her actions, but Cardin is able to cite specifics.
He says the involvement of his wife and his cousin, the late Shoshana Cardin, in the Soviet Jewry movement shaped his work in government. “I would come home at night from Congress, and Myrna would ask me, what have I done to help Soviet Jews that day?” he recalled.
Cardin’s close personal ties to the movement propelled him to his years-long involvement with the Helsinki Commission, the network of parliamentary bodies that monitor compliance with the landmark 1975 human rights Helsinki Accords.
It also propelled, decades later, his most significant legislation, the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which sanctions individuals for human rights abuses. Sergei Magnitsky was an accountant who died in a Russian prison in 2009 after exposing massive corruption implicating Russian President Vladimir Putin and his circle.
“You can talk about human rights tragedies, but unless you put a face on it, it’s hard to get corrective action,” he said about why he made sure Magnitsky’s name was attached to the legislation. “So I was determined to put a face on it.”
Naming the act for an individual gave it a face, something he learned from the wristbands he once wore bearing the names of Jewish Prisoners of Zion.
“We put a face on every one of these individuals,” Cardin said of advocates for Soviet Jewry. “And that was the success of the Soviet Jewry movement. Putting a face on the refuseniks, on those that were in prison really helped us a good deal.”
The Magnitsky case underscored how Cardin’s human rights advocacy did not stop with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the freedom of its Jews. In the three years Cardin was the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, from 2015 to 2018, he invited reporters to the Capitol for periodic briefings.
The reporters would gather in the stately Foreign Relations Committee room, framed by daunting portraits of its past chairmen,and take seats around its conference table. At each place, they would find a one-page printout of a single person being persecuted by a repressive regime, usually activists unknown outside of their region.
Cardin made clear the blurry photo atop the printout exercised him more than the portraits on the walls. He would open the meeting with a minute or so of explanation about the persecuted person, and then take questions on whatever was on a reporter’s mind, an unusual gambit in the hyper-controlled Senate. He did not expect reporters to necessarily write about the human rights activist, but he wanted them on the media’s radar.
Cardin’s style, soft-spoken and self-effacing, stood out in a body crowded with self-promoters; he is able to attract bipartisan support and navigate far-reaching legislation through the Senate, cleaning up waterways, enhancing retirement plans and providing dental care to impoverished children.
Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., speaking at J Street’s conference in Washington D,C., April 16, 2018. (J Street)
There were occasions when his best efforts at finding accommodation stymied him, never more so when he was one of just four Democrats in the Senate in 2015 to oppose President Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement, the Iran nuclear deal that traded sanctions relief for Iran’s rollback of its nuclear enrichment capabilities.
He was getting it from both sides: Obama and the organized Jewish community, which mostly opposed the deal. Obama kept him in a room for more than 90 minutes, seeking to attach to the deal the credibility of the lawmaker most identified with Jewish activism. Meanwhile, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee organized a rally at Cardin’s synagogue, Beth Tfiloh in Pikesville, Maryland.
“Call Senator [Barbara] Mikulski and call Senator Cardin and urge them to oppose the deal,” Howard Kohr, AIPAC’s CEO at the time, said in a rare public appearance outside of AIPAC’s policy conferences.
“It was a tough vote,” Cardin recalled. “I was lobbied very, very heavily by President Obama personally. It lasted probably about an hour and a half, two hours. President Obama was pretty insistent on getting my vote, so it was a tough vote.”
Wait, a reporter asks, 90 minutes alone with the U.S. president, for a single vote?
Cardin grins. “It felt like five hours.”
Cardin does not regret the vote; he said the Obama administration gave up too much too early by going into the talks conceding that Iran would walk away with some level of enrichment. But he made it clear that he thought President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the deal in 2018 was a disaster, giving Iran a pretext to break its commitments, leading it to near-weaponization levels of enrichment today.
“One of the most tragic foreign policy mistakes of our time was Donald Trump withdrawing from the nuclear agreement while Iran was in compliance, and today we’re in much worse shape than we would have been if we were still in the agreement,” he said.
AIPAC spokesman Marshall Wittman said the pro-Israel lobby would miss Cardin’s reliable support.
“For his entire tenure in Congress, Senator Cardin has been an extraordinary leader in advancing the US-Israel relationship,” Wittman told JTA. “Time after time, he could be counted on to take the initiative to support our alliance with the Jewish state. We will miss his stalwart leadership but his legacy of standing with our ally will long endure.”
Indeed, with Cardin’s departure, the organized Jewish community is losing go-to senator for Jewish and pro-Israel issues — most recently, Cardin joined Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in seeking to honor Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir with a gold coin.
Not to worry, Cardin said: Every generation of Jews frets as it ages that it will be the last to fully represent on the American stage.
“I love the Jewish community. You can find every flavor imaginable in the Jewish community, and that’s healthy,” he said. “It was that way when I was growing up, it’s that way today. There are a lot of Jews that have very little identification to the traditions of Judaism, and there are a lot of young people who are much more engaged than I was.”
He added, “We’ve lasted these thousands of years — we’re going to continue to have a healthy, young population that understands the values of our religion and are committed to making sure we carry it out.”
Cardin is concerned by the turmoil in Israel in the face of the government’s radical proposals to overhaul the courts, but even there he sees hope.
“What Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu is doing with the judiciary is wrong, I’m going to speak out against it. I think it weakens their democratic institutions and democracy is their bedrock,” he said. “The Israelis are speaking pretty strongly against what the Netanyahu government is trying to do.”
Cardin described the typical headache of a Jew explaining his faith to others: It doesn’t quite match other faiths’ concepts of identification.
“I keep kosher in my house and we observe the major holidays in the Orthodox traditions, but I’m not an observant Orthodox Jew,” he said. “It’s hard to explain that.”
He recalled the late Sen. Harry Reid calling him, apologetically, to come in on the second day of Rosh Hashanah for a critical vote to fund the government and avoid a shutdown. Reid’s assumption was that Cardin would abjure working for the holiday.
“I said, ‘Look, it’s perfectly OK if you do it in the afternoon, I go to synagogue in the morning — I’ll be there for the vote,” Cardin said.
That’s typical of Cardin’s most tender memories — his non-Jewish colleagues expressing sensitivity to his Jewishness. In 1971, members of the House of Delegates noticing him gathering a minyan to say Kaddish after his mother died, and offering to join in; in 2006 after his election to the Senate, Mikulski telling him that she would handle meet and greets on Friday nights, knowing that he and Myrna routinely have as many as 30 people over for the Shabbat meal.
Asked if he would encourage younger Jews to get into politics, he doesn’t hesitate.
“This is a great country,” he said. About being Jewish, he added, “It has certainly not interfered with my political career.”
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The post Translating ‘tzedakah’ for Marylanders: Sen. Ben Cardin’s long Jewish goodbye appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Argentine court orders return of Nazi-looted painting to Jewish collector’s heir
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES – A Dutch journalist hunting for art treasures belonging to an Amsterdam Jewish art dealer spent years trying to get answers from Patricia Kadgien, the daughter of the Nazi financier who had made off with some of them, with no luck. So last year he went to her house in Mar del Plata, a resort city on Argentina’s Atlantic coast.
No one was home, but the journalist, Peter Schouten, noticed a “for sale” sign outside the property from Robles Casas & Campos, a local real estate agency.
Schoten went to the agency’s website, where the house was listed for $265,000. As he scrolled through the listing, he noticed something in a photograph of the living room. Schouten recognized the painting hanging above a sofa: “Portrait of a Lady,” most likely the work of the 18th-century northern Italian painter known as Il Pitocchetto.
On Friday, Argentine federal judge Santiago Inchausti authorized the restitution of “Portrait of a Lady,” which belonged to the collection of Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, to his daughter-in-law and sole heir, Marei von Saher.
“The property had been listed for sale on a real estate agency’s website, and one of the photographs showed a painting in the living room that matched one of the works from Goudstikker’s collection that had been sought for years,” Inchausti wrote in his ruling.
Goudstikker was one of Holland’s most prominent Jewish art dealers before World War II. In 1940, he fled the Nazi-occupied Netherlands with his wife and son, carrying a black notebook listing some 1,400 artworks. After his death during the voyage, his widow preserved it, and the notebook later became key evidence in the family’s restitution efforts.
His gallery and collection fell under Nazi control. Hermann Goering, a powerful deputy to Adolf Hitler, acquired hundreds of paintings from Goudstikker’s collection in a forced sale that Dutch authorities later determined was directly linked to Nazi persecution.
Herberto Robinson, von Saher’s lawyer who specializes in estate planning and asset protection, described what happened after Schoten’s sleuthing in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“At that point, the journalist contacted attorney Yael Weitz in Freedman Normand Friedland of New York where she specializes in art and cultural property law,” he said “She then contacted us and asked us to take on the case. The family’s sole intention was to recover the painting. They were not interested in pursuing those who had possessed it or in seeking financial compensation, they wanted the artwork returned.”
Kadgien is the daughter of Friedrich Kadgien, a German financial official who worked for the Nazi regime and later escaped to South America. The elder Kadgien, who had close ties to Goering, fled Germany in 1945 to Switzerland, eventually making his way to Argentina, where he started a business and raised a family. He died in 1978.
Kadgien and her husband at first did not cooperate. The realtor’s listing was removed after the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad published its report. Argentine authorities then searched the property on Aug. 26, 2025, but the painting had been removed and replaced with another artwork, while an outline matching its dimensions remained visible on the wall.
Kadgien and her husband, Juan Carlos Cortegoso, were placed under house arrest for 72 hours while authorities searched the family’s other properties. They subsequently turned the artwork over to federal prosecutors and were charged with aggravated concealment.
Experts from Argentina’s National Academy of Fine Arts attributed the work to Giacomo Antonio Melchiorre Ceruti, known as Il Pitocchetto, and valued it at approximately €250,000. The local and national Jewish communities took a keen interest in the case.
“We are very pleased and hope this marks the beginning of many more restitutions, as we know there are undoubtedly other works out there that rightfully belong to families who suffered this tragic fate,” Clauda Beatriz Malamud, the president of Sociedad Union Israelita Marplatense, the local Jewish community body, told JTA.
Under an agreement Inchausti approved, the criminal proceedings against the couple were suspended for two years, subject to a set of conditions. They irrevocably renounce any right or claim to the artwork, clearing the way for its restitution. The painting will remain in the custody of Argentina’s Supreme Court until the restitution is carried out. They also agreed to pay 4.8 million Argentine pesos — approximately $3,180 — in 24 monthly installments to the support association of Mar del Plata’s Interzonal Specialized Maternal and Child Hospital.
According to well-placed sources at the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum, von Saher has expressed interest in lending the painting to the museum for a temporary exhibition, possibly for one or two years. The exhibition would help raise awareness of the systematic theft of Jewish-owned art under the Nazi regime and the continuing international effort to return such works to their rightful owners. No final agreement about this has been announced.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Germany takes a step back to its Nazi past — and Donald Trump is cheering them on
What a role reversal.
Since the start of his second term as president, Donald Trump has looked like he’s been following the playbook of Adolf Hitler and other despots. But now Germany is becoming like Trump’s America.
The Sunday election results in Saxony-Anhalt state were a victory not just for the Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD, but also for Trumpism. As Trump’s powers are cracking in the US because of high prices and the unpopular war against Iran, the American president’s brand has not only taken root in Germany’s former communist region, but is threatening to spread across the country.
“Wow! The Populist Party in Germany just had a really big night,” Trump wrote Tuesday on Truth Social. “They finally got tired of the absolutely horrible Immigration rules and regulations which have hurt Germany so badly.”
“MGGA!!!,” Trump wrote at the end of his post, apparently meaning “Make Germany Great Again.”
MAGA’s influence is plain to see on social media videos posted in the run-up to the Saxony-Anhalt election, in which the AfD came alarmingly close to winning enough votes to form a government on its own, which would have been the first time since the Nazi era that an extreme-right party has taken over the leadership of a German state. The videos show AfD followers saying racist things about immigrants and the superiority of white people, that there’s too much emphasis on the Nazi years and German history needs to be told more positively, and calling for an end to funding “anti-German art,” whatever that might mean, among a host of other stands that mirror those of MAGA.
Sally Lisa Starken, a freelance German journalist and bestselling author who has been chronicling the AfD, posted an Instagram video of an AfD “family festival” in Magdeburg, the capital of Saxony-Anhalt.
“The whole time I felt like I was at a Trump event. The AfD has quite consciously learned from the MAGA movement,” said Starken, who has also covered Trump rallies in the US.
AfD merchandise was everywhere, including t-shirts bearing the photo of Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s lead candidate in the Saxony-Anhalt election, and the man who would become leader of the state if the party is able to find a partner willing to join in a coalition government.
As is the case with Trump, there’s a cult of personality surrounding the 35-year-old Siegmund. People at the family festival stood in line for two hours to have their picture taken with him. Just before the Saxony-Anhalt election, the cover of the newsmagazine Der Spiegel called him “the most dangerous man in Germany.” Taking a page from Trump, Siegmund used the cover’s mug shot-style photo in his election campaign.
As with Trump, people of all shapes, sizes, ages and backgrounds attend these AfD gatherings, but they’re probably even whiter than at Trump’s rallies. And like Trump, Siegmund sounds like a huckster who knows how to grab the attention of people who feel like they’ve been left behind.
The AfD has become especially strong in former Communist East Germany at least partly due to German reunification, which occurred in 1990. The economy in the eastern region has never caught up with that of the wealthier west, unemployment is high, wages are comparatively low. There’s a feeling among many in eastern Germany that reunification hurt them, rather than helped them.
Reunification also triggered an explosion of neo-Nazi violence against foreigners, a scourge that continues to the present day. Resentment against foreigners soared in 2015, when then-Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to waves of refugees fleeing war-torn Syria, a fateful decision that lifted the AfD from a fringe group of extremists to a party to be reckoned with — at first just in the eastern states like Saxony-Anhalt, but now across the country.
In last year’s federal elections, the AfD doubled its share of seats in the Bundestag, the German parliament. As a growing number of Germans have felt ignored by the mainstream parties — the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Left — the AfD has surged ahead to become Germany’s largest opposition party.
Among those who attend AfD rallies are diehard neo-Nazis, many sporting tattoos with symbols and slogans banned by law because of their association with the Third Reich. Instagram videos from party gatherings show AfD followers saying that Hitler was a great man and Germany could use another leader like him, and only people with pure German blood deserve to be citizens.
Last year, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, classified the AfD as right-wing extremist.
“The ethnicity- and ancestry-based understanding of the people prevailing within the party is incompatible with the free democratic order,” the agency said in a statement at that time.
That judgment didn’t stop the AfD from seeking legitimacy abroad — or from finding it. Close links between the Trump administration and the AfD go back to the start of Trump’s second term.
It started with JD Vance’s address in February 2025 to the Munich Security Conference, an annual meeting of American government officials with our purported European allies. Vance shocked the conference by coming to the defense of extremist parties like the AfD. Since the defeat of the Nazis, Germany’s mainstream political parties have maintained a “firewall” that keeps them from cooperating with extremist parties. In his speech to the security conference, Vance essentially accused Germany’s mainstream parties of authoritarian behavior by shutting out the AfD.
“If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you,” Vance told the European leaders.
On that same trip, Vance added insult to injury by meeting with the head of the AfD, Alice Weidel.
Olaf Scholz, who was chancellor at that time, defended the firewall against the AfD, saying the party trivializes Nazi atrocities. He basically told Vance to mind his own business.
“Where our democracy goes from here is for us to decide,” Scholz said.
At the center of the fraternal relationship between the AfD and MAGA is Elon Musk, the man who insists the stiff-arm gesture he gave at a rally celebrating Trump’s second inauguration was not the Hitler salute, although it sure looked like it. Just a few days later, Musk made a virtual appearance before a gathering of 4,000 at an AfD campaign rally in Halle.
“I think you really are the best hope for Germany,” Musk told the AfD followers. “It’s good to be proud of German culture and German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.”
Musk added that there is “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that.”
After the AfD’s success in the Saxony-Anhalt election, Musk wrote on X: “Well done!”
The AfD’s election shocker in Saxony-Anhalt has certainly caught the world’s attention — something that probably would not have happened were it not for Germany’s Nazi past.
Nonetheless, it feels like we have lost sight of a very important fact.
As we worry about the prospects of right-wing extremists increasing their power in Germany, politicians with virtually the same ideologies — xenophobes, white supremacists, racists and bigots — are already in the halls of power or positions of influence in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere in America.
And there’s something positive to be said about Germany.
Unlike the Trump administration, Germany investigates, prosecutes, and sends to prison far-right would-be insurrectionists, instead of freeing and rewarding them.
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For Orthodox women, or those who find men in yoga studios ‘gross,’ a refuge in Brooklyn
It’s Friday morning in Hasidic Crown Heights, just two blocks away from the Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters, and we are doing cat-cows. In cat pose, I hunch my back and pull my chin to my chest, letting gravity pull my ponytail to the ground. In cow, I pull my shoulders back, look up, and scan the room. For some, this class at Vessel Studios is a final meditative moment before a hectic day of shopping, cooking, and otherwise preparing for Shabbat. But as I look around, it’s impossible to tell which of my fellow cows is Orthodox and which is not. Save for the headscarves that some of the Hasidic women are wearing, heathens and believers alike are dressed in more or less matching uniforms of leggings and sports bras.
Ordinarily, this class would be taught by the owner of the studio, Riki Rosenthal, but she is extremely pregnant and has thus joined as a participant rather than a teacher. A Crown Heights native, Rosenthal grew up Hasidic and took her first yoga class when she was 19, an age where wearing leggings at the Crunch Gym in Prospect Heights without a skirt on top still felt like a rebellious act. Now, she identifies as a “non-frum Lubavitcher” — a phrase that captures the dual reality that she no longer conforms to an Orthodox lifestyle, but still identifies strongly with the culture in which she grew up.
“Chabad supersedes being religious in a way; it’s a culture that I will always connect to,” she said. Aside from a stint in Manhattan in her 20s, she has never lived anywhere other than Crown Heights. By founding a yoga studio that caters to women only, she has created a space where students, regardless of their religious beliefs or lack thereof, can exercise without the influence of men, whether for tznius, for the sisterly environment, or simply because, like Rosenthal, they believe “yoga studios with men are gross.”
In September 2020, 12 years after she took off her skirt to work out at Crunch, at a time when many studios were still closed because of COVID, Rosenthal started teaching yoga in her apartment. Two years later, she opened Vessel in the basement of a townhouse on Eastern Parkway. Signing a lease for her own studio was a big move, she said, but “there’s this part of being Chabad that makes you feel invincible.”
The studio has a soothing, sage green aesthetic, small lamps placed around the room provide soft lighting, and instructors often burn incense. There’s even a drawer with extra tichels — headscarves — in case anyone forgot theirs (though recently it had been emptied in anticipation of heavy rain and possible flooding, and hadn’t been restocked when I visited).
Rosenthal sometimes hears from would-be yoginis wanting to know if yoga is “kosher.” She feels unqualified to answer that question, especially since she “doesn’t totally subscribe to kosher.” Still, what she teaches is an Americanized brand of yoga that goes light on the Sanskrit, so that students don’t feel like they’re committing the sin of worshipping a false idol. “None of my teachers really talk about any of the yogic deities,” she said. “I try to keep it very neutral because I don’t really want to piss anyone off.”
Still, here on Eastern Parkway, as our Friday morning class comes to a gentle close, our instructor, Rachel Sherman, ends it with a “namaste” along with a “Shabbat shalom.”
For Sherman, who grew up Reform in Dallas, teaching yoga at Vessel has challenged the stereotype of Hasidic women — at least, Lubavitcher women — as quiet and demure. “A lot of my students speak, like, five languages. Most of them have careers,” she said. She admires what she views as their extreme confidence: “Total beginners will come to yoga and go straight to the front row,” she said. “No one’s afraid to tell me if they hate the incense, or if they need the temperature of the room different, and as someone who leans a little more people-pleasy, I appreciate a straight shooter.” She said she’s also impressed by how quickly women start doing yoga again after giving birth.
Maia Levy, a member of the Crown Heights Lubavitch community, was a near-total beginner when she started coming to Vessel. She said she wasn’t intimidated, though; she understood quickly that Vessel was the kind of place where “everyone is at their own pace” and “if you need to be in child’s pose for, like, 20 minutes, that’s fine.”
Earlier this year, Levy gave birth to her first child. She attended prenatal yoga at Vessel while pregnant, and returned to class a mere six weeks after giving birth. Sure, she might spend a little more time in child’s pose than before, but in a women’s-only yoga studio in a community that puts a heavy emphasis on motherhood, no one bats an eye. “I was, like, itching to get back,” she said.
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