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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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Why Does the Palestinian Authority Still Promote Holocaust Denial? Because It Starts at the Top
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas looks on as he visits the Istishari Cancer Center in Ramallah, in the West Bank, May 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohammed Torokman
Official Palestinian Authority (PA) television recently aired yet another segment questioning the reality of the Holocaust.
On Oct. 8, 2025, PA TV brought on Tunisian journalist Sufian Al-Arfawi to claim that the Jewish “victim narrative” is collapsing, and the PA TV host added that even the gas chambers could be dismissed with “simple evidence.”
Tunisian journalist Sufian Al-Arfawi: “The moral issue that they [the Jews] were victims and the issue that they were subjected to extermination by Hitler allowed them to receive support and a global popular embrace, because there was sympathy. This [victim] narrative has begun to collapse and to go in the right direction…”
Official PA TV host: “There is the narrative that says that the [German] soldier used to drag the Jews to the crematorium while calmly eating a sandwich. How does someone drag a person into a crematorium that has toxic gas and isn’t harmed by it? Meaning, even the narrative can be undone with very simple evidence.” [emphasis adde]
[Official PA TV, Capital of Capitals – Tunis, Oct. 8, 2025]
According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Holocaust denial and distortion, “Holocaust denial may include publicly denying or calling into doubt the use of principal mechanisms of destruction (such as gas chambers, mass shooting, starvation and torture) or the intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people.”
Given the ideology of the PA’s leadership, this denial is entirely predictable.
PA leader Mahmoud Abbas himself laid the groundwork for this narrative decades ago in his doctoral thesis, later published as The Other Side.
Abbas argued that Zionists intentionally inflated the number of Holocaust victims for political gain and that the real number of Jews killed was only “a few hundred thousand.” He even claimed that Jews were “offered up” to increase the victim count.
Having more victims meant greater rights and stronger privilege to join the negotiation table for dividing the spoils of war once it was over. However, since Zionism was not a fighting partner – suffering victims in a battle – it had no escape but to offer up human beings, under any name, to raise the number of victims, which they could then boast of at the moment of accounting …
It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement…is to inflate this figure so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions — fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand.” [emphasis adde]
When the head of the PA has distorted the memory of the Holocaust throughout his life, such as when he suggested that Hitler killed Jews out of self-defense because “they caused ruin” and because of Jews’ “social role,” it is no surprise that PA TV echoes them.
This is not a new narrative; rather, it is a continuation of the Holocaust distortion that Mahmoud Abbas embedded into PA ideology and that its media still carries forward today.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.
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Israel Exposed Hamas’s Terror Network Across Europe. Will UK Media Now Stop Treating Its Leaders With Kid Gloves?
Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official in Gaza, speaks during an interview with Reuters in Istanbul, Turkey, Oct. 16, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Murad Sezer
Over the past two years, senior Hamas official Basem Naim has been granted multiple high‑profile interviews on UK platforms such as Sky News and the BBC — remarkable visibility for someone with a leadership position in a designated terrorist group. Now, in light of a startling disclosure by Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad concerning a Europe‑wide terror infrastructure attributed to Hamas, those media appearances demand re‑examination.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office released a statement this week on behalf of the Mossad saying the agency, in cooperation with European counterparts, has dismantled a network of terror cells across Germany, Austria, and beyond — cells that stockpiled weapons and stood ready to strike Jewish and Israeli targets on the continent.
Among the most striking details was a weapons cache seized in Vienna last September, consisting of pistols and explosives and traced to a certain Muhammad Naim, who was identified by Israeli intelligence as the son of Basem Naim. Investigators reportedly uncovered a meeting in Qatar between father and son, allegedly signaling leadership‑level approval of the European operation.
When one considers that Basem Naim has been treated in the UK media as a mainstream political figure, flattered with copious airtime, speaking from Istanbul and Doha, questions must be asked.
On Oct. 10, Sky News’ lightweight foreign news presenter Yalda Hakim interviewed Naim in Doha (perhaps she flew there on Sky News’ weather forecast sponsor Qatar Airways’ own fleet), where she didn’t once question Hamas’s international terrorism aimed at Jews. Instead, Naim was given time to claim Hamas was prepared to relinquish governing Gaza but would not agree to disarm.
Hakim’s three softball interviews of Naim never one challenged the terrorist and his organization’s evil, sadistic behaviors or ideology in as aggressive a way as she badgered me for doubting the discredited and disproven Hamas-supplied casualty figures during the Gaza war. Earlier, a BBC “HardTalk” session with Sarah Montague on Jan. 29 featured Naim on Gaza’s future, once again without evident interrogation of his organization’s international terror links.
I myself appeared on Hakim’s Sky studio show back in February 2024, immediately after another segment with Naim, and openly criticized the absurdity of the interview — from Turkey, during active warfare in Gaza — where no questions were asked about Hamas’s torture of its own people or its transnational terror ambitions. I pointed out that he had served as minister of health in the first government of arch-terrorist Ismael Haniyeh, only for the other guest, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, to jump in and suggest that his willingness to perpetuate the suffering of Gazans while he was safe in Turkey was somehow akin to Yair Netanyahu, the son of the Israeli Prime Minister and a private citizen, living in the US. In conversion outside the studio, she insisted to me that Israel’s main problem was its democratically elected leader but, when challenged, couldn’t name a single other Israeli leader who she thought would act differently in the circumstances. I’m not sure she could name any other Israeli politicians at all. No criticism of Dr. Naim, though.
Having highlighted this at the time, I hope that now the mainstream media and establishment’s choice to confer legitimacy on Naim without substantive challenge on important issues is reconsidered. (I haven’t had the opportunity to ask Hakim or Warsi since then).
To dismiss Palestinian terrorism as only a local Israeli problem is to ignore how Hamas has long viewed itself: as a regional, even global, movement, and an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood — a transnational Islamic jihadist movement. Indeed, senior Hamas leadership in Gaza have, for years, framed their cause not simply as liberation of the enclave but as vanguard of a broader “resistance” spanning all of Israel, with their own founding charter clear on its views of Jews in general. They want us dead. To anyone who claims it’s all just rhetoric, the European arrests and weapon caches expose their ambitions in operational form.
The recent arrest in London of a British man accused of helping move firearms into Europe for attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets should dispel any lingering doubt about how far these networks extend.
German authorities say the suspect was detained in the UK on a German warrant after a monthslong investigation into a Hamas-linked cell operating across Germany and Austria. According to Germany’s Federal Prosecutor, he was a member of Hamas and twice traveled to Berlin over the summer to meet a German citizen referred to as Abed Al G, who was arrested earlier alongside two others described as “foreign operatives” alleged to have been seeking weapons for attacks on Jewish sites. During those arrests police seized an AK-47, several handguns, and quantities of ammunition. Prosecutors say the suspect had already taken delivery of five handguns and ammunition and transported them to Vienna for safekeeping.
The picture emerging is of a network that now reaches into Britain itself.
In this context, Britain’s recent decision to admit young Palestinian students from Gaza with fully‑funded scholarships — and dependent family members — is disturbing. On the face of it, the initiative is humanitarian. But when set against the backdrop of a terror network active on European soil, rooted into Hamas leadership and stretched into host‑countries, it smacks of policy naïveté, or worse, “suicidal empathy.”
Granting access to students and their families from a territory under Hamas control where generations have been educated to idolize terrorists and carry out attacks like the Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel seems more than a little foolish. UK campuses are experiencing rising extremism as it is, and radicalization is a known problem without importing the children of a Gazan education system built on antisemitism and violence.
The threat, it seems, is not only on Israel’s doorstep — it may be on our own. And while compassion is a noble instinct, in a world of asymmetric warfare, porous borders, and subterranean terror networks, we risk opening doors without knowing what, or whom, may walk through.
When the media treats a senior Hamas figure as legitimate without challenge, when Western academic institutions open their doors to students from societies led by terrorist groups, and when intelligence agencies expose the apparatus of terror on our continent, can we still afford to view Palestinian terrorism as someone else’s problem? Or have we now become part of that problem ourselves?
Jonathan Sacerdoti, a writer and broadcaster, is now a contributor to The Algemeiner.
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Parshat Toldot: Appearances Can Fool Us, But Divine Purpose Never Does
A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.
Fans of Victorian England may be familiar with the unusual legal drama known as the “Tichborne Case.” It was part mystery, part tragedy, and part social spectacle. The story has all the elements of a potboiler novel: a ship lost at sea, a grieving mother, a missing heir, a large inheritance, and, in the end, an imposter chasing the money.
In 1854, Roger Charles Tichborne, the young heir to an English baronetcy and a vast fortune, boarded a ship in South America called The Bella. The ship vanished off the coast of Brazil on its way to Jamaica, and everybody on board was thought to have died at sea. Everyone believed Roger had drowned — everyone, that is, except his mother, Lady Henriette Tichborne.
Lady Henriette was French, the illegitimate daughter of a British Member of Parliament, Henry Seymour, who had arranged her marriage to his friend, Sir James Tichborne, Roger’s father.
Known for her emotional temperament, Lady Henriette could not accept her son’s death. She and Roger had lived together in Paris before he left to travel the world, and she kept his room untouched, still writing him letters as if he were just away for a while.
When rumors spread that some survivors of The Bella had been rescued and taken to Australia, Lady Henriette placed ads in Australian newspapers, offering a handsome reward for any information about her missing son.
In 1865, she received a letter from New South Wales about a man claiming to be Roger — a butcher from Wagga Wagga named Thomas Castro. Delighted, she arranged for him to come to France.
But when they met, it was immediately apparent that Castro looked nothing like the slim, tall, dark-haired youth who had disappeared eleven years earlier — a fluent French speaker who also spoke the Queen’s English. This man was obese, fair-haired, spoke no French at all — and his English had a pronounced Cockney accent.
Castro could not recall even basic details of Roger’s childhood or the names of close relatives. Still, Lady Henriette insisted he was her son, dismissing all the startling changes as the result of years of hardship and separation.
Intriguingly, her servants and advisers supported her, insisting that this corpulent stranger was Roger. But the rest of the Tichborne family, the press, and the public considered him a complete fraud.
Scotland Yard detective Jack Whicher soon discovered that “the Claimant” was in fact Arthur Orton, the son of a butcher from London’s East End who had emigrated to Australia.
Even so, Lady Henriette’s faith in him remained unshaken. She gave him a generous allowance and defended him fiercely, as only a mother could. Even after she died in 1868, her implausible opinion seemed to haunt the courtroom as “Sir Roger” sued the Tichborne family for his inheritance.
The sensational trials at Westminster became a national obsession. Crowds packed the galleries and newspapers breathlessly reported every detail. Nearly a hundred witnesses swore he was the true heir. The two trials — one civil, one criminal — lasted 291 days, and the closing statements of the second alone took 62 days.
The jury deliberated for just 35 minutes. Orton was found guilty of perjury and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. He was released a decade later, destitute, and died in poverty in 1898 — having finally confessed that he was indeed Arthur Orton.
But the real mystery lies not in his deception, but in Lady Henriette’s firm conviction that this obvious imposter was her son — a mother so certain of what her heart told her that she became a willing party to Orton’s fraud.
And it is that same strange mixture of blindness and conviction — love triumphing over reason — that we find at the heart of Parshat Toldot. Isaac, old and sightless, summons his older son Esau, whom he loves despite his unrighteous behavior, to receive the family blessing.
But while Esau is out hunting for food to feed Isaac, Rebecca urges her younger son Jacob to disguise himself as Esau, covering his smooth arms with goatskins to imitate Esau’s hairy skin, and to claim the blessing instead.
Jacob hesitates, but obeys his mother. When he enters Isaac’s tent, the scene could almost come from a Victorian melodrama: the blind father reaching out, the reluctant son trembling, the air thick with tension.
Isaac hears the voice of his son and frowns. “The voice is the voice of Jacob,” he says, “but the hands are the hands of Esau” (Gen. 27:22). Then, like Lady Henriette, Isaac allows his emotions to override his doubts. His love for Esau blinds him completely. He blesses Jacob, believing him to be Esau.
But this is where the similarity to the Victorian story ends. The Tichborne claimant was a fraud, but Jacob was not. His act may seem deceitful — pretending to be his brother to get something that isn’t his. But the Torah and its commentators make clear it was not deceit — it was destiny.
Earlier in Toldot, Esau had sold his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of lentil stew. That sale was not just symbolic — it was legally binding. Esau did not value the birthright, but Jacob did. The blessing Isaac intended to give was tied to that birthright. Jacob was not stealing — he was taking what he had rightfully acquired.
As for Rebecca, she wasn’t a meddling mother — she was following what God had told her. Before her twins were born, God said (Gen. 25:23): “Two nations are in your womb… and the elder shall serve the younger.” She knew Jacob, not Esau, was meant to continue the path of Abraham’s covenant. Her plan was not for unfair gain, but to fulfill prophecy.
Some commentators, like the Ramban, even suggest that Isaac may have suspected the truth. The Torah hints at this, quoting Isaac as saying: “See, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field blessed by God” (Gen. 27:27). This is why Isaac’s blessing focused on spiritual destiny, not on hunting or power as it might have for Esau.
Arthur Orton’s fraudulent identity hid a lie and caused years of pain and suffering. Lady Henriette’s refusal to accept her son’s death blinded her to reality, and her embrace of Orton brought her family needless grief.
Isaac’s love blinded him too — but through that blindness, God’s plan came into focus: a wrong was righted, and a precious legacy was preserved. Jacob’s disguise did not conceal a lie — on the contrary, it revealed the truth. Esau’s disregard for the covenant made him unfit to inherit it. Jacob’s deception was not a betrayal of destiny but its fulfillment.
The Tichborne Case ended in shame and imprisonment. The Jacob Case ended in a nation of faith, and an enduring covenant with God. Jacob’s blessing shows us that sometimes destiny is hidden in confusion. What seems like a mistake may be God’s way of making sure a blessing goes where it truly belongs.
Maybe that is the real lesson: appearances can fool us, but divine purpose never does. The voice may sound like Jacob and the hands may feel like Esau, but Heaven knows the truth, and in time, so will we.
The author is a writer and rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.