High intensity interactions between campaigners for State Senator Dalya Attar, who is Orthodox Jewish, and her opponent, Delegate Malcolm Ruff, who is Black, were the norm this past week at a key early voting center in northwest Baltimore.

But on Wednesday tensions escalated outside the building into what witnesses describe as an ugly scene in which a well-known Attar supporter and campaign contributor, Ronald Rosenbluth, repeatedly screamed at and tried to physically intimidate 78-year-old Ruff supporter Betsy Krieger.

Krieger said it happened after Ruff campaigners were telling voters, among other things, about Attar’s pending federal criminal charges and were approached by Rosenbluth, who accused the Ruff campaign of being anti-Semitic.

“I said, ‘I’m Jewish, you know. I’m in this campaign, and I’m Jewish,’” Krieger recalled. “And that’s when he just flipped.”

“He said, ‘I hate Jews like you!’ and ‘How many people did your family lose in the Holocaust?’” Krieger said in an interview yesterday with The Brew. “People were holding him back, literally holding him back. I don’t know if he would have hit me or not, but he was certainly screaming and trying to get in my face.”

He said “a lot of other things that I really didn’t hear because I was rather shaken,” Krieger said in an Instagram post by Progressive Maryland.

• Always an election season hot spot, Baltimore’s 41st District is extra edgy thanks to criminal charges one candidate is facing (6/13/26)

Also campaigning outside the Public Safety Training Center at 3500 West Northern Parkway was Erica Puentes, who said she was with Krieger and witnessed the whole thing.

Puentes corroborated Krieger’s account and said she was afraid the older woman was in physical danger.

“I literally had to get in between them [short video clip] to become a physical barrier, throw my arms out to kind of protect Betsy from him,” Puentes said. “She’s walking off to get away, but he’s continuing to come towards her very aggressively, intimidating her, closing in with his body.”

“I’m scared that he’s going to hurt her. I just start repeating, ‘We respect our elders. You can’t harass her. Stop harassing her,’” Puentes, of Progressive Maryland, said last night.

“She’s walking off to get away, but he’s continuing to come towards her very aggressively, intimidating her, closing in with his body”  – Erica Puentes, another person campaigning for Ruff.

Another witness, George Buntin, said he and others tried to calm Rosenbluth down, pull him back and get him to stop following Krieger.

Afterwards, Buntin said, two Attar campaign workers picked up a large Attar sign and went over to where Krieger and Puentes were standing.

“They were doing that really aggressive thing, being like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna body you out, so you can’t talk to the voter’ and intentionally bumping them. Very physically bumping them and hitting them with the signs,” Buntin recalled.

He shared a bystander’s video showing him chewing out Senator Attar’s brother, Joseph Attar, over the behavior.

(Buntin, like Rosenbluth, is running for a seat on the 41st District Central Committee. Buntin is on Ruff’s slate, Rosenbluth is on Attar’s.)

No Response from Rosenbluth, Attar

Puentes told The Brew she feels Rosenbluth and the Attar campaign should apologize to Krieger, and that Rosenbluth, who has been a member of the 41st District Central Committee for years, should be considered unfit to serve on it. Krieger said she feels the same way.

Rosenbluth has not responded to multiple texts and voicemail messages from The Brew seeking comment on the incident. The Attar campaign also has not responded to requests for comment.

The incident comes in the final days of an election season stressed by factional fighting in this large northwest Baltimore district, which includes Black neighborhoods and the city’s largest concentration of Orthodox Jewish residents.

The district, which is 63% Black and 24% white, includes such west, northwest and north neighborhoods as Yale Heights, Edmondson Village, West Arlington, Grove Park, Pimlico, Cheswolde, Fallstaff, Mount Washington, Cross Keys and Roland Park.

The tenor of the campaign has grown especially toxic, in part because of the eight-count criminal indictment filed last October against Attar, her brother Joseph Attar and a Baltimore policeman, Kalman “Kal” Finkelstein.

Prosecutors charged the trio with extortion and conspiracy, alleging an elaborate scheme that involved secretly videotaping a woman Attar once employed in bed with a married man (cameras were said to have been hidden in smoke detectors) and then threatening to share the sex videos with rabbis, family members and others.

The goal was to stop the woman from disclosing things Attar feared would be damaging to her 2022 campaign, according to the indictment, which includes text messages among the defendants hatching the alleged extortion scheme.

Rosenbluth’s name has come up in connection to the case. He was on a list of people that the three defendants are to have no contact with by order of a federal judge, the Baltimore Banner reported last November. Amid that disclosure, Rosenbluth resigned from his job at the Baltimore City Sheriff’s Office.

Neighbors vs. Neighbors

The 63-year-old owner of Tov Pizza has been in the news before. In 2010, disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff went to work at Rosenbluth’s kosher pizzeria on home detention at the end of the four-year sentence he served for fraud, corruption and conspiracy.

The founder of the Shomrim private patrol group, Rosenbluth has long been active in 41st District politics, serving on the central committee along with this wife, Sandy Rosenbluth.

Buntin and others said campaigning for Ruff at the early voting center last week was emotionally exhausting, with Attar supporters yelling at any Ruff campaigner who brought up her indictment to a voter.

“They would say, ‘Oh, now you’re playing dirty!’” Buntin recalled, “while a lot of people bringing it up just thought, ‘It’s a fact, it’s public record, why shouldn’t I say it?’”

The discord is par for the course in a campaign that has generated charges of racial bias by Ruff supporters, anti-semitism by Attar supporters and the usual volley of accusations about campaign signs being allegedly ripped up or removed.

Asked to comment on the incident on behalf of his campaign, Ruff texted these thoughts to The Brew:

“The 41st District is made up of Black neighbors and Jewish neighbors, immigrant families and families who’ve been here for generations, people who pray in different buildings, who come from different blocks, who don’t agree on everything. But we need to stand shoulder to shoulder for the same Baltimore.”