MONROE TOWNSHIP, N.J.  Some men retire to a life of anonymity. Not Ben-Ami Kadish.

Pick up a random copy of the newsletter for the Ponds, the retirement community here where Mr. Kadish lives with his wife, Doris. Here is Mr. Kadish, a former military engineer arrested Tuesday on charges of spying for Israel a generation ago, delivering the latest duplicate bridge results: He and Doris were East-West winners on Dec. 1, 2006.

There he is, reporting in his regular Jewish War Veterans column on a successful outing to the Veterans Memorial Home in Menlo Park, where he and some fellow former soldiers held a bingo game and admired the new reclining wheelchairs they had bought for the residents with money from selling Veterans Day poppies. And there he is on Page 19, in Irene Eisenberg’s Yiddish Club column, in which she thanks Mr. Kadish, the club’s co-founder, and other members of the hospitality committee “for the bang-up job they always do.”

There seemed to be no end to Mr. Kadish’s public activity. He organized hospital visits and prayers for the dead, advised acquaintances on how to buy Israel bonds, served meals on wheels, persuaded the condominium association to let him build a hut in his yard each autumn to welcome scores of people for the Jewish harvest festival Sukkot. In his spare time, he tracked down 500 relatives and posted a family tree to a genealogy Web site.

Which is why the notion that he had engaged in espionage 25 years earlier was so hard to swallow for his white-haired neighbors in this gated community of 600 homes set among golf courses and nature trails an hour southwest of New York City.