Arguably more than any other notable Jewish Baltimorean alive or deceased, David Mark Rubenstein is a classic rags-to-riches story.
The only child of a post office worker and a homemaker who sometimes worked in a dress shop (his parents are buried in Rosedale’s Mikro Kodesh Beth Israel Cemetery), Rubenstein, 74, grew up in Pikesville and succeeded wildly in the fields of business, government, media, law and philanthropy.
Rubenstein admits to having a restless soul. “I’m Jewish,” he told the Baltimore Sun in 2010. “I can never be completely happy.” (In a 2015 profile on “60 Minutes,” Rubenstein’s mother Bettie admitted she wanted her son to become a dentist.)
The co-founder and co-chairman of the private equity firm The Carlyle Group, Rubenstein, a Bethesda resident, is worth $3.7 billion and the 790th richest person in the world, according to Forbes. He leads an investment group that was officially approved by Major League Baseball on March 27, 2024 to acquire the Baltimore Orioles, a longtime dream of Rubenstein’s.
Here are seven facts you might not know about Rubenstein:
1. Rubenstein comes from a blue-collar Jewish family that attended an Orthodox shul.
“In Baltimore, the Jewish community was very segregated from the rest of the community,” he said in an interview on the website of writer and New York University law professor Max Raskin. “And the Jewish community was in three different categories: the wealthy entrepreneurs, the middle class, white-collar workers and the schleppers, or the blue-collar workers.
“We were in the blue-collar worker category. The blue-collar workers were not wealthy enough to be able to afford to go to the Conservative or the Reform synagogues, so they were all Orthodox.”
2. As a youngster, he was a hard-working but not naturally gifted student.
“I was fortunate to have a loving set of parents who were committed to my education,” Rubenstein told the Washington Post in 2012. “They wanted me to do well in school, and their approval meant a lot. When your parents tell you, ‘We are proud of you,’ and they tell the neighbors what a good job you did, that’s incentive. …
“Until I was 11 or so, I thought everybody was Jewish. I’d see people working hard and getting well-educated, so I always felt that’s how you get ahead.”
3. Some of his Jewish ancestors were scammed back in the Old Country.
“My father once told me that my ancestors on his side came from the Ukraine,” Rubenstein said. “When there was a pogrom around 1908 or 1909, they all left. But they weren’t that smart and maybe not literate, so they bought tickets to the United States and it was a scam where they only got you to Leeds, England, not the United States. So 40,000 Jews are stuck in Leeds, England, for like 20 years or something before they could afford to figure out how to get to the United States.”
4. Though raised in a Jewish household, he is not religiously observant.
“I was born Jewish and I was bar mitzvahed, but I’m not an observant Jewish person,” he said. “My parents, who didn’t really understand Hebrew, would go to sit for the High Holy Days, but they didn’t really understand what was going on.
“I went to Hebrew school, but my Hebrew was so bad that when I got bar mitzvahed, the rabbi had to write it out phonetically for me in English to make sure I got it right. So I would say I’m not observant.”
5. Nonetheless, he is proud of being a Member of the Tribe. In 2022, he donated $15 million to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to support and expand its collection.
“When Hitler came around, he didn’t say, ‘Oh, you’re not observant? Then you’re OK. Oh, you don’t go to High Holiday services? You’re OK.’ He didn’t do that. If you’re Jewish, you have a Jewish name, and you look like me, you are not going to be spared antisemitism.
“I don’t pretend to be not Jewish and try to pass as Robert Redford or something like that.”
6. Although an author himself and a history buff and proud native of Charm City, he is not a fan of writer Henry Louis Menken, the legendary “Sage of Baltimore”?
“H.L. Mencken was fairly virulently antisemitic, and so because of that I was never as enamored with him as maybe some people who could overlook that. I would say I wasn’t one of his big admirers.”
7. Rubenstein was an aspiring but unsuccessful athlete while attending Baltimore City College with the likes of classmates Kurt L. Schmoke, former mayor of Baltimore (and a fellow member of the Lancers Club), and the late Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-7th).
“I went to a public high school that had 1,500 people in my class. It was half-black and half-Jewish. I just couldn’t make any of the athletic teams. It wasn’t realistic.”
Updated March 28, 2024
A committed philanthropist and community leader, Russel was president of R&H Motors.
The mother of four was a native of Winchester, Virginia, who spent most of her life in Northwest Baltimore.
The remaining 6,000 members of the community are expected to immigrate by 2030.
The Columbia resident worked on the Gemini and Apollo space missions.