Uncategorized
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.”
—
The post As trial begins in Tree of Life massacre, Pittsburgh’s Jews struggle with what to reveal and what to conceal appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
With Marine Le Pen on the right and Defiant France on the left, French Jews face an impossible choice
Marine Le Pen is back. And once again, the French Republic and the democratic values it represents, has its back against the wall.
On Wednesday, the judges of a French appeals court reached something of a Solomonic decision. On the one hand, they confirmed the ruling of a lower court that Le Pen, for more than a decade, oversaw the funneling of several million euros, meant for her European Parliament staff, to her political party, the extreme-right National Rally. On the other hand, they shortened the length of her ineligibility to run for political office, thus allowing her to join the fray for next year’s presidential election.
Much can be said about the consequences of this decision. First, there is the stunningly brazen legal dimension. Just as Donald Trump was the first convicted felon to be elected president of the United States, Le Pen — who leads other announced candidates by at least 10% in opinion polls — stands a very good chance to be the first convicted felon, on far more serious charges than Trump’s, to become president of France. (Two earlier presidents of the Fifth Republic, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, were also found guilty of embezzlement, but only after their presidential terms ended.)
No less significant are the political ramifications. Le Pen’s announcement that nothing will stop her from running in turn stopped Jordan Bardella, her young protégé and president of the National Rally, dead in his tracks. Dismissed as an empty, though always svelte and shiny suit, Bardella proved to be, to Le Pen’s growing discontent, more popular in opinion polls than his mentor. Poised to run in her stead, this young man in a hurry, and with neither practical experience nor university education, was suddenly benched.
It is too early to predict how this will play out. On Wednesday, in their first public appearance together since the court’s ruling, Bardella, standing a few steps behind Le Pen, looked less like a partner than a prop while she bathed in the crowd’s attention. Adding to the tension are policy differences that had begun to appear between Le Pen and Bardella, with the former hewing to her populist image and Bardella leaning towards the traditional right. Tellingly, Le Pen supports the recent rollback of the retirement age to 62, while Bardella seems, like others on the traditional right, to prefer raising the age as high as 67.
More important, Le Pen’s entry may well turn the 2027 election into a choice between equally dismal options. For months, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the turbulent tribune of the extreme-left Defiant France, has portrayed himself as the one figure who can save the republic from Le Pen. In the latest IFOP poll, Mélenchon stands an even chance to finish in second place in the first round of the election. This will mean that for the two-thirds of French voters still allergic to Le Pen, they will have nowhere to go after the second round except to the leader of a party that has repeatedly flirted with antisemitism.
This brings us, finally, to the historical significance of this event. The National Rally is, of course, the party formerly known as the Front National. Equally obvious, the latter, founded by Marine’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was a gaggle of goose-steppers, antisemites, and apologists for Vichy, the collaborationist regime which did its bit for the Final Solution. (By the time he died last year, Le Pen père, who coined the infamous line that the Final Solution was a “detail of history,” had racked up multiple guilty verdicts for Holocaust denial and inciting race hatred.)
Her father’s notorious verbal dérapages, or excesses, finally led his daughter, who had slapped a new coat of paint on the party by renaming it soon after her father gave her the keys, to banish her father from its fold. Undeniably, Le Pen’s relentless pursuit of a policy of “dédiabolisation” or “detoxification,” has largely rid the party of its Nazi-adjacent followers. (As part of this renovation, the more than one hundred National Front representatives who sit on the far-right in the National Assembly — by far the largest parliamentary party — always wear business attire. This makes for a striking contrast with their Defiant France colleagues, who tend to dress as my students do.)
But a bespoke suit does not mean one is not still beholden to racism. Le Pen and Bardella have labored to distance their party from its rancid and racist origin, most recently reflected in the latter’s controversial visit last year to Israel, where he spoke at a sparsely attended conference on antisemitism. (Many of the invitees, upon learning that Bardella would attend, snubbed the event.)
No less contentious was Le Pen’s decision for her party to join the march against antisemitism two years earlier in Paris, along with her vow that the National Rally would serve as the “bouclier,” or shield to protect French Jews. She did not say against whom her party would shield French Jews, but there was no need to: All of France understood who she meant. For her party, the Jew is no longer, if only for now, the dreaded other who threatens the unity and purity of the French people. The Arab or Muslim now fills that role. Hence the party’s insistent demand for a constitutional amendment for “la préférence nationale,” which would limit an array of social privileges to French citizens, as well as the consistent drumbeat of racist and xenophobic declarations on the part of its rank and file.
Apologists for Marshal Philippe Pétain, the leader of Vichy France, insisted that he too served as his nation’s shield against Nazi Germany. They conveniently forgot, of course, that this shield was used to separate French Jews from their non-Jewish compatriots. Between now and next year’s presidential election, the French will have time enough to reflect on the promise, or threat, of a party whose origins warn us against those who use shields to clobber those they decide do not belong to a nation.
The post With Marine Le Pen on the right and Defiant France on the left, French Jews face an impossible choice appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Graham Platner may be gone, but his Nazi tattoo is not fading away
(JTA) — Why did it take sexual assault allegations to collapse Graham Platner’s Maine Senate campaign when the Nazi-linked tattoo was there all along?
Progressive lawmakers, Jewish leaders and conservative commentators posed the question in dozens of exasperated iterations in the hours after Platner announced Wednesday evening that he would suspend his race amid allegations reported by Politico Monday that he had raped a former girlfriend.
“Graham Platner has dropped out of the Maine Senate race amid serious sexual assault allegations,” the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, wrote in a post on X. “But leaders should not have needed another scandal to act. The Nazi tattoo should have been enough.”
Platner, who won his Democratic primary in June on an anti-Israel progressive platform, faced mounting calls to leave the race after the Politico story ran from Democratic groups and progressive leaders who had formerly supported him, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. (Platner has denied the allegations.)
But others argued that those backers should have pulled their endorsements months earlier after it surfaced in October that he had a chest tattoo of a Totenkopf, a Nazi-era skull-and-crossbones design favored by SS officers.
At the time, Platner claimed that he had gotten the tattoo while “inebriated” as a young adult when he was on shore leave from a tour of duty in Iraq, without knowing what it meant. A number of people who knew him before his political ascent, including at least one of the women who accused him of sexual misbehaviour, said he had been aware of the symbol’s provenance. When the revelations emerged, he covered up the skull with a Celtic knot.
His campaign had dismissed as irrelevant noise the backlash the tattoo revelation received, as well as criticism over allegations that he had deployed race and gender stereotypes in the past as irrelevant noise.
“I said, ‘None of this will or should stop him from becoming a U.S. senator,’” Daniel Moraff, a progressive strategist who had headhunted Platner, told The Wall Street Journal last month, before the Politico revelations, about Reddit posts that included homophobic and ableist epithets unearthed in the vetting process. The firm that vetted Platner did not uncover anything about his Nazi tattoo, Moraff said.
The tattoo didn’t seem to be a dealbreaker for voters, either, since he coasted to victory in the June primary after his primary opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, suspended her candidacy in late April, saying her campaign could not afford to continue.
Now the Maine Democratic Party is considering replacements for the disgraced candidate, but the question of why his backers ignored warning signs still looms.
Brian Romick, the president and CEO of the Democratic Majority for Israel, told JTA in a statement that he didn’t understand why progressives had supported “a candidate with so many obvious red flags, including an allegation of sexual assault and a Nazi tattoo.”
And Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which did not endorse Platner, told the Forward ahead of Platner’s exit that “a lesson for Democrats is that we shouldn’t compromise.”
“There were red flags about Platner from the outset,” Soifer said. “They just continued to compound on each other as more stories came out. But the Nazi tattoo for us alone was one too many.”
On Tuesday, New Jersey Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer argued that warning signs had been apparent long before the latest allegation.
“I said it in June: Nothing about this guy was right. From the first abuse allegations to his Nazi tattoo, the red flags were there. His endorsers just chose to accept them,” Gottheimer wrote in a post on X.
New York State Sen. Julia Salazar, a Democratic Socialist, also argued that supporters had made a mistake by overlooking Platner’s tattoo.
“Sorry to the well-intentioned people who made the mistake of supporting this guy. But: having a Nazi tattoo doesn’t pass the sniff test for running for US Senate, nor did his excuses. And far worse that he faces a credible allegation of rape,” Salazar wrote in a post on X.
Jewish Republicans said the Democratic response to Platner’s campaign was too late.
“I didn’t support Graham Platner as soon [as] we all learned he’s a Nazi,” Republican Max Abrahms, a political scientist focusing on terrorism, wrote in a post on X. “For the Democratic Party his being a Nazi wasn’t disqualifying. They viewed it as an asset. Platner matters politically for what he says about mainstream Democrats.”
The Republican Jewish Coalition also took aim at Democratic leaders who had stood by Platner earlier in the race.
“American Jews will never forget that leading Democrats chose to stand with Graham Platner KNOWING FULL WELL THAT HE HAD A NAZI SS CONCENTRATION CAMP GUARD TATTOO,” the group wrote in a post on X. “There is only ONE party where American Jews can be proudly Jewish and loudly pro-Israel: @Republicans.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Graham Platner may be gone, but his Nazi tattoo is not fading away appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Israel reportedly tells US about new Iranian plot to assassinate Trump
(JTA) — Israel has shared intelligence with the United States that Iran had developed a new plot to assassinate President Donald Trump, according to media reports.
Citing an article by The Wall Street Journal Thursday and two people familiar with the matter, CNN reported that the intelligence revealed there was a “new” and “specific” threat. The details were not disclosed. However, the story added that U.S. intelligence agencies had not independently identified the threat or vetted it.
Israeli officials reportedly passed the intelligence to Washington in recent days or weeks.
CNN reported that U.S. officials have monitored ongoing threats against Trump since the 2020 U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander Qassem Soleimani.
Trump told reporters Wednesday, “They want to take out the U.S. leader — me. I’m on whatever list. I saw this morning I’m on every single one of their lists. And so far, I guess I’ve been a bit lucky, but maybe that doesn’t last very long.”
The report comes as tensions between Washington and Tehran continue to be strained over Iran’s nuclear program and recent military strikes.
During Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s funeral on July 5, Reuters reported that demonstrators set fire to U.S. and British flags and held placards in English with the words “KILL TRUMP.”
Others held posters with the faces of Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The posters displayed each man in the crosshairs of a gunsight, with the words “There will be blood.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israel reportedly tells US about new Iranian plot to assassinate Trump appeared first on The Forward.
