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After synagogue gunman’s death sentence, Pittsburgh’s Jews feel relief, resilience — and gratitude
PITTSBURGH (JTA) — The overriding feeling in this city now that the gunman convicted of murdering 11 Jews here in 2018 has been sentenced to death is gratitude.
Not for the penalty itself, which was the preference of some but not all of the victims’ families and which some local Jews openly opposed, and not even for the end of a trial whose long delay protracted communal trauma.
Instead, the gratitude is for people — those who made the trial happen, those who supported the victims’ family members as they sat through weeks of painful testimony, and those who kept the singular Jewish community thriving even when so much had been lost.
Jeffrey Myers, the rabbi of the Tree of Life congregation, which was housed in the synagogue the gunman attacked, opened a press conference at the Jewish community center in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood with a prayer of thanks.
Dozens of family members and survivors of the attack joined him as he recited the Shehecheyanu prayer in Hebrew, then translated it for the media. The prayer, he said, thanks God, “who has kept us alive, sustained us and enabled us to reach this stage.”
There was palpable relief. “The only thing positive about the sentencing of a criminal is that this long slog is over,” said Audrey Glickman, who hid in the synagogue on the day of the attack.
Myers, who during the trial recalled praying as he waited for the gunman to kill him, thanked the Pittsburgh community, the prosecution, the first responders for what he said was the “embrace” they conferred on the Jewish community since the attack on Oct. 27, 2018.
Wednesday, he noted, was Tu B’Av, the Jewish calendar day marking rituals of courtship and love.
“I don’t believe in coincidences. It was meant to be today,” he said of the end of the trial. “Why today? Because today we received an immense embrace from the halls of justice around all of us, to say that our government does not condone antisemitism in the vile form that we witnessed, and that we were embraced by a system that supported and nurtured us and upheld us.”
Survivors and family members stepped up to the microphone, some with notes, some not, and expressed thanks to law enforcement, to the prosecutors, to others who rushed to their assistance after the attack and who nurtured them in the years since.
“I want to take the time to thank all of those people that were part of the jury, the court system, our local community here, the massive support structure and staff and police taking care of us,” said Howard Fienberg, whose mother Joyce was one of the 11 murdered. “And I especially want to thank the prosecution team for their steadfast focus on this capital crime as an antisemitic act as a frontal assault on the constitutional freedom of religion, and the freedom to be Jewish and practice Judaism in the United States.”
In the hall, the JCC maintained its suburban rhythms: Parents picked toddlers up from daycare, and members headed to the gym. Outside the building, one of the most consequential trials in Jewish history barely resonated; the main topic of conversation in a diner nearby was the summer blockbuster “Barbie,” showing in the cinema across the street.
The Jewish Community Center in Pittsburgh, Aug. 2, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
But inside at the press conference, survivor after survivor, family member after family member, expressed thanks in great detail: to the police, the FBI, prosecutors, the social workers, the restaurants that had fed the stunned and traumatized in the weeks after the killing and throughout the trial.
They also emphasized the importance of keeping the victims at the center of the story about what happened in Pittsburgh. In addition to Joyce Fienberg, the people who were killed were Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger.
It was a showing typical of a Jewish community that had always been tight-knit and became more so in the wake of the attack. Squirrel Hill, in the eastern part of Pittsburgh, has been the center of the city’s Jewish life since the turn of the 20th century, when wealthy Jewish families began settling there. While Jewish communities in other cities moved neighborhoods or migrated to the suburbs in the ensuing century, Squirrel Hill remained the home of Pittsburgh’s Jews. The neighborhood is home to multiple Jewish day schools, kosher restaurants and a Holocaust museum — as well as about 15,000 Jews from all denominations.
Members of the three congregations housed in the synagogue building — Tree of Life, New Light and Dor Hadash — spoke to the press only after clearing it first with a public relations firm the community hired. Volunteers and staffers for the 10.27 Healing Partnership, an organization launched in the wake of the massacre, sat with the survivors and family members in interviews, ready to intervene, they explained to reporters, if a question was too triggering.
Howard Fienberg, whose mother was a Tree of Life member, said the three congregations were friendly but not deeply involved with one another before the attack. Now that they had been brought together by tragedy and its aftermath, he found meaning in their closeness.
“I didn’t understand what Reconstructionism was like,” Fienberg said about the Jewish movement with which Dor Hadash is affiliated. “They were those guys down the hall for years.”
Now he said, he was more inclined to see what brings Jews together, and not what divides them. “There’s a reason that they were all in the same space,” he said. “And it wasn’t just happenstance. They’re all Jewish, right?”
The comments at the press conference were reflected in countless statements from community members and local organizations that expressed thanks, memorialized the victims and committed to sustaining Jewish community.
“As this chapter comes to a close, we reflect on the strength and resilience of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community and the entire community,” the local Jewish federation said in its statement. “In the wake of the horrors of the worst antisemitic attack in U.S. history, our community neither retreated from participating in Jewish life nor suppressed our Jewishness. Instead, our community embraced our Jewish values — strengthening Jewish life, supporting those in need, and building a safer, more inclusive world.”
The divisions that do exist simmered beneath the surface on Wednesday. There had been differences among the families and the congregations about whether the death penalty was appropriate; a small contingent of local Jews who cited Jewish laws saying that the death penalty should be rare in the extreme organized. Of the nine families, the family of at least one of the victims, Jerry Rabinowitz, objected to the death penalty; seven other families were in favor of it.
Speakers at the press conference who did address the ultimate penalty were in favor of it.
“Even if he sits alive on death row for decades, he is separated from others,” said Glickman.
“Had he been sentenced to life in prison … he would have been afforded an increasing ability to communicate and play with others and the chance of working his way out of any high-security situation,” she added. “This has been a step in the right direction.”
The New Light congregation said in a statement that it “accepts the jury’s decision and believes that, as a society, we need to take a stand that this act requires the ultimate penalty under the law.” Notably, its rabbi, Jonathan Perlman, wrote to the U.S. attorney general to say he opposed the death penalty.
David Harris, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh law school, said differences about the death penalty persist but have not had an effect on the sense of mutual solidarity.
“There’s still a lot of really active conversations up to and including today that I’m having with people about, well, ‘I think he should get this,’ the death penalty or a life sentence,” Harris, who has walked members of the community through the trial’s legal thicket as a service of the 10.27 Healing Partnership, said in an interview earlier this week.
“But even though the community is not is not of one mind, we don’t have one universal opinion, we are united in supporting each other,” he said. “We are united in wanting this horrible thing to go right and be over and to say we did our best to support those who have been injured.”
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US Sanctions Iran’s ‘Shadow Banking’ Network, Ecuador Designates IRGC as Terrorist Group
A bronze seal for the Department of the Treasury is shown at the US Treasury building in Washington, US, Jan. 20, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
The United States has fired another shot in the battle to break Iran’s illicit finance machine, this time targeting a web of “shadow bankers” moving millions of dollars through Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates to fuel Tehran’s military efforts and terrorist allies.
Meanwhile, Ecuador has become the latest country to blacklist Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Hamas, and Hezbollah, naming them as terrorist organizations.
On Tuesday, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated two Iranian nationals — Alireza Derakhshan and Arash Estaki Alivand — as key financial facilitators for the IRGC-Qods Force (QF) and Iran’s Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL). Alongside them, more than a dozen shell companies and individuals in Hong Kong and the UAE received sanctions for laundering oil money and cryptocurrency transactions to support Iran’s weapons programs.
“Iranian entities rely on shadow banking networks to evade sanctions and move millions through the international financial system,” US Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence John Hurley said in a statement. “We will continue to disrupt these key financial streams that fund Iran’s weapons programs and malign activities in the Middle East and beyond.”
The networks OFAC mapped out are intricate and deliberate, comprising a dizzying labyrinth of front companies such as Alpa Trading – FZCO in Dubai and Alpa Hong Kong Limited, coordinated by Derakhshan and his conspirators, with ties to Hezbollah’s financial operators and Syrian oil brokers. Transactions included more than $100 million in cryptocurrency sales on behalf of the Iranian government, funneled through offshore accounts and digital wallets designed to obscure their final destination into the furnaces powering the IRGC’s terror industrial complex.
This is the third time since June that OFAC has targeted Tehran’s “shadow banks.” In July, another sprawling network received sanctions for laundering billions through exchange houses and front firms. This oil sold off the books fuels Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran’s other terrorist proxies.
Sanctions freeze all property in the United States tied to individuals and firms named, forbidding US persons from doing business with them, and threatening secondary sanctions on foreign financial institutions that participate. This has created a financial game of whack-a-mole, with Iran creating new financial fronts as soon as old ones get exposed and sanctioned.
Other nations have also taken action against the threats posed by the Islamic regime in Iran and its primary fist abroad, the IRGC.
On Monday, Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa signed a decree designating the IRGC, Hamas, and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, drawing from intelligence reports warning of their presence in South America and links to local criminal gangs. The decree warned the groups pose “a direct threat to public security and sovereignty.”
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar praised the decision, writing on X that “Ecuador’s courageous step sends a clear message against Iran’s terror network and strengthens global security. We call on more countries in Latin America and around the world to follow suit.”
The US has previously called for terrorist designations for the IRGC. Ecuador has joined Canada, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and most recently Paraguay and Australia in designating the IRGC.
Last month, Australia expelled the Iranian ambassador after the nation’s intelligence service uncovered the Islamic regime’s hand behind a series of arson attacks against Jewish communities in Sydney and Melbourne. Iran responded by cutting ties and denying involvement.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the crimes “extraordinary and dangerous acts of aggression orchestrated by a foreign nation on Australian soil.” He said that they sought “to undermine social cohesion and sow discord in our community.”
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke described the terrorist scheme as “a series of intermediaries so that people performing different actions don’t in fact know who is directing them or don’t necessarily know who is directing them.”
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said that “the accusation of antisemitism against Iran is ridiculous and baseless.” He added, “According to diplomatic law and in response to Australia’s action, the Islamic Republic has also reciprocally reduced the level of Australia’s diplomatic presence in Iran.”
On Tuesday, Israel struck another Iran-backed terrorist group, Yemen’s Houthis, at the Red Sea port of Hodeidah.
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California Legislature Passes ‘Landmark’ Bill to Combat K-12 Antisemitism
Illustrative: May 1, 2024; Los Angeles, California, USA. Photo: USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
California lawmakers have passed legislation, Assembly Bill 715, which would require the state to establish a new Office for Civil Rights for monitoring antisemitism in public schools at a time of rising anti-Jewish hatred across the US.
The measure, which will now head to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk potentially to be signed into law, also comes amid the state government’s embrace of the controversial ethnic studies movement, which largely promotes anti-Zionism in its course materials.
Receiving near-unanimous support, the legislation passed the state Senate on Friday in a 35-0 vote with five abstentions and then, hours later, cleared the state Assembly in a 71-0 vote with nine abstentions.
The bill is California’s response to an epidemic of antisemitism in K-12 schools, which, as The Algemeiner has previously reported, has produced a slew of complaints alleging violations of civil rights. If signed by Newsom, a Democrat, it would establish an Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator, set parameters within which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be equitably discussed, and potentially bar antisemitic materials from reaching the classroom.
“Antisemitism in K-12 education is a major crisis. AB 715 creates new tools to address this proactively, protect Jewish students from discrimination, hold school districts accountable, and stop outside interests from weaponizing our schools to promote hate,” said Roz Rothstein, chief executive officer of StandWithUs, a Jewish civil rights advocacy group based in Los Angeles. “We deeply appreciate the tireless work of legislators, some of whom endured outrageous attempts to smear and intimidate them. This bill was weakened, in part because interest groups who are complicit in K-12 antisemitism have so much influence over our education system. While we achieved progress, much remains to be done if California is going to earn back the trust of Jewish families.”
Pro-Hamas groups, left-wing nonprofits, and teachers unions have emerged to denounce the bill even as it declined codification of the widely recognized International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism — the exclusion of which constitutes a significant compromise for Jewish and pro-Israel activists. Additionally, the bill’s effect on California’s politicized and racially divisive ethnic studies curricula remains unclear.
“This isn’t just curriculum — it’s about whose histories and lived experiences are allowed in our schools,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said in a statement, imploring Newsom to veto the bill. “By anchoring enforcement to a politicized definition of antisemitism and inviting politically motivated complaints, AB 715 sets a dangerous precent of censorship and erasure.”
AB 715 enjoys the backing of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). On Saturday, the organization’s office praised it as a “landmark bill” while Robert Trestan, vice president of the organization’s western office, said it is a “foundational step toward addressing systemic antisemitism in K-12 classrooms and a national model” for similar bills.
Antisemitism in K-12 schools has increased every year of this decade, according to data compiled by the ADL. In 2023, antisemitic incidents in US public schools increased 135 percent, a figure which included a rise in vandalism and assault.
In September 2023 some of America’s most prominent Jewish and civil rights groups sued the Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) in California for concealing from the public its adoption of ethnic studies curricula containing antisemitic and anti-Zionist themes. Then in February, the school district paused implementation of the program to settle the lawsuit.
One month later, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, StandWithUs, and the ADL filed a civil rights complaint accusing the Etiwanda School District in San Bernardino County, California, of doing nothing after a 12-year-old Jewish girl was assaulted, having been beaten with stick, on school grounds and teased with jokes about Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
On Sept. 9, EndJewHatred (EJH), a Jewish civil rights nonprofit group based in New York City, declared war on K-12 antisemitism, launching a new “End Hate in Education” initiative in the US and beginning preparations for a push into the Canadian media market.
“For too long, classrooms have been used as platforms for pushing divisive ideologies that undermine our core values,” EJH founder Brooke Goldstein said in a statement. “Across the United States, K-12 schools and college campuses have become incubators of extremist ideology, including pro-terror and radical Islamist agendas. The End Hate in Education campaign is about reclaiming our schools, defending civil liberties, and ensuring that every child — regardless of background — can learn in an environment grounded in truth, respect, and constitutional values.”
In press materials, EJH outlined six objectives for the campaign — “curriculum transparency,” “rejecting political indoctrination,” “accountability through funding,” “examination of the rule of foreign funding,” “strategic legal action,” and “grassroots mobilization” — all of which serve its larger, ambitious goal of eradicating from public schools not just antisemitism but all forms of “hate and harassment.”
Speaking to The Algemeiner during an interview on Tuesday, Gerard Filitti, senior counsel of EJH and The Lawfare Project, a partner organization, said antisemitism and anti-Israel bias have been planted in public schools.
“What we’re seeing in colleges and universities is just the tip of the iceberg. The radicalization in schooling, in reality, starts much earlier,” Filitti said. “We’re seeing lesson plans which push the idea that Israel is a genocidal state, or that it is an illegitimate state. We see faculty and administrators who do not support Zionist identity and reject that it can be the basis of discriminatory hate.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Disgraced Ex-US Contractor Who Falsely Accused IDF of Killing Gaza Boy to Speak at Terror-Linked CAIR Conference
Anthony Aguilar, a former contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) who previously served as a US Army Green Beret. Photo: Screenshot
A US Army veteran and former contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) who has made discredited claims against Israel is scheduled to speak later this week at a conference organized by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a nonprofit advocacy group long accused of having ties to terrorist organizations including Hamas.
Anthony Aguilar will appear as a “special guest” at a conference-wide dinner on Friday night in Washington, DC, according to itinerary of the event posted on CAIR’s website.
“CAIR’s Leadership & Policy Conference and annual banquet aren’t just another event. It’s where real conversations happen, where policy meets purpose, and where you should probably be,” the organization said on X/Twitter.
Aguilar claimed he witnessed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shoot a child — Abdul Rahim Muhammad Hamdene, known as Abboud — as the GHF was distributing humanitarian aid on May 28. The GHF is an Israeli and US-backed program that delivers aid directly to Palestinians, blocking Hamas from diverting supplies for terrorist activities and selling them at inflated prices.
After Aguilar made his claim, the former US Army Green Beret rapidly rose to prominence, presenting himself as a whistleblower exposing supposed Israeli war crimes. His story gained traction internationally, going viral on social media. He subsequently embarked on an extensive media tour, in which he accused Israel of indiscriminately killing Palestinian civilians as part of an attempt to “annihilate” and “disappear” the civilian population in Gaza.
However, Aguilar, who erroneously labeled the boy in question as “Amir,” gave inconsistent accounts of the alleged incident in separate interviews to different media outlets, calling into question the veracity of his narrative.
Nonetheless, his claims were cited widely by critics of Israel such as Tucker Carlson, Ryan Grim, and Glenn Greenwald as supposed proof of war crimes.
The GHF launched its own investigation at the end of July, ultimately locating Abboud alive with his mother at an aid distribution site on Aug. 23. The organization confirmed his identity using facial recognition software and biometric testing.
Abboud was escorted in disguise to an undisclosed safe location by the GHF team for his safety, according to The Daily Wire, which noted that the spreading of Aguilar’s false tale put the boy’s life in danger, as his alleged death was a powerful piece of propaganda for Hamas.
Fox News Digital reported that Abboud and his mother were safely extracted from the Gaza Strip earlier this month.
In footage obtained by both news outlets, the boy can be seen playfully interacting with a GHF representative and appearing excited ahead of their planned extraction.
During the summer, as Aguilar’s claims were receiving widespread media attention, the GHF released a chain of text messages showing that Aguilar was terminated for his conduct. It also held a press conference to present evidence showing that Aguilar “falsified documents” and “presented misleading videos to push his false narrative.”
Meanwhile, CAIR has long been a controversial organization. In the 2000s, it was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Politico noted in 2010 that US District Court Judge Jorge Solis “found that the government presented ‘ample evidence to establish the association’” of CAIR with Hamas.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “some of CAIR’s current leadership had early connections with organizations that are or were affiliated with Hamas.” CAIR has disputed the accuracy of the ADL’s claim and asserted that CAIR “unequivocally condemn[s] all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.’”
Moreover, several high-ranking members of CAIR publicly celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel. During what ended up becoming the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust, Palestinian terrorist murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages while rampaging through Israeli communities.
In a 2023 speech following Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, for example, CAIR’s national executive director, Nihad Awad, said he was “happy to see” Palestinians “breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land.”
US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) recently requested that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) launch an investigation into CAIR claiming the group has ties to Hamas and other terrorist organizations.
CAIR has come under recent scrutiny after the organization’s Philadelphia chapter announced that it was partnering with local schools.
In a letter to the US Education Department warning about this partnership, Cotton cited materials which CAIR distributes across the city and promotes in its programming — notably its “American Jews and Political Power” course — and other attempts to revise the history of Sharia, or Islamic, law, which severely restricts the rights of women and is opposed to other core features of liberal societies.
One of CAIR’s most controversial documents demands that teachers omit key facts about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on US soil.
“Avoid using language that validates the claims of the 9/11 attackers by associating their acts of mass murder with Islam and Muslims,” CAIR says in the material. “For example, avoid using inaccurate and inflammatory terms such as ‘Islamic terrorists,’ ‘jihadists,’ or ‘radical Islamic terrorists.’”