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In an unusual alliance, Jewish media and striking journalists are uniting to cover the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial
PITTSBURGH (JTA) — How many times should an alleged synagogue shooter’s name be mentioned in a news story about his trial, now beginning after more than four years?
For the Pittsburgh Union Press last month, the answer was seven. For the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, it was an uneasy five, in a departure from its usual answer of zero — a number chosen out of deference to a community devastated by the shooting.
The slight difference was the only discrepancy between one set of stories published by the two news organizations covering the trial of Robert Bowers, accused of murdering 11 Jews in their synagogue here in 2018.
The anomaly offers a window into an unusual partnership between the two publications — the city’s Jewish paper and the news site established by striking staffers for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — born in February when it became clear that the trial would last months.
Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle editor Toby Tabachnick was dreading the trial coverage, with a staff of just three on the editorial side: herself and two reporters, David Rullo and Adam Reinherz.
“I started getting really nervous. Like, how are we going to do this?” Tabachnick said on the eve of the trial, speaking at the federal courthouse where jury selection would soon begin. “Our regular reporters could have been here. But it would have been extremely taxing, difficult and emotional for us, because we’re so ingrained in the community too.”
Plus, she added, “In addition to this trial, which is going to be every day for three months, we’re covering the synagogues, events and the holidays, the lectures, we still have a regular community newspaper to put out.”
Tabachnick knew Andrew “Goldy” Goldstein, one of the Post-Gazette’s team that picked up a Pulitzer for their coverage of the massacre, from his time as a Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle intern. She also knew he was on strike and wondered whether he could use the extra freelance opportunity.
Instead, Goldstein immediately offered up a better idea: Join with the Pittsburgh Union Progress, the strike paper, in a joint reporting project, organized in part through the Pittsburgh Media Partnership, an incubator for local journalism. (The Jewish Telegraphic Agency is raising funds for the coverage.)
Working together just made sense, Goldstein said. The Chronicle was deeply resourced and credible in the Jewish community, and the Progress had on board Torsten Ove, a local legend.
From left to right, Bob Batz of the Pittsburgh Union Progress, Toby Tabachnick of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle and Andrew Goldstein of the Progress pose in the Joseph Weis Jr. Courthouse in Pittsburgh, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
“We have the all-star federal courts reporter in Torsten and we have a lot of really great journalists who love Pittsburgh, love this community, and we’ll do our best to cover it,” Goldstein said, noting that the Chronicle would also have access to the Progress’s photographers. “But the Chronicle brings something different entirely to the table, which is, they’re so deeply sourced in the Pittsburgh Jewish community, and they have such an interest in this trial in particular.”
Newsroom collaborations have become more frequent in recent years as publications realize they can expand their impact and audience by working together. But while there are a growing number of relationships between local and national publications and between daily and investigative outlets, ties between mainstream newsrooms and community or ethnic media are less common.
S. Mitra Kalita, the founder and director of URL Media, a network of Black and Brown community news outlets that share content and revenue, said the value in such partnerships was not just in delivering relief as media staffs shrink, but also in sensitizing mainstream media to minority sensibilities.
“Talking about who [the ethnic media outlet is] serving and why we’re doing it this way — the spirit of real collaboration is a bit of that give and take,” she said. “We make mainstream media way better because it starts to infuse mainstream media with aspects of community and thus redefine the mainstream.”
The residual trauma of the massacre in the Pittsburgh collaboration made it all the more important for the mainstream reporters to be sensitive to the nuances that the Jewish media was bringing, she said.
“Especially a story like this one, which was such an attack on a community — a community that was singled out for their sheer existence, the strategy cannot be ‘let’s just work in parallel,” Kalita said. “It’s not going to work. It has to be kind of a cross-pollination and a real collaboration.”
That’s exactly what is happening, according to the reporters and editors involved in the project, with communication easy between each publication’s editor and expertise flowing in both directions.
Ove a denizen of the Joseph F. Weis Jr. Courthouse for so long that he can tell stories about a sizable stretch of the portraits of judges that line its corridor walls; he may be the only court reporter to seek an interview with a judge after his death, to ask him why he was haunting the place. (The judge never showed, but his widow was less than surprised to hear that he was still working.)
He led a passel of Chronicle and Progress staffers through the warren-like courthouse on the Friday before the trial, handily impressing them with his intimacy with the building — he knew the provenance of the paintings in each courtroom — and its staff. Soo Song, the assistant U.S. attorney who is leading the prosecution team, smiled and nodded as she passed.
Torsten Ove, left, of the Pittsburgh Union Progress and Adam Reinherz of the PIttsburgh Jewish Chronicle confer on the first day of jury selection for the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre trial, April 24, 2023. (Toby Tabachnick)
Ove showed the reporters how to access court records for free, and while they stood around him at one of the computer terminals, the teams’ different emphases emerged: Ove predicted that jury selection, which started last week and is expected to last as long as three weeks, would not be a news generator, because in his experience, it rarely has been.
Reinherz and Tabachnick, attuned to reporting on faith communities, were not so sure: Reinherz wondered whether believing Catholics, who reject the death penalty, would be eliminated, and Tabachnick wondered whether defense attorneys would seek to keep Jews off the jury — and how they would go about doing that.
Reinherz ended up covering the first day of jury selection. “Local and national reporters decided the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle should have one seat during the initial session of day one,” Reinherz explained in a story that appeared on both news sites. He noted that the first member of the public to enter the courtroom was Daniel Leger, one of two survivors of the attack.
Working together across platforms was odd, said Bob Batz Jr., the Progress’s interim editor, but he could get used to it.
“This is uncharted territory for someone like me, and I’ve been doing this for a long time, and we don’t, you know, we don’t collaborate,” he said.
“We compete!” Tabachnick interjected.
“What we’re doing is not common, and it’s not going to be easy,” Batz said. “Surely, we’re going to tick each other off about something or somebody is going to put the wrong word in or there’s a million things that can go wrong, but the breaking of ground where you’re actually working together, it just makes sense in so many ways on this story. We’re really trying to serve the community.”
Tabachnick said she saw added value in keeping journalists she admired in the limelight while they are on strike. Journalists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette went on strike back in October over wages and working conditions, in a crescendo of mounting tensions between the paper’s longtime owners and the staff that contributed to a newsroom exodus even in 2018, when the paper won a Pulitzer for its synagogue shooting coverage. The strike is now one of the longest in journalism history, and the staffers contributing to the Pittsburgh Union Progress are doing so despite earning well below than their regular salaries.
“I feel good about getting their names, their publication’s name out,” Tabachnick said.
Each story is running in essentially identical form on both publications’ websites, with a line crediting their collaboration. Tabachnick and Batz had a brief and friendly email exchange before each clicked “publish” on their story about debate among victims’ families about the appropriateness of the death penalty.
The Chronicle is minimizing appearances of the name of the accused killer, out of sensitivity to readers who may want to see their community members centered rather than their aggressor. Some researchers and law enforcement officials have also called on journalists not to print mass shooters’ names and photographs, citing evidence that doing so may contribute to their glorification and even copycat crimes.
Batz says he totally gets the Chronicle’s thinking, despite making a different choice in his newsroom.
“We’re still feeling our way, we’re still figuring this out,” Batz said. “They don’t name the defendant in their story, and they haven’t. And our guy Torsten who’s an all-star courts reporter, he’s going to use the guy’s name. And then in real time going back and forth on email and text we came up with his solution and that story was on both websites in minutes and it was really kind of cool.”
Tabachnick picked up the account of the previous night’s collaboration as if she’d been working across a desk from Batz for decades instead of online since February.
“The solution was that I realized that with the trial starting, it really didn’t make sense not to use his name at all anymore that we really needed to as a news organization,” she said. “But that didn’t mean we had to overuse his name. And I’m not saying Torsten overused his name. He used it as much as he needed to use it in terms of style, but I took out a few of them and replaced it with ‘the defendant’ and we were all happy.”
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They want Jewish life without Zionism. Now they’re building the institutions to match.
(JTA) — One year after Jewish Currents editor-at-large Arielle Angel called for “new Jewish institutions” that have no attachment to Israel or Zionism, more than 100 Jews crammed into a Victorian house-turned-event space in central Brooklyn in hopes of creating them.
The event was billed as a bootcamp for people hoping to get fledgling Jewish groups off the ground. Sessions focused on topics like staffing and funding, as well as discussions about who, exactly, is welcome in a space that is “anti-Zionist,” “non-Zionist,” “diasporist” and the like.
Many of the groups represented on Monday were minyans, which host prayer services in locations like people’s apartments or community spaces. They sought practical guidance for building their institutions, but also for defining who to welcome as their ranks expand.
“If we’re doing things right,” Angel said, “many of these small minyans will be synagogues in a few years.”
Esti, 27, who declined to share her last name to maintain privacy, is involved in leading an anti-Zionist minyan in Brooklyn. She said she has heard from “so many” attendees that they were relieved to attend services in a space without an Israeli flag.
“People are like, ‘I never thought I could be in a Jewish space like this, I never thought I’d see queer people leading, I never thought I could be in a Jewish space where they’re saying Free Palestine,’” she said. The minyan averages about 50 attendees at Shabbat services, she said.
Some of the speakers at the workshop detailed how they have refused to compromise their organizations’ politics. One panel led by Rabbi Brant Rosen, who helped found the anti-Zionist synagogue Tzedek Chicago, and Rebecca Vilkomerson, the former director of the anti-Zionist group, Jewish Voice for Peace, focused on the process of setting an organization’s “political boundaries.”
Rosen spoke from his own experience, saying that Tzedek Chicago was presented as “consciously not an inclusive community.”
“In other words, this is what we stand for, it might not be for you, it might not be for everyone, and that’s OK. There are many places out there that you can choose,” he said. Rosen added that potential members were not forced to agree in order to join, but rather that they were faced with the question: “Given that these are our values, is this a community you want to belong to?”
Esti spoke to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the sideline of the Urbane Arts Club event, which JTA attended on the condition that attendees’ in-session remarks throughout the day were kept off the record, though panelists’ remarks were all on the record.
Americans’ support for Israel has dropped writ large amid its military campaign in Gaza and the war with Iran. A survey by the Jewish Federations of North America found that 37% of Jewish respondents said they identified as Zionist, while 7% labeled themselves anti-Zionist and another 8% said they were non-Zionist. Another 18% said they weren’t sure, while 30% said none of the labels described them.
According to an AP-NORC poll from earlier this year, support for Israel is a less significant component of younger Jews’ religious identity versus Jews older than 45.
“These groups are starting up because of demand,” Rabbi Alissa Wise told JTA.
Wise is a co-founder of the Jewish Diaspora Movement, the group behind Monday’s bootcamp, which is itself in its beginning stages. She has previously worked for JVPe and in October 2023 founded Rabbis for Ceasefire, which has protested for a Gaza ceasefire and an end to U.S. military aid to Israel.
While JVP “played a pivotal role in building Jewish life outside of Zionism,” Wise said there was still a major gap in religious and cultural Jewish institutions that reject Zionism.
In addition to the represented minyans, which facilitate prayer services, and the havurahs, which offer events such as Shabbat dinners and other holiday celebrations, Angel said some attendees were looking to start projects including summer camps, educational offerings and cultural projects such as theater collectives.
Jen Kaminsky, an attendee who is part of the Buffalo Jewish Collective’s leadership team, told JTA that her organization welcomes “a range of Jews, many of whom have not felt comfortable in legacy Jewish institutions.”
“We say that we welcome anti-Zionists and non-Zionists, and people who are questioning Zionism and people who have a range of relationships to Zionism,” Kaminsky said. “If you are comfortable with the values that we put out, or you’re comfortable being in a room where those values are the dominant values, we welcome you.”
Vilkomerson told the group that there should be an attempt to grow membership by engaging people closer to the center in “left-liberal coalitions,” but without making concessions on left-wing values. She put the concept into New York City political terms, pointing to the political alliance between the anti-Zionist Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the liberal Zionist Brad Lander.
“Brad, as a liberal Zionist, was able to partner with Zohran Mamdani — but Zohran set the terms of the campaign, not Brad,” she said.
Also on Monday, Lissy Romanow — a co-founder of the group IfNotNow, which describes itself as “anti-occupation” — gave a nuts-and-bolts session on the first steps of creating an organization, including how to concisely conceive of a group’s DNA and how to avoid burnout among volunteers.
As groups look to grow and achieve loftier goals like setting up permanent locations and hiring paid staff, one clear obstacle stands in the way: funding.
“There’s only so much money on the Jewish left,” Angel told JTA.
Any anti-Zionist group is highly unlikely to receive funds from one of the country’s many Jewish federations, which often maintain deep ties to Israel.
Three left-wing Jewish donors — Liana Krupp, Deborah Sagner and Kathleen Peratis — spoke on Monday about the limited landscape of funding for Jewish anti-Zionist organizations.
“If we don’t flip liberal Zionists we’re not going to grow, because that’s where the money is,” Peratis said.
Participants on Monday, whose groups are mostly volunteer-run, did not have any illusions about that landscape.
“For now, the goal is to keep doing Shabbat in a sustainable way on a regular basis,” Esti said. But she also shared her long-term vision.
“I think it would be amazing to have a brick-and-mortar shul, a place we could call our definitive home,” she said. “But that’s way, way far down the line.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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After bronze win, judo athlete Raz Hershko tells JTA, ‘I stand for something far bigger than myself.’
(JTA) — Israeli judoka Raz Hershko, one of the country’s top athletes, missed a major opportunity in 2025 when the 12-day war between Israel and Iran closed Israeli airspace, preventing her from traveling to Budapest. Earlier this year, she withdrew from the Tashkent Grand Slam after the Shin Bet ordered the Israeli team to leave Uzbekistan.
But nothing could keep Hershko off the podium this weekend, when she won a bronze medal at the World Judo Championships in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Hershko, 28, burst into tears after winning the bout that secured her medal.
“Representing Israel has always been something that moves me, but at this moment, it carries so much more meaning,” Hershko told JTA. “At the end of the day, I step onto the mat alone, but I feel like I have an entire country behind me.”
Hershko dedicated her victory to the memory of Yonatan Gutin, an Israeli soldier killed on Oct. 7, 2023, as well as his family and the people of Israel.
According to his official memorial page, Gutin, a 20-year-old Israel Defense Forces officer, was killed fighting to rescue civilians during the battle for Kibbutz Be’eri. Judo was a central part of his life. He had trained in the sport for about 14 years and was a member of Israel’s cadet national team. Even during his military service, he occasionally returned to his judo club to coach.
Despite the achievement, Hershko made clear that bronze was not the result she had hoped for.
“I’m pretty disappointed that the day ended with a bronze medal, because I was aiming for gold,” she said. “But now it’s time to look ahead to the next goals.”
Hershko has established herself in recent years as one of the world’s leading judokas and one of Israel’s most prominent athletes. She won an individual silver medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics and a gold medal at the 2024 European Championships. She competes in the women’s heavyweight division.
Her latest achievement came just days after Israel marked the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks, a date that has continued to shape the country’s public life and weigh heavily on its athletes competing abroad.
“Knowing that I was able to give people back home even a few moments of happiness, a smile, a sense of pride — that means so much to me. Especially during the times we’re going through, these are the moments that remind me why I do what I do,” she added.
The judoka said that “everything has felt different since Oct. 7” and that she can’t “disconnect” herself from the Israeli reality.
“Before that, I would go into competitions feeling immense pride in representing my country,” she said. “Today, that pride is even stronger. I’m much more aware of what the flag I wear represents, and of the fact that I stand for something far bigger than myself.”
Hershko, however, has little time to dwell on the medal. She told Channel 13 that she would take two days off before returning to training ahead of another competition next week. Asked by JTA how she has managed to stay hungry and focused after achieving so much, the Israeli athlete said she simply enjoys the journey.
“I really love what I do. I love judo, I love competing, I love the challenges, and I think that’s what keeps me hungry,” she said. “Of course, I’m proud of everything I’ve achieved, but I never feel like I’m done or that there’s nothing left to strive for. At the end of the day, the medals are incredible moments, but the journey is what builds me as an athlete, and I’m still enjoying that journey.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Jewish school educators cancel trip to Italy after Italian education program required participants to denounce ‘genocide’ in Gaza
(JTA) — Educators from Jewish schools across the U.S. canceled a study trip to Reggio Emilia, Italy, over whether the hosts would require participants to formally distance themselves from Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
The controversy has drawn accusations of antisemitism from Jewish educators and from Italian Jewish community leaders. It has also sparked a political dispute in Italy.
In an email sent to participants on Oct. 9, the American organizers, the Paradigm Project, said they canceled the trip because of “antisemitic pressure being placed on the group.” In a Zoom call with the participants, the organizers also cited safety concerns amid the scrutiny of the Jewish school educators’ personal profiles by pro-Palestinian activists who were agitating for the declaration, a participant said.
In a leaked audio recording broadcast Monday evening by Italy’s Tg3 TV news program, the president of the host organization Reggio Children, Maddalena Tedeschi, discussed asking participants to sign declarations distancing themselves from the “occupation of territories and genocide.” The recording is of an Oct. 6 meeting of the city’s early childhood education council.
In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Reggio Children spokesperson Francesca Severini said the request — intended to appease local pro-Palestinian activists — had never become an official participation requirement, but acknowledged that the additional wording had been discussed.
The Paradigm Project, a professional development network for Jewish early childhood educators, organized the trip for 68 Jewish educators. A separate delegation of 22 educators from Israel arrived in Reggio and was participating in the program this week.
“Now, more than ever, we must bring back the light and keep the bridge between us strong,” the Israeli educators said in opening remarks Monday.
Reggio Children, an educational organization partly owned by the municipality, promotes the city’s internationally influential approach to early childhood education and provides training for educators. Reggio Emilia Mayor Marco Massari and the city’s education official Marwa Mahmoud did not respond to requests for comment.
The cancellation, which came in a phone call from Paradigm to Reggio Children on Oct. 7, follows months of tensions in the city, where pro-Palestinian activists had protested the participating schools’ ties to Israel. During the weeks preceding the trip, activist Cosimo Pederzoli had publicly accused some of the schools of supporting the Israeli military.
At the Oct. 6 meeting, Reggio Children presented a charter, titled “For a Democratic and Participatory Education,” asking visiting groups and partners to uphold human rights, oppose discrimination, reject war, and condemn genocide. The charter, which was approved and is now on the organization’s website, also opposes violations of human rights in occupied territories worldwide, without naming Israel or Gaza.
Severini, the spokesperson, said that activists, teachers and parents had pressured Reggio Children and the municipality to take the charter one step further and requiring participants to agree to the statement: “I … hereby declare that I distance myself from the occupation of Gaza and the violation of children’s and human beings’ rights in occupied territories as well as every place in the world.”
Severini said that the wording was included as “material for discussion” in a private WhatsApp group. The American organizers were not in the chat, she said, and subsequently received the wording without the context that it would not, in the end, be official language.
Her account contradicts Reggio Children’s earlier public statements. On Oct. 7, the organization acknowledged that the educators had been asked to explicitly distance themselves from the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in response to concerns raised in the city. Mayor Marco Massari also acknowledged the additional commitment in a public statement, which says, “This Charter will be signed by all delegations visiting Reggio Emilia in the coming months and years.”
In an email to parents, leaders of Wilshire Boulevard Temple’s early childhood centers in Los Angeles said seven of their educators had been scheduled to join the trip and expressed support for Paradigm’s decision to cancel.
“Paradigm, on behalf of our educators and dozens of others, rightfully refused and canceled participation in the study tour and conference, due to the refusal to sign and other security considerations,” read the email. “All participants were notified on October 7, 2026.”
Pesha Kletenik, head of Manhattan Day School, had planned to join the trip. “This was one of the most painful experiences I’ve had,” Kletenik told JTA. “I never felt so targeted as a Jew before in my life. I’m an American citizen. I have one passport. I’ve lived here my entire life.”
Kletenik said she had hoped to adapt the Reggio approach to Jewish teaching and practice, including their model Passover seder, because “it aligns so beautifully with Jewish values.”
Steve Freedman, head of Solomon Schechter Day School of Bergen County, New Jersey, said his school withdrew an educator from a separate trip planned for November. In a letter to families, he criticized the demand for a political declaration while affirming the school’s commitment to the Reggio approach.
The council of the Jewish Community of Modena and Reggio Emilia, a single institution based in nearby Modena that serves both cities, condemned efforts to boycott educational and cultural initiatives involving Jews. It described the conflation of diaspora Jews with Israel’s government as antisemitic.
The Reggio Emilia approach, developed after World War II by educator Loris Malaguzzi and local families, places children’s exploration, expression, and participation at the center of early childhood learning. It gained wider international recognition after Newsweek named one of the city’s preschools among the world’s 10 best schools in 1991.
Severini said Reggio Children’s relationships with American Jewish and Israeli educators stretch back roughly three decades. The Israeli liaison first visited in 1996, she said, and educators from Reggio have also traveled to the United States and Israel.
The organization has hosted educators from all over the world, Severini said, including China, Russia, and Iran. She said she knew of no comparable controversy involving other visiting groups, including previous delegations from Jewish schools.
Reggio Children, she said, hoped to continue its dialogue with the American educators. For Manhattan Day School’s Kletenik, the cancellation stood in stark contrast with the educational values that had drawn her to the approach.
“How are we to navigate rejection by the very experts we collectively idealized—the gatekeepers of the sensitive worldviews and teachings we trusted to nurture our most tender children?” she wrote in a message to her school’s board.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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