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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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Chef Alon Shaya shares the stories, resilience and recipes of World War II survivors
(JTA) — In 2015, while visiting Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, James Beard Award-winning chef Alon Shaya came face-to-face with a World War II artifact that moved him deeply.
It was a red cloth triangle — cut from a Nazi flag — embroidered with the names of a few dozen female prisoners at the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
In a place where they were starving to death, he learned these women had formed a clandestine “food” club. Together, they talked about recipes, their Friday night Shabbat candlesticks and cherished memories of home.
That red cloth was “100% the catalyst,” Shaya said, for his deep interest in food as “an agent of survival, defiance and bringing people together.”
Now, 11 years after that defining moment in Jerusalem, Shaya’s second book, “Memories of a Good Meal: Recipes of Resilience Inspired by Stories of World War II Survival,” is being published on Oct. 6. Co-authored with food historian June Hersh, the book gathers accounts from survivors and heroes of World War II, illustrating the outsized role that food — and the memory of it — played in human survival. While featuring 80 recipes, it functions as much as a history book as a cookbook.
“The recipes are there to support the stories,” Shaya said. “It’s not the other way around.”
Shaya and Hersh tell the stories of 10 distinct groups impacted by the war, including Jewish partisans, hidden children, Navajo code talkers, persecuted homosexuals, Japanese Americans, and Austrian and German Jews who built new lives in the Dominican Republic.
Alongside these narratives, the authors included family recipes preserved across generations. Where none survived or existed, Shaya crafted recipes using ingredients available to the book’s subjects during the war.
The opening chapter highlights a story particularly close to Shaya’s heart. In 2019, during a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Shaya was shown a tattered, 100-year-old, handwritten recipe collection from the Fenves family of Yugoslavia. Saved during the war by the family’s cook, Maris, the Hungarian-language notebook was eventually donated to the museum by survivor Steven Fenves.
Determined to bring those dishes back to life, Shaya worked with Fenves to translate the recipes, filling in missing elements like precise steps, exact measurements and oven temperatures.
“I really became a part of their family,” said Shaya, whose collaboration on what became known as the Rescued Recipes project has raised nearly $1 million for the Holocaust Museum to digitize historical documents and artifacts. “The family wouldn’t be here if Steven and his sister didn’t survive Auschwitz,” said Shaya.
Featured recipes from this chapter reflect the Hungarian culinary traditions of Fenves’s hometown of Subotica, including körözött (a spiced cheese spread) and authentic Hungarian goulash.
Other chapters explore how people sustained themselves despite meager resources. In the profile of Polish Jewish partisan Shalom Yoran — who subsisted largely on potatoes while hiding in the woods — Shaya developed recipes centered on the staple tuber, including Polish herring and potato salad, potato dinner rolls and potato, and pine nut doughnuts with blackberry caramel.
“Shalom’s wife, Varda, shared his story with us,” Shaya explained. “The partisans lived in a hole in the ground in the Polish forest through winters that reached minus-20 degrees, and they did that for four years. Potatoes were a huge part of their survival.”
For Sarah Pelz, executive editor at Harvest, the book’s publisher and the granddaughter of a partisan, the concept of the book resonated deeply, especially in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks inside Israel. “The throughline here is the power of food and memory — the power of food to bring us together at a table, and to remind us who we are and where we come from,” she said in an interview.
“Alon’s message is powerful and necessary right now,” she continued. “He hopes that people will read this book, will cook from it, and that it will bring people together at the table, people of diverse backgrounds, people of diverse perspectives, that it will not just help to enlighten readers, to history and to what happened, but also help bring people together.”
In gathering these accounts across the globe, Shaya and Hersh faced a race against time, as most interviewees were well into their 90s or older. John Kinsel, one of the last living Navajo code talkers, was 107 years old when the authors visited him on the Navajo Nation reservation. His chapter details the vital role Native American Marines played by using their complex language to transmit secret Allied messages in the Pacific theater. The book features recipes inspired by Navajo traditions, including blue corn mush and stuffed pumpkin with stewed lamb.
Throughout the project, Shaya couldn’t help but draw parallels between past atrocities and modern struggles.
“One of the lessons that struck home the most for me is that people will persecute you for what you believe in and gather together and create laws to persecute you,” he said. “We saw it in what happened with immigration in the 1940s, and we see it with what’s happening in America today.”
He was also struck by the role of propaganda, promulgated then by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, and today by bad actors on social media, in spreading hate and disinformation.
Some of the stories, like the meal prepared by nuns in a convent for a group of persecuted homosexual prisoners, seem almost cinematic in nature.
“I have definitely thought about turning these stories into a miniseries or a movie,” said Shaya. “Nobody has shown interest in it yet, but it is something that I think the more ways these stories can be shared, the better.”
Born in Israel and raised in Philadelphia, Shaya has become one of the country’s leading interpreters of Israeli and Middle Eastern cooking, with a distinctly Southern sensibility. His 2018 cookbook, “Shaya: An Odyssey of Food, My Journey Back to Israel,” blends memoir with recipes.
Shaya was committed to the latest book despite huge demands on his time. The chef and his wife, Emily, have two children, aged five and two. His Pomegranate Hospitality operates three restaurants, Saba and Safta’s Table in New Orleans, where he lives, and Safta in Denver. (Saba means grandfather and Safta means grandmother in Hebrew.) He is also involved in a variety of philanthropic work.
“The work I put into this book fills my heart and makes me feel good, like I’m doing something that builds me up and can have an impact,” said Shaya.
Shaya views the book as an educational tool.
“This book might engage a 13-year-old who really loves the chocolate cake recipe,” Shaya reflected. “If he or she hears the history behind that chocolate cake and delves into the history behind it, they learn that Austrian and German Jews took refuge in the Dominican Republic and wanted to keep their culinary traditions alive and need to use the local resources. That’s how a traditional Sacher torte-inspired tres leches cake came to be. Or a plantain latke, or matzo ball soup with avocado, lime and yucca.
“If those stories can come together and have that kind of impact on one 13-year-old in the world,” he added, “I will feel complete.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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‘That’s a lie’: Israeli journalists clash with Irish football association ahead of tense rematch
(JTA) — Israel and Ireland’s UEFA Nations League rematch on Sunday ratcheted up tensions between the two teams, in a sports drama where emotions over the Gaza war have fueled theatrics as intense as the match itself.
During the 1-1 draw played in Serbia, Ireland’s captain declined, as in the last match, a pregame handshake with his Israeli counterpart, Irish players bowed their heads during the playing of the Israeli national anthem and the team donned black armbands to signal their disapproval of Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Israeli players also wore black armbands displaying “7/10,” in recognition of the anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
Tensions also spilled off the pitch.
Staffers for the Irish team abruptly cut short a Saturday press conference with Irish head coach Heimir Hallgrímsson after a tense back-and-forth between Israeli journalists and Ireland’s press officer, Kieran Crowley.
While both Hallgrímsson and Israeli coach Ran Ben-Shimon, in his separate meeting with the media, insisted their focus remained on the game itself, Ireland’s press conference took a turn when an Israeli journalist asked Hallgrímsson for his thoughts on the flydubai hijacking last week.
“What do you say about the people that you support? Their ideology is based on murder,” the reporter asked. “Just this week, one of them tried to kill 170 Israeli passengers, including 27 innocent children and thousands of others.”
Crowley interrupted, saying, “We are not doing any questions like this today. We are doing football questions.”
Another Israeli reporter then asked Hallgrímsson about his team calling Israeli players “monkeys” during the Sept. 27 match. Crowley again interrupted, saying, “That is completely untrue. … That’s a lie. You’ve just broadcast a lie.”
The press conference was then cut off, as the reporter argued with a staffer who confiscated the microphone. UEFA barred the two Israeli reporters from the postgame media gathering on Sunday.
The incident came after months of controversy leading up to the Sept. 27 match between the two sides, which Ireland faced intense pressure to boycott. Ireland has a long history of pro-Palestinian policies and anti-Israeli sentiment.
There were additional signs of tension on the field, with Ireland’s head of athletic performance, Damien Doyle, alleging that an Israeli player spat at him as the teams left the field at the end of the first half. Israel’s football association denied the accusation.
After the match, Hallgrímsson called on UEFA to ensure the two teams do not face each other in the future.
“That’s not ours to decide, that’s UEFA,” he said. “I wouldn’t want or wish any national team to go through what we have gone through these two weeks. UEFA needs to step in and do something.”
Hallgrímsson also indicated that he had made a “mistake” by sharing his stance on the war in Gaza. In the lead-up to the matches, he had told reporters, “We’re not playing with genocide, we’re playing against genocide. We’re playing against Israel, we’re not playing with Israel.”
On Sunday, Hallgrímsson added that “my feelings and my opinions should be set aside when I am spokesman for an organisation.”
Sunday’s game included Irish player Finn Azaz, whose mother has Israeli heritage, as a substitute.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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How Jim Bakker sent a rabbi’s son to 52 churches
Jim Bakker convinced me to go to church.
Bakker died Monday at 86. For a stretch in the 1980s he and his wife, Tammy Faye, were on television every day, praying, singing and weeping, her in waterproof mascara, in front of as many as 13 million people. Then came the sex scandal, the hush money and the fraud trial.
And yet, he became my gateway into Christianity.
I’m an Orthodox rabbi’s son who grew up in the Bible Belt, which made me a spiritual window-shopper. My bedroom window looked out across the street at Cokesbury Methodist Church. Every Sunday morning, I watched the families climb out of their minivans in khakis and pastels, smiling like people who had never once wondered whether turning on a light switch counted as work on Shabbat.
We didn’t have cable. Regular TV in our house was already a negotiation, and a channel devoted to Jesus wasn’t even up for discussion.
Then I went off to college, moved out on my own, and one of my first acts of rebellion was ordering basic cable. I flipped on the Cartoon Network, a channel that showed animated classics around the clock, and wondered if this was what the Messianic age felt like.
On Sunday mornings, on channel after channel, I stumbled across pastors preaching to their congregations. What hooked me wasn’t the theology; the sermons seemed more like self-help seminars. It was the production. Where I came from, worship was a closed-door affair, in Hebrew, for members only. Here it was a show, with a band and cameras.
The format Bakker perfected inspired others: the tears, the house band, the host who knew exactly where the camera was. I couldn’t look away.
Heaven, with a gift shop
Bakker was born in Michigan in 1940 into a Pentecostal family, and he met Tammy Faye at Bible college. They married in 1961, after three dates, which, as a rabbi’s son who spent years in the dating trenches, I find both reckless and enviable. They drifted into television through Pat Robertson’s network, where they hosted a children’s show, and in 1976 they started their own ministry: PTL, short for Praise the Lord. At its peak, PTL drew as many as 13 million viewers a day and took in more than $100 million a year. Critics said PTL stood for “Pass the Loot.”
On 2,500 acres in Fort Mill, South Carolina, the Bakkers built Heritage USA, a Christian theme park with a hotel, water slides, skating and Bible study. They sold shares in it and offered lifetime vacations there to donors.
I’ll confess: I was jealous. Christians had a place you went to bring your family closer to God, with a gift shop and cotton candy. We had the Catskills and a very long buffet. I took this about as well as a kid whose neighbors have a swimming pool.
Then it all fell apart. In 1987 came the revelation of Bakker’s encounter with a church secretary, Jessica Hahn, and the $265,000 paid to keep it quiet. Fellow preachers lined up to condemn him, Jerry Falwell took over the ministry, and a federal inquiry followed. He was convicted of fraud in 1989 and sentenced to 45 years. He served five. Tammy Faye divorced him while he was in prison.
Bakker left prison in 1994, chastened. In a 1996 book called I Was Wrong, he wrote that Jesus had nothing good to say about money, a lesson he learned, as so many of us do, only after losing the water park. In 2003 he resurfaced in Branson, Missouri, hosting a new show from a café and selling viewers buckets of emergency food for the end of days.
The Jew on the Jumbotron
Soon, I had a plan of my own. I would spend a year going to 52 churches over 52 Sundays. Jewish tradition teaches that it’s verboten to go to church, especially during services. I planned to go as a journalistic endeavor and write a book about the experience.
Yet, I was still riddled with the guilt of my ancestors, so I went to my synagogue’s rabbi and asked his permission. To my surprise, he granted it on two conditions: I had to wear my press badge, so worshippers knew I was there to take notes and not to take part in prayer. The second condition was that I had to wear a yarmulke. People needed to know I was Jewish, the rabbi said. As if being short, bespectacled and named Benyamin Cohen didn’t already give that away.
Jim Bakker had put church on television. I was going to find out what happened when you stepped through the screen.
My wife, Elizabeth, a Christian minister’s daughter who had converted to Judaism, was still dripping wet from the mikvah and not exactly thrilled that her husband was going to spend a year in churches. She pointed out that I was about to become the first Orthodox Jew in history to qualify for a church loyalty card.
I started in the deep end, at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, one of the country’s largest megachurches, home to 15,000 people on a typical Sunday. The sanctuary looked like a sports arena. A camera operator found me in the pews. Within seconds my shayna punim was 20-feet tall on Jesus’ Jumbotron for all to see. I had been there for all of five minutes and I was already outed as the Jew.
“Oh God,” I thought. “What if my dad could see me now?”
Watching church was Bakker’s big idea. At New Birth, the cameras roamed the pews and the congregation cheered at itself on the big screens. After years of watching church from my couch, I was the one in the shot.
I’d spent my childhood sure the grass was greener at the proverbial church across the street. It wasn’t. It was just better lit. Once the cameras and the choirs were gone, what I found were people trying, like me, to figure out how to believe, and some of them were doing it better than I was.
Hanging out with Jesus made me a better Jew, a sentence I never expected to write, and one my father never expected to hear.
The other Bakker
There was another Bakker I felt I knew.
I was born the same year as Jay Bakker, the son of Jim and Tammy Faye. He was 12 when his father was indicted. By 18, he’d co-founded Revolution, which eventually opened a branch in Atlanta, my hometown. The New York Times once described churches like it as meeting in “warehouses, bars, skate parks, punk clubs,” which is, to put it plainly, not where my synagogue held services.
In 2006, the Sundance Channel made a six-part series about him called One Punk Under God, and I was hooked. The camera was back on the Bakker family business, only now it followed the son, who seemed to be building the opposite of his parents’ church.
I felt a kinship with Jay that I couldn’t have explained then. We were both preachers’ kids, which meant your father’s job was also your religion, so you couldn’t be mad at one without it messing with the other. He titled his memoir Son of a Preacher Man, which is also what I called a chapter in mine.
His choices were harder than mine. My father never lost his congregation to a federal grand jury. While Jim Bakker went to Branson to sell apocalypse buckets and political prophecy, Jay went toward a gentler, more inclusive faith.
As I learned throughout my journey, a church built for television is only as strong as its ratings. The Jewish service I understand best would make terrible TV. On Yom Kippur we fast for 25 hours and act somberly. In the prayers, we confess in the plural, a whole congregation beating its chests together: we have sinned, not I.
Jim Bakker got me into church, and church sent me back to synagogue. Praise the Lord, as they used to say on his show. And, as we say in mine, amen.
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