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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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Graham Platner, anti-Israel progressive, locks up Democratic Senate nomination in Maine
(JTA) — Graham Platner, the anti-Israel progressive who took Maine’s political establishment by storm this spring, has officially prevailed in his state’s Democratic Senate primary.
Multiple news outlets called the race within 90 minutes of the polls closing, with only a fraction of the votes counted.
The victory was seen as a foregone conclusion after Platner’s primary opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, suspended her candidacy in late April, saying her campaign could not afford to continue.
Still, the final tally suggested that not all Mainers had embraced the political neophyte whose campaign was dogged by controversies, including the revelation that Platner had a Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on his chest for nearly two decades until he drew criticism for it on the campaign trail. He denied knowing it was a Nazi symbol.
Mills, who remained on the ballot, drew about one in five votes in the first 10% of ballots counted, according to the tally published by The New York Times.
The result sets Platner up to face off in November against incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who has received substantial support from pro-Israel donors. The latest polls suggest a tight race.
“I’m humbled and proud to officially be your Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate to take on Susan Collins and the billionaire class she represents. Together, we will win this seat back for working Mainers,” Platner tweeted on Tuesday night. “Thank you, Maine.”
While Democratic leaders officially threw their support behind Platner after Mills halted her campaign, many of them remained circumspect about him. Their balancing act grew more delicate in the final days of the primary race, as Platner drew allegations of antisemitism over his characterization of donations channeled to Collins by the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and as he faced new allegations of misconduct toward women. (He said he had been a “far from perfect boyfriend” during some periods of his life but denied engaging in misconduct.)
Now, top Democrats will have to decide how hard to gun for Platner, who has become a standard-bearer in the party’s anti-Israel shift at a time when the chamber is narrowly divided.
They are already facing pressure to disavow him. “Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in America, and every Senate Democrat propping up Platner’s campaign, should be ashamed,” the Republican Jewish Coalition said in a statement after the polls closed. “Their continued support of Graham Platner, who wore the symbol of Hitler’s SS on his chest for 18 years is an outrage. Schumer must withdraw his support immediately.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Graham Platner, anti-Israel progressive, locks up Democratic Senate nomination in Maine appeared first on The Forward.
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A new proposal to radically destabilize Israel
Given the jackhammer pace of outrageous developments, one might almost think Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition is trying to give the opposition ammunition in the coming election — most recently by promoting a bill rendering full-time Torah study as a national service equivalent to military service.
The proposed “Basic Law: Torah Study,” which will undergo its first of four Knesset votes on Wednesday, seeks to elevate full-time Torah study within Israel’s Basic Laws framework, a de facto constitution. Under its logic, sustained Torah study will not be merely a protected cultural or religious activity, but a state-recognized form of “meaningful service” to the nation. In effect, it would place long-term yeshiva study on a comparable footing to military service, including in terms of tangible financial benefits and how the state defines civic contribution.
This comes in the context of a conscription crisis, which has seen the country come to a boiling point over a long-standing institutional arrangement by which Haredi yeshiva students are exempted from military service.
Yet even as the rage mounts, the governing coalition is trying to find legislative ways to formalize the draft exemptions to appease Netanyahu’s Haredi coalition partners, without whom he would lose his tenuous majority.
The result may be a disastrous dual-track citizenship model: one in which military service obligations are heavily concentrated among secular and national-religious Israelis, while Haredi communities are structurally insulated both from conscription and from the economic consequences that typically accompany non-participation in the labor force or military.
There are plenty of cultural disagreements between Haredi and secular Israelis, but the central criticism of the proposed law is about how the legislation threatens the structure of the country. It incentivizes behavior that will undermine Israel’s ability to defend itself from its very real enemies by diminishing the number of people serving, and demoralizing those who do.
Torah study as national defense
The draft exemption has contributed to a severe manpower shortfall in the Israel Defense Forces, as tens of thousands of reservists are repeatedly mobilized for extended periods of duty: sometimes hundreds of days per year, even after completing compulsory service. Ordinary Israelis are chafing under this burden, while many thousands of conscription-age Haredim enjoy danger-free and often taxpayer-subsidized lives.
With the Haredim set to make up a third of Israel’s citizenry by 2050, many see the long-term implications of this inequality as dire for Israel.
By classifying Torah study as a form of recognized national service, the Basic Law proposal would provide a legal foundation for aligning the rights of yeshiva students with those of IDF veterans and active soldiers. That would influence their eligibility for a range of state-linked benefits and entitlements that are tied — directly or indirectly — to military service, including housing assistance, childcare subsidies, and other welfare mechanisms that privilege or differentiate based on service status.
In parallel, it strengthens the political and legal argument that full-time Torah learners should not be treated as draft evaders but as a distinct category of service-recognized citizens, thereby reinforcing the broader exemption framework. It would function as a bulwark anchoring existing and future exemption arrangements against judicial or legislative rollback.
Words can hardly express the agitation this prospect has caused in mainstream Israel.
A coherent worldview
Haredi politicians have settled on justifying the draft exemption by arguing that their prayers are more important than the actions of pilots or tank commanders in aiding Israel. Supporters of the exemption frame the arrangement as a necessary accommodation to preserve large-scale Torah study as a core national and religious value.
These arguments are, in my view, wrong but not trivial. They reflect a coherent worldview about identity, community and the meaning of national service.
Actual supporters of this approach outside the Haredi parties — and they are few — argue that Torah study is not merely a private religious activity but a foundational element of Jewish national identity. In their view, it represents a continuous spiritual contribution to the survival and cohesion of the Jewish people — one that cannot be measured in military or economic terms. They also warn that broad coercive conscription risks destabilizing Haredi society, undermining its institutions, and producing a deep cultural rupture.
The law “will be a historic confirmation of the supreme value of the Torah and students of the Torah to the people of Israel and their security,” said Aryeh Deri, head of the Haredi Party Shas, adding “the People of Israel need greater virtues for the success of its campaign against enemies.”
That argument is unlikely to convince anyone not already sold on this worldview. Which raises the question: What is Netanyahu thinking in letting this move forward?
It is all but certain this move will harm him in upcoming elections, and the opposition, should it win, will cancel most of the laws that resulted from the current legislative blitzkrieg — most of which involve weakening of the state’s institutions, primarily those with oversight over the government.
Perhaps the Haredim have conditioned future support for Netanyahu on the effort; but this would be an empty threat, because the center-left opposition is not a viable alternative for them, any more than the MAGA movement might join the U.S. Democratic Party.
The whole thing is a mystery. But one thing is clear, and alarming: Israel’s government is now openly advocating against a single shared system of civic duty, and for a tiered structure in which one group bears the full burden of military service, and another is exempt, on the strength of arguments that most Israelis reject.
The post A new proposal to radically destabilize Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Milei praises ‘Judeo-Christian values’ at Chabad event as Argentina courts European Jews
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES — Argentine President Javier Milei exalted “Judeo-Christian values” on Monday as he spoke to a crowd of 1,800 people celebrating the 32nd anniversary of the death of the last Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi.
Milei was the keynote speaker at the Hasidic Orthodox movement’s event marking the yahrzeit of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, becoming what appears to be the first sitting non-Jewish head of state to make an official tribute to the Lubavitcher Rebbe at a major Chabad event.
“The conclusion I have reached is simple in its formulation and profound in its consequences: When one embraces Judeo-Christian values, spiritual and material life become aligned and resonate on the same wavelength,” Milei said Monday night at the Palacio Libertad cultural center.
It was the latest in a long list of expressions of admiration for Judaism for Milei, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who was elected in 2023 and since has made support for Israel a cornerstone of his agenda. He has previously visited Schneerson’s grave in New York City, made pilgrimages to the Western Wall in Jerusalem and presented a picture of Schneerson to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a gift. He was also honored at a Chabad synagogue in Miami in 2024, where he revealed that he believed he has Jewish heritage.
Milei has long studied Judaism and has said he wants to convert after leaving office but sees Jewish practice, including the observance of Shabbat, as incompatible with the presidency.
His 40-minute speech at the Chabad event focused almost entirely on Jewish religious texts and thought, quoting passages from the Torah as the basis of his economic view.
Milei also revealed that his address was drawn from the epilogue of his upcoming book, “Morality as State Policy,” in which he argues that capitalism is a system invented by “the Creator” — whom he also referred to as “the One” — to bring paradise to earth through work.
Jews in Argentina have a range of perspectives on Milei’s philosemitism.
“I appreciate that the president chose to attend and speak at the Tribute to the Rebbe,” Rabbi Tzvi Grunblatt, the head of Chabad in Argentina, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “He is doing so from a deeply personal place. I also think it is healthy for him to have this spiritual side.”
But Alicia Osipovich, a sign-language interpreter assisting a deaf attendee at the event, told JTA that Milei’s forceful support for Israel and Judaism made her uneasy, even as she personally appreciated it.
“I’m proud and deeply moved to have a president like him,” Osipovich said. “At the same time, I have some concerns. He speaks extensively about Israel, and you know how support for Israel is sometimes portrayed. He says he is a Zionist, but nowadays the word ‘Zionist’ is often used as a negative label. I have mixed emotions. As a Jew, I am proud, but I also feel some concern about the increased public exposure of Judaism these days.”
Under Milei’s leadership, Argentina has invited European Jews worried about rising antisemitism to consider the country as a destination. Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno recently emphasized Argentina’s attractiveness in a message aimed at Jews in Britain and other European countries who are grappling with surging incidents targeting Jewish communities.
“A country on the up with great opportunities. Sunny, with many natural attributes, and home to the largest Jewish community in Latin America. Strong stand against antisemitism. British and European Jews should seriously consider Argentina. You are welcome,” Quirno wrote on X in reply to author Saul Sadka, who had urged British Jews to consider leaving amid growing hostility.
Argentina’s leading Jewish organization, DAIA, has recorded more antisemitic incidents in recent years, mostly taking place online. But the rate of antisemitic incidents reported in the country last year was significantly lower than in many other countries with sizable Jewish populations, according to the 2025 worldwide antisemitism report published in April by Tel Aviv University.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s global director, praised Quirno’s invitation, saying it reflected a significant shift.
“Sign of the times? A country formerly ruled by a Nazi-supporting dictator has morphed over decades into a strong democracy whose president is a philo-Semite,” Cooper wrote in reply to Milei’s foreign minister. “Argentina currently serves as chair of IHRA [the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance]. Foreign minister now beckons embattled British Jews. Incredible.”
Israel’s ambassador to Argentina Eyal Sela told JTA at the Chabad event that he had no difficulty recognizing that Argentina is currently a very good place for Jewish life.
“Yes, I agree with the Argentine foreign minister,” Sela told JTA. “Of course, Israel will always be the best place for Jewish life. But today, Argentina is a much better place for Jews than Europe.”
Monday’s event opened with the testimony of Yosef Chaim Ohana, a survivor of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, who expressed deep gratitude for the support shown by Jews around the world, followed by remarks from his father, Avi Ohana. Milei hosted the Ohanas and Grunblatt on Tuesday morning at Argentina’s presidential palace, the Casa Rosada.
Dozens of Argentine nationals were murdered or taken hostage on Oct. 7. This week, an Israeli who had worked in Buenos Aires at the Israeli embassy in Argentina was killed in an attack on a moshav in central Israel.
The post Milei praises ‘Judeo-Christian values’ at Chabad event as Argentina courts European Jews appeared first on The Forward.
