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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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The Jewish women who kept Confederate graves from disappearing
In June 1866, just over a year after the Civil War ended, young Jewish men in Richmond, Virginia, removed their coats and set to work among the graves of their fallen comrades. Some were “frail of limb,” a newspaper noted. They wheeled gravel and turf, filled the graves, and tamped the earth down “in a very substantial manner.” It was the last sad tribute they could offer.
The work that day was organized by Jewish women in the city. Their aim was permanence: to enclose the soldiers’ graves, to mark them, and to ensure they would not disappear “before the relentless finger of time.”
The Hebrew Cemetery in Richmond was established in 1816, decades before the Civil War reshaped the nation and long before the city became the capital of the Confederacy. It was the second burial ground for the Beth Shalome Congregation, Virginia’s first synagogue. Tucked within its grounds is the Soldiers’ Section, where 30 Jewish Confederate soldiers are buried, in what is believed to be one of only two Jewish military cemeteries in the world outside Israel.
They came from across the South, including Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and beyond. A bronze plaque at the entrance reads: “To the glory of God and in memory of the Hebrew Confederate soldiers resting in this hallowed spot.”
What matters here is not only who is buried — but who remembered them, and how.
The work the war left behind
In 1866, just a year after the war’s end, Jewish women in Richmond organized the Hebrew Ladies’ Memorial Association. That same year, the group issued an appeal “to the Israelites of the South” for aid to enable the society to care for the graves of Jewish Confederate soldiers from all over the South who lie buried in the cemeteries of Richmond.
It was a duty, an act of chesed shel emet, Hebrew for the truest form of kindness, performed for those who could not repay it.
Newspaper accounts from the period are striking for their clarity and urgency. These women understood that the work of memory is laborious — physical, ongoing, and vulnerable to neglect. Graves, they warned, could vanish unless someone acted.
So they took responsibility.
By the late 1860s and 1870s, the Association’s work had grown to include an annual memorial service. Reports describe flowers laid carefully on each grave, marble slabs placed at the head of each burial, names and regiments inscribed so those resting there would not slip into anonymity.
An 1868 account observed that “each grave has been marked in a manner that ensures that the names of the still tenants of this beautiful spot will be preserved from oblivion; and handed down to be further cherished by the generations yet to come.”
That language echoes a Jewish concept. Zachor. Remember.
Memory, they understood, does not preserve itself.
Importantly, these memorial services were not closed affairs. One report from 1868 noted that the crowd gathered in the cemetery “was not confined to any one denomination.” Jewish lives were honored in the public view, but still held apart from Richmond’s larger Confederate cemeteries, Hollywood and Oakwood, which were not consecrated for Jewish burial and could not accommodate Jewish ritual requirements, including separate sacred ground.
Tending the dead
The care itself remained constant, but the language surrounding it did not.
What is striking in early accounts of the Soldiers’ Section of the Hebrew Cemetery is not the absence of politics, but how its weight changes over time.
In the earliest years, memory and the war were still closely bound. The 1866 appeal issued by the Hebrew Ladies’ Memorial Association spoke openly of a “glorious cause” and framed the soldiers’ deaths within the language of Confederate sacrifice. Like other women’s memorial groups in the postwar South, these Jewish women used care for the dead to assert dignity and a claim to sacrifice in a defeated society.
Yet even then, the work itself was grounded in restraint. The focus was on names, tending, and preservation — on preventing the graves from vanishing. The labor was physical, repetitive, and unglamorous. Whatever meanings surrounded it, the work remained the same.
As decades passed, the emphasis shifted. By the 1930s, memorial services featured a cadet, Walter McDonald of the Catholic Benedictine College, sounding taps and the ceremonial laying of wreaths. Confederate organizations were invited to attend. In 1940 and 1941, the public was welcomed to observe the 74th and 75th annual memorials. After 1941, the Hebrew Ladies’ Memorial Association continued to participate alongside other organizations in Memorial Day observances, but it appears that by 1947 the local observance of “Hebrew Memorial Day” or “Jewish Confederate Memorial Day” faded as a distinct commemoration.
Across generations, the observance persisted, a refusal to abandon the dead to neglect. Memory grew larger than any one explanation. The women’s work became less about what the war had meant, and more about what the living still owed to their dead.
A refusal to forget
This is a complex story that shows how history so often complicates memory. It sits at the intersection of some of America’s most divisive episodes and a small minority faith community declaring its presence and its sacrifices over decades.
When the Civil War ended, Jews needed to be buried. What followed was a choice.
The Hebrew Ladies’ Memorial Association chose to take responsibility. To remember “many a loved brother, son, and husband.” To insist that whatever judgment history would render, oblivion was not acceptable for “Israelitish soldiers of the Confederate army.”
Today, the Soldiers’ Section in Richmond’s Hebrew Cemetery remains. Names are still remembered. The work begun in 1866 was not temporary.
The post The Jewish women who kept Confederate graves from disappearing appeared first on The Forward.
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Spanish PM Sanchez Says US Invasion of Greenland ‘Would Make Putin Happiest Man on Earth’
Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomes US President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff during a meeting in Moscow, Russia, Aug. 6, 2025. Photo: Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Pool via REUTERS
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said a US invasion of Greenland “would make Putin the happiest man on earth” in a newspaper interview published on Sunday.
Sanchez said any military action by the US against Denmark’s vast Arctic island would damage NATO and legitimize the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
“If we focus on Greenland, I have to say that a US invasion of that territory would make Vladimir Putin the happiest man in the world. Why? Because it would legitimize his attempted invasion of Ukraine,” he said in an interview in La Vanguardia newspaper.
“If the United States were to use force, it would be the death knell for NATO. Putin would be doubly happy.”
President Donald Trump on Saturday appeared to change tack over Greenland by vowing to implement a wave of increasing tariffs on European allies until the United States is allowed to buy Greenland.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said additional 10 percent import tariffs would take effect on February 1 on goods from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and Great Britain — all already subject to tariffs imposed by Trump.
Those tariffs would increase to 25 percent on June 1 and would continue until a deal was reached for the US to purchase Greenland, Trump wrote.
Trump has repeatedly insisted he will settle for nothing less than ownership of Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark. Leaders of both Denmark and Greenland have insisted the island is not for sale and does not want to be part of the United States.
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Damascus and Kurdish Forces Agree to Immediate Ceasefire
Syria’s interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa speaks during a Ministerial formation of the government of the Syrian Arab Republic, in Damascus, Syria, March 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi
i24 News – Syrian state media reported on Sunday that the Syrian government and the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have reached an immediate ceasefire after days of clashes in Kurdish-held areas of the northeast.
The agreement, announced electronically by Damascus, marks a major shift in Syria’s ongoing efforts to reassert control over its Kurdish-majority regions.
According to the Syrian presidency, the deal, signed by President Ahmed al-Sharaa and SDF commander Mazloum Abdi, calls for a full halt to combat operations on all fronts, the withdrawal of SDF-affiliated forces to the east of the Euphrates, and the integration of SDF fighters into Syria’s defense and interior ministries on an individual basis.
The agreement also stipulates that the Syrian government will assume military and administrative control over Deir al-Zor and Raqqa, take over all oil and gas fields, and assume responsibility for prisons and camps holding ISIS members and their families. The SDF has committed to evacuating all non-Syrian PKK-affiliated personnel from the country.
“All lingering files with the SDF will be resolved,” Sharaa said, adding that he is scheduled to meet Abdi on Monday to continue discussions. The ceasefire is intended to open safe corridors for civilians to return to their areas and allow state institutions to resume their duties.
US Special Envoy Tom Barrack praised the agreement, describing it as a “pivotal inflection point” that brings former adversaries together and advances Syria toward national unity. Barrack noted that the deal facilitates the continued fight against ISIS while integrating Kurdish forces into the broader Syrian state.
The ceasefire comes after days of heavy fighting in northeastern Syria, highlighting both the fragility and potential of Damascus’ reconciliation efforts with Kurdish forces.