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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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Australia Invites Israeli President for Official Visit, Set to Pass New Gun, Hate Speech Laws After Boni Attack
People attend the ‘Light Over Darkness’ vigil honoring victims and survivors of a deadly mass shooting during a Jewish Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on Dec. 14, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hollie Adams
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Tuesday he called Israeli President Isaac Herzog and invited him to visit Australia, expressing his shock and dismay over the attack at the Jewish community Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach last week.
Herzog said he would accept the invitation, conveyed his condolences to the families of the victims, and mentioned that the president of the Zionist Federation of Australia also sent him an official invitation expressing their wish for him to visit, and he intends to do so, Albanese said in a post on X.
Herzog conveyed his condolences to the families of the victims and said he would accept the invitation, the president‘s office said in a statement.
“President Herzog underscored the importance of taking all legal measures to combat the unprecedented rise in antisemitism, extremism, and jihadist terror,” the statement said.
News of the planned visit comes as Australia‘s most populous state is set to pass tougher gun laws, ban the display of terrorist symbols, and curb protests in an emergency sitting following the Bondi mass shooting, as authorities stepped up their response to the antisemitic attack.
Fifteen people were killed and dozens injured in the mass shooting at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration at Bondi on Dec. 14, a shock attack that prompted calls for tougher gun laws and stronger action against antisemitism.
Albanese said earlier on Tuesday his government would address hate speech and gun control, working with the states on new laws.
The terrorism and other legislation amendment bill is expected to clear the upper house of the New South Wales parliament on Tuesday.
The state’s center-left Labor government has proposed capping most individual gun licenses at four firearms with farmers allowed as many as 10.
Police said one of the alleged Bondi gunmen, Sajid Akram, 50, who was shot dead by officers at the scene, owned six firearms. His 24-year-old son Naveed, who was transferred from hospital to prison on Monday, faces 59 charges, including murder and terrorism.
Although Australia tightened gun laws after a 1996 shooting that killed 35 people, a police firearms registry showed more than 70 people in New South Wales, which includes Sydney, each own more than 100 guns. One license holder has 298 weapons.
A Sydney Morning Herald poll on Tuesday found three-quarters of Australians want tougher gun laws. The rural-focused Nationals Party opposed the gun reforms in New South Wales, saying the amendments would disadvantage farmers.
A Muslim prayer hall previously linked by a court to a cleric who made statements intimidating Jewish Australians was shut on Monday by local authorities, a move described by New South Wales Premier Chris Minns as an “important step” for the community.
Minns said authorities “need to make decisive steps, whether it’s through planning law or hate speech [law], to send the message to those who are intent on putting hate in people’s heart or spreading racism in our community that they will be met with the full force of the law.”
The Canterbury Bankstown Council said on Tuesday it had issued a “cease use” directive to shut down an “illegal prayer hall” run by cleric Wissam Haddad after surveillance of the Al Madina Dawah Centre showed the premises was being used in violation of planning laws.
An official at the center told Reuters by telephone that Haddad was no longer involved in managing the center.
The Al Madina Dawah center said in a statement on social media on Dec. 15 that Haddad’s involvement was “limited to occasional invitations as a guest speaker, including delivering lectures, and at times Friday sermons.”
A source close to Haddad, who declined to be named, also told Reuters the preacher was no longer involved in the management of the center.
Haddad denies any involvement or knowledge of what happened in Bondi, the source added.
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Two Men Found Guilty of UK Plot to Kill Hundreds of Jews as ISIS Fears Grow
Surveillance image showing Walid Saadaoui, 38, and Amar Hussein, 52, pictured near Dover, as they have been found guilty at Preston Crown Court of plotting to kill hundreds in an Islamic State-inspired gun rampage against the Jewish community, in Britain, in this handout surveillance image dated May 8, 2025. Photo: Greater Manchester Police/Handout via REUTERS
Two men were found guilty on Tuesday of plotting to kill hundreds in an Islamic State-inspired gun rampage against the Jewish community in England, a planned attack investigators say demonstrates the resurgent risk posed by the terrorist group.
Police and prosecutors said Walid Saadaoui, 38, and Amar Hussein, 52, who went on trial a week after an unrelated deadly attack on a synagogue in the nearby northwest city of Manchester in October, were Islamic extremists who wanted to use automatic firearms to kill as many Jews as they could.
Had their plans come to fruition, it would have resulted in “one of, if not the, deadliest terrorist attack in UK history,” said Assistant Chief Constable Robert Potts, in charge of Counter-Terrorism Policing in northwest England.
Their convictions come little more than a week after a mass shooting at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach in which 15 people were killed.
Islamic State said the Australian attacks were a “source of pride.” Although the jihadist group did not claim responsibility, its response has heightened fears of an increase in violent Islamist extremism.
While not posing the same threat of a decade ago when Islamic State controlled vast areas of Iraq and Syria, European security officials caution that IS and affiliated al Qaeda groups are once again looking to export violence abroad, radicalizing would-be attackers online.
“You can see signs of some of those terrorism threats starting to grow again and starting to escalate,” British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said last week.
TWO MEN PREPARED TO BECOME MARTYRS
British prosecutors told jurors that Saadaoui and Hussein had “embraced the views” of Islamic State and were prepared to risk their own lives in order to become “martyrs.”
Saadaoui had arranged for two assault rifles, an automatic pistol, and almost 200 rounds of ammunition to be smuggled into Britain through the port of Dover when he was arrested in May 2024, prosecutor Harpreet Sandhu said.
He added that Saadaoui planned to obtain two more rifles, another pistol and collect at least 900 rounds. Unbeknown to him, a man known as “Farouk” he was trying to get the weapons from was an undercover operative, which police said meant his plan never came close to being put into operation.
Sandhu said the assault rifles Saadaoui wanted were similar to those used in a 2015 Islamist terror attack on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris that killed 130 people. He added that Saadaoui “hero-worshipped” Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who coordinated that attack.
Saadaoui said in a message to “Farouk,” whom he thought was a fellow militant, that the Paris attack was “the biggest operation after that of Osama [bin Laden]”, an apparent reference to the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the United States.
“Based on Walid’s communications and interactions with the undercover operative, and some of the things he said, that made it very clear that he regarded a less sophisticated attack with less lethal weaponry as not being good enough,” Potts said.
“Because, in effect, it was his role and his duty to kill as many Jewish people as he could, and that wasn’t going to be achieved via the use of a knife or, for example, potentially a vehicle as a weapon.”
Both Saadaoui and Hussein had pleaded not guilty and Saadaoui said that he had played along with the plot out of fear for his life.
Hussein did not give evidence and barely attended his trial after he angrily shouted from the dock on the first day “how many babies?” in an apparent reference to Israel’s war in Gaza.
They were convicted in Preston Crown Court on a single charge of preparing terrorist acts.
Walid Saadaoui’s brother Bilel Saadaoui, 36, was found guilty of failing to disclose information about acts of terrorism but prosectors said he had been reluctant to join the attack.
ISLAMIC STATE THREAT GROWING
The foiled plot is the latest in Britain and elsewhere inspired by Islamic State, which emerged in Iraq and Syria a decade ago and quickly created a “caliphate,” declaring its rule over all Muslims and largely displacing al Qaeda.
At the height of its power from 2014-17, Islamic State held swathes of the two countries, ruling over millions of people and imposing a strict, brutal interpretation of Islamic sharia law.
Its fighters also carried out or inspired attacks in dozens of cities around the world, which were often claimed by Islamic State even without any actual connection.
The SITE Intelligence Group said in the wake of the Bondi Beach attack in Australia that IS had encouraged Muslims to take action elsewhere, particularly singling out Belgium.
A European intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said IS was flooding social media with propaganda and while this impacted only a handful of people, it meant there were more terrorism investigations than last year.
Ken McCallum, head of Britain’s domestic spy agency MI5, said in October that his service and the police had thwarted 19 late-stage attack plots since the start of 2020, and intervened to counter many hundreds of other terrorism threats.
“Terrorism breeds in squalid corners of the internet where poisonous ideologies, of whatever sort, meet volatile, often chaotic individual lives,” McCallum said.
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Syria Detains Prominent American Islamist Journalist, Sources Say
Syria’s interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa speaks during a Ministerial formation of the government of the Syrian Arab Republic, in Damascus, Syria, March 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi
A prominent American Islamist journalist who has been critical of Syria‘s new government and its nascent partnership with the United States has been detained by Syrian security forces, two people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.
Bilal Abdul Kareem, a former stand-up comedian in the US turned war journalist who has lived in Syria since 2012 and worked with many foreign media outlets, was detained in Al-Bab in northern Aleppo province on Monday, they said.
Syria‘s information ministry, an interior ministry spokesperson, and a spokesperson for the US special envoy to Syria did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Abdul Kareem has been a prominent voice among foreign Islamists in Syria, giving air to hardliners who view President Ahmed al-Sharaa – who once commanded Al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria – as compromising too much on Islamic values since taking power.
In August, Abdul Kareem petitioned the Syrian state to give citizenship to foreign jihadists among the rebels who swept to power with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group that ousted autocratic President Bashar al-Assad a year ago.
The fate of foreign fighters has loomed large since then, with few countries willing to take back people they often view as extremists and some Syrians wary of their presence.
Al-Sharaa’s government has progressively limited their space for expression, detaining several, including some with a significant online presence.
In Abdul Kareem’s latest video, he criticized Syria‘s decision to join the US-led global coalition fighting Islamic State. The video was published a day after a gunman said by the US and Syria to have been a member of Islamic State killed two US soldiers and a civilian interpreter in eastern Syria. IS has not directly claimed responsibility for the attack.
In the video posted on X, Abdul Kareem begins: “I’m not going to sugarcoat this, and it probably is going to get me in trouble, but here is the reality. The Americans have no legitimate reasons to be here.”
He adds: “We simply cannot legitimize the presence of the enemy, and I said America is the enemy of the Syrian people.”