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As trial begins in Tree of Life massacre, Pittsburgh’s Jews struggle with what to reveal and what to conceal
PITTSBURGH (JTA) — On Friday afternoon, Squirrel Hill was suffused with spring breezes and pink dogwoods, and alive with the movement that typifies the coming of Shabbat.
Toddlers scrambled up the jungle gym in the JCC playground, while the chatter in cafes was about a looming storm that could soak the walk to synagogue on Saturday. Murray Avenue Kosher was emptying out of challahs.
Barely present, at least on the surface, was any indication that Monday morning would hold a turning point in the community’s greatest trauma. That’s when jury selection was to begin in the trial of the man accused of shattering Shabbat on Oct. 27, 2018, with gunfire. His massacre of 11 worshipers, in a synagogue building a 10-minute stroll from the downtown of this leafy, heavily Jewish neighborhood, was the deadliest-ever attack on U.S. Jews.
But behind the scenes, there are clear signs that the trial’s proximity is being felt. Maggie Feinstein, the director of the 10/27 Healing Partnership, which provides post-traumatic therapy for the community, said that as the trial nears, requests for treatment have spiked.
“The trauma cues that for a while bothered us right after the shooting — for some people it might be ambulances, for other people it might be media, for some people it might be the sound of multiple police cars — you get to a place where they don’t bother you as much,” she said. “But the increased media attention and the increased awareness of this upcoming trial for a number of people is bringing back for them that maybe they didn’t do their own healing the first time around.”
A Starbucks in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh is decorated with a memorial for the victims of the 2018 massacre at the city’s Tree of Life synagogue, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
There were three congregations in the building: Tree of Life and New Light, both affiliated with the Conservative movement, and Dor Hadash, which is Reconstructionist.
The 11 victims were brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal, couple Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Rose Malinger, Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Jerry Rabinowitz, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger. Seven were from Tree of Life, three were from New Light and one was from Dor Hadash.
For their families, their friends, their congregations and their broader Jewish community, the legacy of the massacre is a deep-seated longing for control, a longing to never have to think again of the gunman and of the anguish he left in his wake, while grappling with tender memories of the dead, of the decades spent in celebration and in prayer in the building.
Who narrates this story, the gunman or his victims? That struggle now looms as the alleged gunman goes to trial. The community is wrestling with questions such as where and whether to put the bullet-riddled artifacts, whether to worship at the site, whether to even speak of the massacre and how and whether the gunman lives or dies.
”We believe strongly that this antisemitic attack should not stop people from practicing and being Jewish,” Feinsten said. “For a lot of people, that’s an active choice that they have to work at. It doesn’t come easily after feeling unsafe in that environment to then work to find safety in it. But a lot of people have chosen to do that.”
On Friday, Feinstein was organizing support services for families who would, if they so choose, be sequestered in a separate room in the court where they could view the trial. (Family members may also ask to be seated in the courtroom.) She assigned six therapists to be present with the families.
Compounding the revisited trauma of the event, the families are divided over whether the gunman, should he be convicted, deserves the death penalty. The accused has a lawyer, Judy Clarke, known as “the attorney for the damned” for her determination to keep her clients from execution.
What’s clear is that the Jews of Squirrel Hill are taking the trial on with their characteristic spirit of collaboration. The community has hired public relations specialists to handle media inquiries ahead of the trial, in part to safeguard locals from being pressed to answer questions that could harm them or shatter the sense of unity. Congregants reached by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency dutifully deferred to the list of approved contacts on a list distributed by a PR agency.
On Friday afternoon, signs of unity that flooded the city in the immediate aftermath of the shooting were still visible. In a tobacconist’s window a sign with the slogan “No place for hate/Stronger than hate,” which had proliferated throughout the neighborhood after the attack, remained propped up next to a flag and an ad for the lottery. A Starbucks had on its window white paint drawings depicting “love,” “kindness” and “hope” in English and in Hebrew, alongside symbols: the Star of David, a heart and a dove.
A tobacconist window includes a poster of the “No Place for Hate” slogan that proliferated after the Tree of Life Massacre in 2018, in Pittsburgh, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
Representatives of the community talk about “doing Jewish” as a means of coping, including redoubling the very activities — allying with the city’s Black minority and advocating for immigration, refugees and gun control — that fueled the rage of the alleged attacker.
The attacker allegedly was driven in part by the partnership between Dor Hadash and HIAS, the Jewish refugee aid group, and the congregation’s sponsorship of refugee families.
“We have, if anything, doubled down on our commitment to immigrants and refugees,” said Dana Kellerman, the chair of the communications committee at Dor Hadash. “We are currently coming up on the end of our first year working with a new resettlement program to resettle a Congolese immigrant family in Pittsburgh, and we have every intention of when the year commitment is up of working with a second family.”
Kellerman said the shooting had “honestly become part of the background of our existence at this point.” In keeping with her congregation’s rules aimed at protecting their community, Kellerman declined to talk about the day of the massacre, the death penalty or about details of the trial. But she was open about the ways in which her congregation has leaned into the values it has long held, and that the gunman so reviled.
“We have become louder and more public about practicing our Judaism,” she said. Now, she said, the congregation incorporates advocacy for refugees into its service, with liturgical readings on immigration.
There are other changes. “We even have hats now! We have baseball caps!” Kellerman said with a smile, unearthing a photo of herself in a white cap with “Dor Hadash” and a stylized Magen David in blue, standing alongside gun control advocates.
“Previously we all would have shown up as our individual selves, and now we show up in our Dor Hadash baseball caps,” she said. “Mine kept blowing off.”
Steve Cohen, the co-president of New Light, said the congregation’s relationship with Black churches in the city has reached new intensity since the massacre. The congregation’s rabbi and congregants who know Hebrew partner with the churches to analyze sacred texts in the original.
“We would bring our Tanachs [Hebrew Bibles], and the Christian congregation would bring their Bible and then we would talk about the Proverbs and go through it, not just what the intention of the author was, but how different ways the same words can be translated in order to imply different things,” he said. “And so we went through the whole Book of Proverbs with the Rodman Street Baptist Church, and this past winter, we did the selected Psalms with the faith and Destiny Church on the north side.”
The interior of the new sanctuary of the New Light congregation, four and half years after a gunman massacred three of its congregants, in Pittsburgh, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
New Light took its cue from survivors of the 2015 attack on the Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in which a white supremacist murdered nine Black worshipers, Cohen said. Leaders of New Light traveled to the church and heard from its elders that it was not enough to tend to the traumatized individuals, but to the community; they emphasized outreach, bringing congregants back in.
“That’s a lot of the reason why we have an outpouring of members who never attended shul now attending shul,” he said.
Feinstein, too, said she had an intensification of religious and ritual observance among her clients: more frequent attendance at Shabbat services, forming a daily minyan, finding a study partner for daily Talmud study.
Kellerman said the community has become closer; she sees it in congregants who linger. “It shows up in things like people showing up for Friday night services, and hanging out to chat or getting on a little early to chat,” she said.
A rendition of architect Daniel Libeskind’s plans for the interior of the new Tree of Life synagogue. (Tree of Life)
In the days leading up to the trial, the community bid farewell to the most salient relic of that painful day: the hulking synagogue building on the corner of Wilkins and Shady that has stood empty since then. All three congregations have decamped to nearby synagogues, leaving behind the chain-link fence draped with paintings from children across the country wishing for strength.
“Nobody has been meeting in the synagogue since the day of the shooting,” said Carole Zawatsky, the Tree of Life CEO who is overseeing the plans to replace the building. The only people to have been inside at all, she said, were survivors and “special friends” — donors to the rebuilding and politicians.
Zawatsky said it is wrenching to even contemplate returning for some. “You can walk through the building and see where the gunman was destructive,” she said. “You can see where the gunman was apprehended, where the gunman opened fire. It’s devastating to witness.”
But some intend to: Tree of Life lost seven congregants but plans on returning once the building is rebuilt as a museum and education center focused on the dangers of extremism.
On Sunday, the Tree of Life congregation had an outdoor ceremony to say “L’hitraot,” Hebrew for “until we meet again,” to the building as it has existed up to now.
“We are grateful to God for the thousands of blessings that have passed through these doors,” Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, the rabbi who sheltered congregants and alerted police, said at the ceremony. “We cannot, we must not, permit one day … to define us, nor outweigh all the good.”
The new center is being designed by Daniel Libeskind, the architect who designed the master plan for the World Trade Center site reconstruction in New York and the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
But Dor Hadash and New Light decided their moves were permanent in part because families of their victims swore never to return to the building.
New Light is now ensconced in what once was a secondary chapel at the Beth Shalom synagogue, as if it has been there for decades: Plaques honoring past donors and presidents adorn the walls of the sanctuary. The only signs of the massacre are the 1,000 paper cranes Pittsburgh’s Japanese community gave the congregation, reflecting a Japanese tradition that folding cranes will make a wish come true. They hang at the entrance to the sanctuary, unexplained by any plaque. There is a stained glass monument to the three victims at the cemetery where they are buried.
Even with Tree of Life’s commitment to return, many questions remain about what that will look like. The congregation has yet to decide what objects will stay in the sanctuary, what will stay in storage and what will be part of a separate exhibit, Zawatsky said.
“The first work that’s had to be done for the synagogue is ‘What are the things that need to be saved and go into storage during construction?’” she said.
In some ways, she indicated, the work of rebuilding could bear some resemblance to the balancing act that the community will have to navigate during the alleged shooter’s trial.
“We are thinking deeply about how you exhibit some of these materials,” Zaslavsky said, “in ways that are both teachable moments and don’t retraumatize.”
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How Jews made ‘Les Miz’ Christian again
At the end of the 1941 school year, 13-year-old Yitshkok Rudashevski went to meet his friend from the Soviet youth movement. Their confab, and that clear summer day, was soon disturbed by the howl of a siren and the raining down of bombs.
“The street was full of smoke,” Rudashevski wrote in his diary. “It is war.”
On Sunday June 22, Nazis mobilized Operation Barbarossa and began their push toward Vilnius. That Rudashevski was determined to fight back could be credited, at least in part, to the book he had with him at the start of the offensive, which he planned to share with his comrades.
“I carry with me Der Giber in Keytn [The Hero in Chains],” the Yiddish translation of Les Misérables, Rudashevski wrote, “from which we will read together about Gavroche, the child of the Paris proletariat who fell on the barricades alongside the adult fighters.” (Gavroche died in the street fighting of the 1832 June rebellion in Paris; Rudashevski would survive Lithuania’s June uprising, and its ensuing antisemitism, to be murdered by Nazis in the Ponary massacre of 1943.)
It makes sense that Rudashevski, a dedicated Marxist and product of the Lithuanian Yiddish school system, would find a kind of role model in Victor Hugo’s gamin.
That Les Misérables in translation was popular among Yiddish-speaking socialists — it was serialized in the Forverts in our first year of publication — is itself unsurprising, given the book’s preoccupations with social justice. That its ethic was a fundamentally Christian one seemed to matter less than its overall message: a universal concern for “the wretched” and vulnerable, particularly children, women and the formerly incarcerated. This last factor may have resonated deeply with Baderekh, a Yiddish theater troupe composed of displaced persons, who staged the story in 1946 Berlin.
I’ve been reading Les Misérables for about a year now (it’s long and brimming with Hugo’s commentary on post-Napoleonic revolts, essays on the argot of the underworld and digressions on Parisian city-planning) and was successfully influenced to buy a nosebleed seat to the arena tour of the musical at Radio City last Friday. Watching the megawatt melodrama, it occurred to me that in much the same way Jews conquered the Christmas song catalogue, the Jewish creative team behind Les Miz brought Hugo’s doorstopper to the world — and arguably made it more Christian.
Composer Claude-Michel Schönberg, born in France to Hungarian refugee parents who lost much of their family in the Holocaust, and the Tunisian-born Sephardic lyricist Alain Boublil created a concept album and early stage version that was Gallic in the extreme, and so more concerned with Enlightenment concepts than an enlightened human soul.
But when the show was brought to British shores, Boublil, Schönberg and original directors John Caird and Trevor Nunn reimagined the structure, adding a prologue with Valjean and the bishop, who gifts him silver candlesticks to restart his life after 19 years slaving as a convict at the shipyard in Toulon.
The revamp, which brought on journalist Herbert Kretzmer as lyricist, gave the bloodhound Inspector Javert a new solo — beloved by Ben Shapiro — where he connects his unyielding policing to the watchful stars and the God who punished Lucifer for his challenge to the heavenly order.
Valjean prays. A lot. And it ain’t the Shema.
The key innovation of the musical may well be how it sets Valjean and Javert in opposition. Whereas in the novel, Javert seems to have no God save the rigid rule of law, in the show his dogma derives from what its creatives recently, and reductively, referred to in a New York Times interview as an “Old Testament” form of justice. His foil, Valjean, the redeemed man of mercy, stands in for the New Testament’s core of forgiveness, which the show clearly favors.
If it’s odd that the presentation of this false binary was trusted to a Jew named Herbert Kretzmer, it hasn’t seemed to deter many Jews from embracing the show as they once did the novel.
A couple of years ago, I attended a virtual Rosh Hashanah service that used the musical’s final takeaway, “to love another person is to see the face of God,” as its thematic thrust. (It was a bit much for me.) It would make just as much sense — though it would be cringe in the extreme — to deploy the show for a Yom Kippur sermon on atonement.
The Jewish affinity for the material is helped by that Hugo, unlike so many — probably most — of his contemporaries is not marred by antisemitism. He inveighed against pogroms in the Russian Empire in the 1880s, warning in an English paper that “Christianity is martyrizing Judaism” and publishing a not-so-subtle allegory about the Spanish Inquisition to drive the point home. I’d say he was doing the Emile Zola thing before it was cool, but it was never particularly popular to speak out in this way in the French Third Republic.
While Kretzmer was born in South Africa to refugees from a later wave of Tsarist pogroms, he and the other Jewish writers of the Les Miz musical do not seem to have been particularly observant. The strongest hint of the cultural inheritance is in the klezmeresque intro to “Master of the House,” a theme of the penny-pinching innkeeper Thénardier. (If that’s problematic, Thénardier later makes an antisemitic remark when the tune is reprised, implying he’s not Jewish himself.)
The show nonetheless points to universal values legible to Jews and, indeed, the world. Like Fiddler before it, Les Misérables is a global phenomenon not on the merits of its specificity, but for how it draws on a common humanity. The Yiddish left of the 20th century read the book; protesters in Hong Kong and China can now be heard singing the musical’s anthem of angry men.
As Hugo wrote in his introduction to the book, “so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use.”
It may be immodest, but history, and his own adapters, have proven him right.
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When a country has gone insane, a ‘psychotic’ Israeli play like this makes total sense
What happens when individuals — and societies — lose their grip on reality, sanity, truth, or all three at once?
Af Mila L’Ima, or “Not a Word to Mother,” a play, running now at Beit Lessin in Tel Aviv, is a window into the mental state of the State of Israel right now. Like much of great Jewish literature, it combines comedy with tragedy.
Written by Noam Gil, and directed by Udi Gottschalk, the play opens with an air-conditioner repairman who finds himself summoned to the home of a woman he does not know. But she hasn’t called him there to fix her air conditioner.
After a few awkward — and very funny — minutes, the lady spits it out: Four days ago, she found out that her husband is having an affair with the air conditioner repairman’s wife.
“No,” he says. “Not my Galya.”
The woman can prove it to him, she says. She asks the repairman to hide, lie in wait for the two philanderers —and then attack her cheating husband with a rolling pin.
“No,” the repairman says, but soon a car is in the driveway, and the woman and the repairman dive behind the curtains.
It’s not who they think it is. Corinne, the woman’s teenage daughter, arrives with her crush, Nadav. The girl proceeds to discuss her mother in uncharitable terms. “I would kill myself if I turned out like her,” the girl says.
After a few minutes, another car arrives in the driveway.
This time it is the woman’s husband and the repairman’s wife, and they’re all over each other.
Just as they rip each other’s clothes off on the coffee table, the teenage daughter, dressed in her Scouts uniform, opens a door, and sees it all.
The repairman and the woman from the first scene emerge from their hiding places.
The horrified and traumatized teenage daughter has filmed the coffeetable make-out scene on her phone. And worse, she recognizes her father’s mistress; it’s her high school teacher.
The teenage daughter threatens to put the video up on TikTok. The adults panic. The situation spirals out of control; after catching his wife in the act, the seemingly peaceful repairman bloodies the nose of the woman’s husband. And Nadav, who can’t leave the apartment because no one will give him the keys — in Israel you need keys to leave the house —loses it.
“P’sichi! P’sichi! P’sichi! P’sichi! P’sichi, ” he yells. Psichi means “psychotic” or “crazy” in contemporary Israeli slang.
But this play is not just about one family’s petty, “psychotic” mess; these characters are each a type of mess in which the audience might recognize themselves: a philandering bal t’shuvah husband, talking big to his mistress about opening up new restaurants when he’s really bankrupt; a woman who has convinced herself she deserves a man with gigantic ambitions; a self-sacrificing, middle-aged mother who has given up on her own dream of writing a play to care for her husband and children; a teenage girl who claims to hate her own mother. Each character is trying to find a way of surviving this mess.
“When you live in a place that is psychotic, everything is normal,” one character observes. The entire audience laughed knowingly.
This line gains resonance as the play zooms out from the “psychotic” behavior of the four adults and the two teenagers to take a look at the place they are all living in: Israel.
In a chaotic household in a chaotic country, the characters look to Jewish tradition to try to stabilize themselves. “Ridfu shalom,” the air conditioner repairman keeps telling the screaming spouses around him, riffing off Psalms 34:15. “Pursue peace.”
But can you always pursue peace?
This play acknowledges that in some situations, that’s not possible. In that way, it looks straight at the belief of many Israelis that now, after everything — the Oslo Accords, the Second Intifada, the withdrawal from Gaza, and finally Oct. 7 — the two-state solution may simply not be something that can be pursued.
And maybe that’s why everyone has gone psychotic, and why so many theatergoers packed the house, to laugh in a time of tragedy — and, to use an American idiom, to “feel seen.”
As I was writing this in a Tel Aviv coffee shop, a young man came over and asked if he could ask me something. I said sure, expecting to be asked for money.
But he sat down and said he was a lochem, a fighter, and was just released, and needed to talk with somebody. Would I be willing to speak with him for a few minutes?
I said of course.
He wanted to be heard. He said his name was Tom, he was the second of six children and hoped to study business administration. We talked about where we grew up, how being a second kid feels like being inside a sandwich, and the difference between a mandatory draft in Israel and selective service in the US. And then he apologized. He said he had to keep walking to stay calm.
If he were to walk over to the Beit Lessin theater, he would find the benches on Dizengoff Street covered with bumper stickers memorializing young men lost in battle. Not far away, there is a fountain that memorializes those killed on Oct. 7. But these memorials do not provide answers. What’s sanity? What’s insanity? What’s “p’sichi” and what’s just a normal reaction to pain?
There are no easy answers. I waved to Tom as he walked on.
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It’s not just Harvard and Columbia. Small liberal arts colleges are quietly settling antisemitism complaints.
As major universities across the U.S. strike deals with the Trump administration over antisemitism complaints, a handful of small liberal arts colleges have been quietly settling cases of their own.
In the past week, Oregon’s Reed College and Pennsylvania’s Haverford College have both settled complaints accusing them of failing to protect Jewish students in the wake of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war. Pomona and Occidental Colleges, both in southern California, settled complaints in late 2024 and 2025, respectively.
At least nine other small liberal arts colleges — which unlike universities mainly focus on undergraduate and interdisciplinary education over research — are still locked in disputes.
These include Sarah Lawrence and Union in New York; Swarthmore and Lehigh in Pennsylvania; Middlebury in Vermont; Whitman in Washington; Wellesley and Williams in Massachusetts; and Scripps in California.
All colleges declined the Forward’s requests for comment.
“Institutions are failing to effectively respond to anti-Zionist conduct targeting Jews, as they’re legally obligated to do,” said Denise Katz-Prober, special counsel of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a non-profit dedicated to advancing the civil rights of the Jewish people. “Most, if not all, of the measures that would apply to a larger institution also apply to a small liberal arts school.”
In most cases, Jewish legal advocacy organizations such as the Brandeis Center, the Anti-Defamation League, or StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice (SCLJ) have leveled the accusations by filing complaints with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
Jews at Haverford, a group of Jewish students, faculty, parents and alumni of the Pennsylvania school, opted for a different tactic, filing a civil lawsuit against the college.
The Trump administration launched investigations of 60 colleges and universities, including small liberal arts colleges. But it has not taken the same drastic measures with them as it did with larger universities, where it used federal funding as leverage. While some schools agreed to the federal government’s demands and reached multi-million dollar financial settlements, others like Harvard did not, and were subsequently hit with lawsuits. A judge dismissed the lawsuit against Harvard on Thursday.
Most complaints have been filed under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and allege that colleges didn’t take sufficient action when Jewish students complained they were discriminated against. The complaint against Reed College alleged that the school’s inaction after a student claimed she was harassed for being a Zionist created an environment where, soon after, the mezuzah on her doorframe was destroyed and a rock was thrown at her through her dorm window.
At Lehigh, a Jewish student’s mezuzah was stolen, according to the complaint, and, shortly after, a “Stand With Palestine” sticker was placed outside the same door. Lehigh police conducted and closed a brief investigation, the complaint says, but when the student identified who admitted to placing the sticker, the college declined to discipline them or increase security surveillance in the dormitory. Because of this, the complaint says, the Jewish student requested alternative housing for his own safety.
“This is outrageous and blatantly unequal treatment,” reads the complaint, filed by StandWithUs.
The lawsuit against Haverford accuses the school of being too permissive with pro-Palestinian protesters, who occupied the school’s main administrative building in December 2023. According to the suit, protesters would perform chants “quoting from the Hamas Charter,” which calls for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews. The suit also accused the president of saying she would take “no punitive action” against the protesters.
At Wellesley, a student resident assistant sent an email to the underclassmen in her dorm saying, “there should be no space, no consideration, and no support for Zionism within the Wellesley College community,” according to the complaint filed by the Brandeis Center.
The RA sent an apology letter to residents, according to the complaint, but soon after posted on her social media that she stood by her statement, sent the apology because she “had a gun to [her] head,” and called students who objected to her message “some weak bitches fr.” The Title VI complaint against Wellesley alleges that the school didn’t do enough to address this issue.
As part of their settlements, Reed, Pomona and Occidental agreed to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism. The schools also agreed to include education to fight antisemitism in their bias training, and to strengthen the rules for campus demonstrations with regard to time, place and manner.
Haverford also agreed to adopt the IHRA definition, which states that claiming Israel’s existence is a “racist endeavor” or comparing “contemporary Israel policy to that of the Nazis” can be antisemitic.
Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history and education at the University of Pennsylvania and an advocate for free speech on college campuses, fears that adopting this definition will stifle that freedom.
“I’m Jewish, and anti-Zionist rhetoric is hard for me to hear,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “But that’s why I should hear it. Zionism is probably the most contested question on our campuses right now. Unless everyone can address it freely and openly we’ll never get a good purchase on it.”
Katz-Prober of the Brandeis Center said the IHRA definition does not restrict or censor speech.
“The IHRA definition specifically and explicitly states that criticism leveled against Israel, similar to that leveled against any other country, is not antisemitism, and also requires context,” she said.
“Antisemitism cannot be effectively addressed without first being able to understand and recognize it and the IHRA definition is the most effective and widely accepted tool for doing just that.”
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