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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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UK lawmakers press government on why West Bank imports haven’t yet been banned
(JTA) — British lawmakers from across the political spectrum are pressing the government to ban imports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, saying that explanations for why such a ban has not yet been imposed were inadequate.
During a three-hour House of Commons debate on Thursday, lawmakers argued that Britain’s long-standing position that the settlements are illegal under international law means it should fall in line behind other countries advancing bans, particularly at a time of rising settler violence and efforts to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
The debate — the latest in a number of formal discussions about a potential ban in Parliament — was led by Abtisam Mohamed, a politician from the governing Labour Party who is the first Arab woman and first Yemeni member of Parliament. She was denied entry into Israel in 2025, a year after being elected.
“I want to pose a simple question to the government today, a question that sits at the heart of this debate,” Mohamed said in opening the session. “If settlements are illegal, why have we not made an outright ban on trade? What exactly is it that we’re waiting for?”
Lawmakers from other parties piled on.
“There is no excuse that we have to wait for other countries to move because they’ve moved ahead of us,” said Ellie Chowns from the left-wing Green Party, which has made opposition to Israel part of its platform. “There is no excuse that this is too technically difficult because the legal framework already exists.”
And a member of the Conservative party, which has traditionally favored strong ties with Israel, said he was unconvinced by the argument, made recently by a government official, that other measures that are potentially less complicated to administer could achieve the same pressure on Israel.
“We’ve done everything except the obvious, which is just the ban,” said the lawmaker, Kit Malthouse. “The question I’m left asking is, why? Why the reluctance? Why the hesitation? Nobody’s buying the complexity argument.”
On Monday, EU foreign ministers met to discuss a ban on products from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, in order to gauge if there is enough support for the move. The EU’s foreign minister said a ban on imports was the most popular option under discussion and said she expected that the conversation would soon advance.
The discussion in the House of Commons comes as the British Labour government is in flux, with a new prime minister set to take over from Keir Starmer next week. It also comes as the government is taking steps to reassure a Jewish community that has been rattled by a number of violent incidents. This week, the government both allocated more than $300 million in security funding for Jewish institutions while also formally declaring Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, seen as tied to many of the attacks, to be a terrorist group, in a move that enables more intense prosecution.
In an appearance before the Foreign Affairs Committee earlier in July, the government’s top Middle East minister fended off allegations that the Labour government was slow-walking pressure on Israel. Hamish Falconer also noted that British Jewish leaders are urging against an import ban.
“There are legitimate and reasonable concerns from the British Jewish community that if we were to take steps which were crude, which were untargeted, could have unintended consequences on the lives of the community who are already under considerable pressure,” he said. “I do take that seriously for obvious reasons.”
The Board of Jewish Deputies, an umbrella organization for almost 200 Jewish groups in Britain, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that it was reluctant to comment on a potential ban on West Bank imports before a new prime minister is installed. But the group has previously weighed in strongly against efforts to boycott Israel, arguing in a 2017 report that “to hasten a solution to the settlements would be to assist the chances of negotiations through promoting peace, rather than the problematic boycott campaign.”
Falconer also signaled that all bets could be off if the Israeli government moves forward with a settlement project known as E1, telling the Foreign Affairs Committee, “I have said repeatedly that no one should benefit from a profit made on land that has been unlawfully procured.”
The E1 initiative would expand Jewish settlements on a stretch of land east of Jerusalem, bisecting the West Bank, and is seen by both its proponents and critics as a bid to undercut a potential future Palestinian state. The current right-wing Israeli government has moved the E1 project significantly toward actualization, approving it formally.
If the project proceeds further, Falconer told lawmakers, “then we and our friends and allies would take tangible action in response.”
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Cori Bush to fellow progressives: My reelection would be ‘the knockout’ punch to AIPAC
(JTA) — Cori Bush told fellow progressives during a virtual rally on Monday night that she intends to deliver a “knockout” punch to AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, by winning her congressional primary next month.
When Bush, the two-term progressive Democratic congresswoman, was defeated in a bruising primary two years ago, both she and her adversaries attributed the loss in part to AIPAC.
The group’s PAC spent more than $4 million to defeat Bush, who was one of two members of Congress to vote against a measure to deny entry to the United States to Hamas terrorists who perpetrated Oct. 7, and declined to call Hamas a terror group on the campaign trail.
Now, as AIPAC has rapidly transformed into a radioactive bogeyman among Democrats and Bush’s fellow progressives have mounted an ascent across the party, Bush is out for revenge.
“Jamaal Bowman says it best: He said that Chris Rabb gave a jab to AIPAC. He says that Darializa and Claire … they gave uppercuts to AIPAC,” Bush said. “But then when I win, that will be the knockout.”
Bush is currently running against Missouri incumbent Rep. Wesley Bell in a field with three other candidates. In 2024, Bell defeated Bush 51.1% to 45.6% in a field of four candidates. A February poll sponsored by Bush’s campaign had Bell and Bush tied, with Bush receiving 44% of the votes, while Bell had 40%. (The survey had a margin of error of 5.4%.)
Bush was referring to a list of prominent progressives, including one, Bowman, who like her was primaried out of Congress in 2024, and three who won primaries decisively in Pennsylvania and New York this year. She was speaking at an online rally organized by Our Revolution, the group formed by Sen. Bernie Sanders to advance the progressive movement.
The rally came as the movement tries to move past a setback in Maine, where Graham Platner, a progressive and staunch critic of Israel, withdrew after winning the Democratic Senate primary amid allegations of sexual assault. One of the candidates vying to replace Platner on the ticket, Troy Jackson, joined other leading progressives including Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and California congressman Ro Khanna in taking the virtual stage.
Jackson did not mention Israel or AIPAC in his comments, even after announcing in recent days that he believes Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Instead, he listed an array of other issues animating left-wing voters.
“I know that there’s real pain, anger, and disappointment, and I’m not going to try and minimize that. But look, this movement has always been bigger than one person,” he said, alluding to Platner’s exit. “It’s about taking on a system rigged against working people, fighting for Medicare for all, strong unions, higher wages, reproductive freedom, and an economy where billionaires and corporations finally pay their fair share.”
Other candidates took aim more squarely at Israel and its supporters. El-Sayed, who in recent days has taken to calling Israel a “rogue state,” noted that AIPAC and its allies have spent more than $40 million to defeat him. (AIPAC has spent nearly $15 million on the race to date.)
“Donald Trump is not himself the disease in our politics; he’s the worst symptom of the disease of our politics,” El-Sayed said. “The disease is the system that allows big corporations, billionaires, special interest groups like AIPAC, to buy and sell politicians in ways that leave them rigging the system against us.”
El-Sayed also took aim at foreign military aid in his remarks, telling those gathered, “It shouldn’t be this hard to pay your taxes and know that that money is going to be spent on you and your kids rather than to annihilate somebody else and their kids.”
Minnesota congressional candidate Kaela Berg similarly cast her refusal to accept AIPAC money as part of a broader rejection of corporate influence in politics.
“We are the revolution, we are bringing that working class voice, that lived experience, two and a half decades of fighting the bosses, being people in Congress who cannot be bought, being the antidote to corporate Democrats and to Republicans,” Berg said. “I do not take AIPAC money. I do not take corporate money.”
Khanna, fresh off a trip to the Middle East during which he claimed that Israeli soldiers took the side of armed settlers who detained him in the West Bank, used his remarks during the town hall to shift attention from his detention to the treatment of Palestinians.
“Yes, people know I was detained, but if there’s one obligation, I feel I want to tell in every part of this country the story of apartheid in the West Bank,” Khanna said. “The story of these Palestinians who are being treated in an inhumane, undignified way, and if we can tell that story, I believe we will finally get change.”
Khanna, who has emerged as one of Israel’s fiercest critics in Congress since Oct. 7, also told attendees that the progressive wins across the country reflected growing support for the movement’s policy positions, including its opposition to Israel.
“We are winning, and we’re winning not because of candidates,” Khanna said. “We’re winning because we stand for Medicare for all. We stand against the genocide. We stand against foreign wars.”
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Five countries over four days: How Cuba’s Maccabiah Games delegation made it to Israel
(JTA) — Nearly three decades after Hella Eskenazi’s first trip from her home in Cuba to the Maccabiah Games in Israel, the journey hasn’t gotten much easier.
This time, she was joined by dozens of athletes who had to travel through five countries over more than four days to reach Israel — a consequence of both the turmoil affecting travel to Israel generally and the unique complexities of getting anywhere from their communist island nation in the Caribbean.
The first time Eskenazi made the trip was 1997, when she was a member of Cuba’s national karate team, and her country’s sole representative at the sports competition known as the “Jewish Olympics.” That was the year the Games were marred by the collapse of a pedestrian bridge over the Yarkon River in Tel Aviv that killed four members of the Australian delegation and injured 60 others.
This time around, Eskenazi, now 56, is both an athlete and the vice president of Patronato de la Casa de la Comunidad Hebrea de Cuba, her nation’s Jewish community and main synagogue. She’s a former Hebrew school director and has been involved in Cuba’s Maccabi programs since 2013, Cuba’s first year with a full delegation.
For this summer’s Games, Cuba sent 52 athletes to participate, many of whom already live in Israel after making aliyah. But for the 29 members who made the journey from Havana, the trip was anything but easy.
And that would have been the case even if Air France hadn’t canceled their flights — due to the conflict in Iran — halfway through their travel.
As Eskenazi explained, due to a variety of political and economic factors, it’s not easy to get out of Cuba. Her athletes needed various visas that would allow them to travel through Europe to get to Israel, and Cuba does not have a national airline with the same international capabilities as travel giants like Air France or Turkish Airlines.
And because Cuba’s oil supply lags behind much of the world, Air France does not offer flights from Cuba. So they had to travel to Panama first, just to get to Paris.
The original plan, Eskenazi said, was for a portion of the delegation to fly from Havana to Panama to Paris to Tel Aviv. But when Air France canceled all its flights to Tel Aviv, they had to pivot — which wasn’t easy given their restrictive travel visas.
Part of the delegation flew from Paris to Austria, while others went through Abu Dhabi, where Eskenazi said Cubans don’t need visas. And each group had layovers of 12 or 15 hours, making the total journey from Cuba to Israel take four or five days.
Eskenazi’s journey was different, because she had a visa that allowed her to travel through the United States. She flew from Havana to Miami to New York to Tel Aviv. Even then, she still had an 18-hour layover in New York.
Eskenazi said her group would not have made it to Israel without the help of the Maccabi World Union, the global organization that puts on the Games and supports local delegations.
“We are here thanks to the Maccabi World Union,” she said in a phone interview from Israel. “Maccabi World Union, they did many things for Cuba, for the Cuban Jewish community to participate in this Maccabiah.”
So once the Cuban cohort finally made it to Tel Aviv, it was understandably a meaningful arrival.
“It has been very very emotional for us because in Cuba we have many difficulties right now,” Eskenazi said. “And to arrive here, to have electricity, to have food, to be safe, to have our friends, to make sport, to share with all of the people from all over the world, has been very emotional, very emotional for us.”
It’s also been a successful trip, competitively speaking.
Cuba has won several medals, competing in sports including softball, futsal and basketball. Eskenazi herself has won two: a silver medal in the one-mile run and a bronze in the five-kilometer competition for the 55-59 age bracket.
But beyond sports, Eskenazi said it’s been a special experience for her athletes — who hail from a country with a relatively affluent but small Jewish community — to be surrounded by Jews from around the world.
“It’s very important because imagine that you can share with people from Holland, from France, from the United States,” she said. “We met people from Ukraine, from Argentina, from Mexico, from different parts of the world. It’s been very very emotional.
“We are happy to be here because we love to share here with the Israeli way of life,” Eskenazi added. “For us it’s very interesting, and we love Israel. Remember that we are Jewish people, and the Israeli people, they are friendly. This is a very special country. If you can see people, for example, with kippah on the street, with tefillin or tallit, it’s like to be inside of the synagogue, a big synagogue. It’s amazing to be here.”
And after the Games end, it’s right back on the plane home. Hopefully with fewer stops this time.
Eskenazi said her delegation is again splitting up into smaller groups, with some flying back through Paris and Panama, and others going through Madrid straight to Havana.
Regardless of the logistics and the travel delays, Eskenazi said Israel is a special place.
“When I visit Israel, I feel like Cuba, like my country,” she said. “I feel that this is my home, also.”
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