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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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As the last generation of Holocaust survivors die, is AI the future of Holocaust education?
At a Brooklyn synagogue on a recent Monday afternoon, a video of Holocaust survivor Sonia Warshawski played on a two-foot-tall box. Seated in a leopard-print chair, her hands folded in her lap, Warshawski blinked and nodded her head expectantly on a continuous loop.
“Did anyone else from your family survive?” a Hebrew school student asked the AI-powered avatar.
The video cut to a separate clip. Warshawski said she and her sister had survived. Her brother, mother and father did not.
Warshawski, who survived three concentration camps and ran a tailoring shop in Kansas City until 2023, had made it part of her life’s mission to tell her story wherever she could. She spoke with students, filmed the 2016 documentary Big Sonia about her life, and was even a guest speaker at a local prison.
But Warshawski knew she wouldn’t live forever. So in 2021, with the help of the interactive media company StoryFile and her granddaughter’s production company, Inflatable Film, Warshawski recorded answers to hundreds of questions about her life, from “What do you remember about the death march?,” to “Why do you like leopard print so much?” Those answers were loaded into an AI-powered avatar of Warshawski that can converse through a video screen, which debuted as an exhibit at the Museum of Kansas City last year.
The technology also caught the attention of the Blue Card, a nonprofit that provides financial assistance to Holocaust survivors in need. The organization adapted it into a portable format and brought the virtual Warshawski to 20 schools and community centers across the New York area over the past year, with plans to expand nationwide. A parallel effort from the USC Shoah Foundation, called “Dimensions in Testimony,” also enables students to have conversations with virtual versions of Holocaust survivors.
The initiative reflects recognition that as survivors age, a model of Holocaust education built on firsthand testimony will be increasingly difficult to sustain. No lesson plan can match the impact of hearing directly from survivors, many of whom dedicate their golden years to speaking tours retelling their traumatic stories. But 90% of the world’s roughly 200,000 living Holocaust survivors are projected to die in the next 15 years. And for aging survivors — who have already lost so much of their lives to violence and deprivation — the weight of transmitting Holocaust memories to the next generation is a burden they cannot shoulder alone.
“It’s absolutely the future of Holocaust education,” said Masha Pearl, the Blue Card’s executive director. “It actually is as close as possible to hearing a live survivor speak.”
Warshawski’s story
Warshawski grew up in Międzyrzec, Poland, and was 17 years old when she and her family were forced into a ghetto. Sonia and her mother were deported to the Majdanek death camp, where she watched Nazis march her mother to her death via gas chamber. Warshawski was then sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was forced to spread her fellow prisoners’ ashes as fertilizer, and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she was shot in the chest on liberation day.
She recovered and met her husband, John, at the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp. The couple moved to Kansas City in 1948.
Using AI technology, students can ask the virtual Warshawski about all of those harrowing moments — with the added benefit that the real-life Warshawski only had to recall them once.
Many survivors “suffer from depression and PTSD, and it’s very difficult for them to recount these extremely painful experiences,” Pearl said. “This actually bypasses that in a way.”
The interactive element is also engaging for kids, Pearl said. At the Conservative synagogue Temple Sholom, after watching Big Sonia, nearly all 25 students ages 10 to 13 — half from the parochial school at the church across the street — raised their hands to ask the virtual Warshawski a question. A few students stayed after the programming had formally ended to ask more.
“It’s the same thing I heard from my uncle’s great grandpa,” said fifth-grader Noah Stein, who attends Hebrew school at Temple Sholom. “It’s amazing — I’ve never seen something like that.”
An imperfect technology
Warshawski, now 100 years old and still going strong, celebrated her birthday in November at a party with more than 1,000 people. But she doesn’t have as much energy as she used to and was unavailable to interview for this piece. So I interviewed her avatar instead.
My question — how she felt about her memory being preserved through AI — triggered an unrelated response.
“After we left [Majdanek], there were still people there, and I must tell you, one day when I was…”
“Can we pause this?” said Rechan Meshulam, special projects director at the Blue Card, who operated the technology at Temple Sholom.
Meshulam said the system had not matched my question to the correct response. She then manually selected the closest question, “Are you glad that you recorded this with StoryFile?”
“I feel this is a very important thing for the people in the world, not to forget and [to] read more about it. Read more history,” Warshawski said. “I’m very grateful that I had a chance to do it. I am thanking the Almighty for it, to give me the strength still to go on.”
The initial mismatched response illustrated the technology’s limits: Warshawski can only answer questions that StoryFile asked her during the original interview in 2021. If a question is similar enough, the AI is designed to redirect Warshawski to the appropriate answer. But this didn’t seem to work in practice. Whenever a student asked a question outside the suggested question bank, operators had to ask the student to rephrase — or pause Warshawski and jump in with their own knowledge about her story.
But according to Pearl, the limited scope of questions is a feature, not a bug. Limiting Warshawski to questions she actually answered prevents her words from being taken out of context or misconstrued, Pearl said.
“Sonia cannot tell you what the weather is today, what her thoughts are on politics — anything that’s really current,” Pearl said. “She can only speak to her experience.”
Not everyone draws the same line. Last year, a Utah-based tech startup called SchoolAI drew controversy for its AI-generated version of Anne Frank, which spits out responses that Frank never wrote herself. Henrik Schönemann, a German historian who tested the chatbot, found AI-Frank avoided holding Nazis responsible for her death and spun her story in an overly positive light.
“How anyone thinks this is even remotely appropriate is beyond me,” Schönemann posted to social media, adding that the technology “violates every premise of Holocaust-education” and amounted to “a kind of grave-robbbing.”
SchoolAI, which also offers the ability to chat with historical figures such as Alexander Graham Bell and Frederick Douglass, said it was implementing additional safeguards to help characters more directly address difficult questions.
I asked SchoolAI’s Anne Frank chatbot about how Frank feels about comparisons between ICE agents and the Gestapo. She didn’t take the bait.
“That’s a difficult question. When I lived in hiding, the Gestapo and police searched for people like us because of who we were, not because we had done anything wrong. I was always afraid,” AI-Frank wrote. “I believe it’s important to treat people with humanity and fairness, no matter their situation. What matters most is how we treat one another, especially those who are vulnerable.”
Yet even with careful control over the accuracy of testimony, some educators are uncomfortable with the idea of immortalizing Holocaust survivors in an interactive form.
In a research paper titled “Creating the ‘virtual’ witness: the limits of empathy,” Corey Kai Nelson Schultz argues that digital versions of Holocaust survivors can have the effect of undermining empathy. Viewers may treat the avatars more like virtual assistants than people, he wrote, and could be tempted to gamify the experience or test the technology’s limits.
Schultz told the Forward he prefers more traditional forms of Holocaust education — seeing artifacts like survivors’ shoes or toys, or watching video testimonies — mediums he believes better capture survivors’ humanity.
But the technology’s novelty was part of the appeal for Warshawski’s granddaughter, Leah, who directed Big Sonia — and said the AI component is just one more way to ensure her grandmother’s story lives on.
Warshawski “does authentically, passionately believe that everybody needs more education, and specifically, Holocaust education. And if this is the way to do it in the future, then so be it,” Leah told the Forward. “You know, ideally, everybody would be able to read more books.”
Pearl said the survivors she works with also have a different set of worries.
“We actually didn’t hear any ethical issues or concerns,” Pearl said. “The concerns that we heard were, Who will tell my story after I’m no longer here?”
The post As the last generation of Holocaust survivors die, is AI the future of Holocaust education? appeared first on The Forward.
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Board of Peace Members Have Pledged More Than $5 billion for Gaza, Trump Says
A drone view shows the destruction in a residential neighborhood, after the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from the area, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, in Gaza City, October 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas/File Photo
US President Donald Trump said Board of Peace member states will announce at an upcoming meeting on Thursday a pledge of more than $5 billion for reconstruction and humanitarian efforts in Gaza.
In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump wrote that member states have also committed thousands of personnel toward a U.N.-authorized stabilization force and local police in the Palestinian enclave.
The US president said Thursday’s gathering, the first official meeting of the group, will take place at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, which the State Department recently renamed after the president. Delegations from more than 20 countries, including heads of state, are expected to attend.
The board’s creation was endorsed by a United Nations Security Council resolution as part of the Trump administration’s plan to end the war between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Gaza.
Israel and Hamas agreed to the plan last year with a ceasefire officially taking effect in October, although both sides have accused each other repeatedly of violating the ceasefire. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, more than 590 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops in the territory since the ceasefire began. Israel has said four of its soldiers have been killed by Palestinian militants in the same period.
While regional Middle East powers including Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel – as well as emerging nations such as Indonesia – have joined the board, global powers and traditional Western US allies have been more cautious.
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Why a forgotten teacher’s grave became a Jewish pilgrimage site
Along Britton Road in Rochester, New York, a brick gatehouse sits across from ordinary homes. Beyond it lies Britton Road Cemetery, its grounds divided into family plots and sections claimed over time by Orthodox congregations and fraternal associations, past and present. Names like Anshe Polen, Beth Hakneses Hachodosh, B’nai Israel, and various Jewish fraternal organizations are found here.
On the east side of the cemetery, a modest gray headstone draws visitors who do not personally know the man buried there, who were never taught his name in school, and who claim no personal connection to his life. Some leave notes. Some light candles in a small metal box set nearby. Others whisper prayers and stand for a moment before going. They come because they believe holiness can be found here.
The grave belongs to Rabbi Yechiel Meir Burgeman, a Polish-born teacher who died in 1938. He did not lead a major congregation or leave behind an institution that bears his name. And yet, nearly a century after his death, people still visit.
Over time, Burgeman has come to be remembered as a tzaddik nistar, a hidden righteous person, whose holiness is known through their teaching and daily life rather than through any title or position. His grave has become a place of intercession. People come to pray for healing, for help in times of uncertainty, and for the hope of marriage. What endures here is not an individual’s biography so much as a practice: the belief that a life lived with integrity can continue to shape devotion, even after the body has been laid to rest.
In life, Burgeman was not known as a miracle worker or a public figure. He was a melamed, a teacher of children, living plainly among other Jewish immigrants in Rochester’s Jewish center in the early decades of the 20th century. At one point, he was dismissed from a teaching post for refusing to soften his instruction. He later opened his own cheder, or schoolroom. There was no congregation to inherit his name, no institution to archive his papers. When he died, he was buried in an ordinary way at Britton Road Cemetery, one grave among many.
What followed was not immediate.
Remembered in return
The meaning attached to Burgeman’s resting place accumulated slowly. Stories began to circulate. People spoke of his kindness, his discipline, his integrity. Over time, visitors came. The grave became a place not of answers, but of belief. For generations, this turning toward the dead has taken this same form. It is not worship. It is proximity. A way of standing near those believed to have lived rightly, and asking that their merit might still matter.
In Jewish tradition, prayer at a grave is a reflection on those believed to have lived with righteousness, asking that their merit accompany the living in moments of need. Psalms are traditionally recited. Words are often spoken quietly.
I have done something similar too. Years ago, before I converted to Judaism and before I had the means to travel, I sent a written prayer through a Chabad service that delivers letters to the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in New York. Someone else carried it. I cannot say with absolute certainty what happened because of it. Only that the practice itself made space for hope that I was seen, and that a prayer was later answered in ways that shaped my life and deepened my understanding of Judaism.
Burgeman’s grave functions in a similar register, though without any institutional frame. People come not because his name is widely known, but because the story has endured. Over time, that story gathered details. The most persistent involves a dog said to have escorted Jewish children to Burgeman’s cheder so they would not be harassed along the way by other youths. The dog then stood watch until they were ready to return home. The versions differ. Some are reverent. Some are playful. Some verge on the miraculous. The story endures because it names something children needed: care, in a world that could be frightening.
In recent decades, Burgeman’s afterlife has taken on a digital form. His name surfaces in comment threads and genealogical forums, passed along by people who never met him and are not always sure how they are connected. Spellings are debated. Dates are corrected. A descendant appears. A former student’s grandchild adds a fragment. Someone asks whether this is the same man their grandmother spoke of. No single account settles the matter. Instead, memory gathers. What once traveled by word of mouth now moves through hyperlinks.
The internet allows fragments to remain visible. Burgeman’s story survives not because it was officially recorded, but because enough people cared to remember it. In this way, his legacy resembles the man himself: quiet, unadorned, sustained by actions rather than declaration.
This story does not offer certainty. It is about remembering a life and asking if we might still learn from it and if, perhaps, it can bring us closer to faith. Burgeman left no grand monument. He left descendants. A grave. A life of Jewish values that continues to teach.
Burgeman did not seek recognition in life. After death, he became something else: a teacher still teaching, not through words, but through the way people continue to act on his memory. That is the lesson. Not any miracle. Not any legend. The quiet insistence that a life lived with integrity does not end when the casket is placed into the earth.
Some graves are instructions.
This one still asks something of us.
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