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Long-delayed Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial to begin Monday, igniting pain, fear and hopes for closure
(JTA) — Every Thursday, Brad Orsini gets on a conference call with dozens of other security specialists who, like him, focus on preventing threats to American Jews. But in a few days, and for the coming months, the conference call won’t just address the dangers of the present and future. It will also deal with events that occurred more than four years ago.
That’s because next week marks the beginning of the trial of the gunman who is accused of killing 11 worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018.
Orsini, who oversaw the city’s Jewish communal security on the day of the attack in the neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, hopes to find a sense of closure in the alleged shooter’s prosecution. But he also knows that the trial threatens to broadcast the white supremacist ideas that lay behind the attack, and continue to pose risks for Jewish communities. And he worries that, in addition to providing a possible pathway for survivors and victims’ families to move into the future, it could also thrust them back into a painful past.
“It’s long overdue,” Orsini said. “This has been looming large over the Pittsburgh community and, quite honestly, the Jewish community in the nation. We’re all looking toward finishing this trial and prosecuting this actor for what he did.”
At the same time, he added, “This trial is going to reopen wounds that this community has suffered for almost five years now, and it’s going to have the ability to retraumatize many people in the community. And we have to be concerned about that.”
Beginning on Monday, those countervailing emotions and expectations will come to bear as the deadliest antisemitic attack in American Jewish history is litigated in court. The trial, which will begin with jury selection, is expected to last about three months. Few doubt the guilt of the accused shooter, Robert Bowers, whose name is hardly uttered by Jewish residents of Squirrel Hill. But what remains unclear is what the trial will mean for American Jews — and for the families most directly affected by the attack.
Some hope for the defendant to get the death penalty — even though that will mean prolonging the legal ordeal — while others have advocated against it. Some hope for the trial to shed light on the threat of white supremacy, even as renewed attention on the attack could inspire other violent extremists. And some hope the trial will help them move past the tragedy, even as they know it will be difficult to hear the details of the shooting laid out in court.
“The country is going to have to undergo this unprecedented trial of the country’s worst mass killer of Jews,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. “It’s going to be really hard, so I think our community is really going to have to buckle down and brace ourselves.”
The attack on Saturday morning, Oct. 27, 2018, killed 11 people from three congregations, all of which met at the same building, and injured six others, including four police officers. The defendant faces 63 criminal charges, including hate crimes and murder charges. He has pleaded not guilty. The prosecution is seeking the death penalty — a choice some relatives of victims are vocally supporting. Previously, leaders of two of the three congregations that suffered the attack had opposed the death penalty in this case.
“This massacre was not just a mass murder of innocent citizens during a service in a house of worship,” Diane Rosenthal, sister of David and Cecil Rosethal, who died in the attack, told local journalists, according to reporting by the Pittsburgh Union Progress. “The death penalty must apply to vindicate justice and to offer some measure of deterrence from horrific hate crimes happening again and again.”
For the survivors and families of victims, the trial will likely be especially painful. Some told the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle that they intend to take time off work, delay a vacation or be away from family for an extended period of time to be present at the proceedings.
“I want to see justice happen, but at the same time, I hate to think about the families having to potentially see images of what happened and things of that sort,” Steve Weiss, who survived the attack, told the weekly Jewish newspaper. “I’m sure they have mental images, but to have to actually see photos of victims and things of that sort I think can really be difficult for them.”
One thing few people question is the shooter’s guilt, despite his plea of not guilty. He offered to plead guilty in 2019 in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table, but prosecutors, determined to pursue capital punishment for the crime, rejected the plea.
It was the same thing that had happened in the case of the man charged with killing nine Black worshippers in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015. But there, despite the rejected guilty plea, the trial took place a year and a half after the attack, and the shooter was sentenced to death. (In an illustration of the length of death penalty cases, his latest court proceeding happened in October, and he has not yet been executed.)
In contrast, the Pittsburgh trial is not starting until four and a half years after the shooting there. Part of the reason for the delay stems from the work of the defense team, which has pushed back the trial through various court filings. The alleged shooter’s lead attorney, Judy Clarke, has defended a series of high-profile attackers: the Unabomber, the attacker in the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics bombing and the Boston Marathon bomber, among others. According to Pittsburgh’s local CBS affiliate, her singular goal is to avoid the death penalty for her client.
But in many other ways, the parallels between the Charleston trial and this one are clear. Both concern shootings by alleged white supremacists in houses of worship, tragedies that have become gruesome symbols of a national rise in bigotry. In both, the culpability of the defendant was assumed before the trial began. Like the Pittsburgh defendant, the Charleston shooter has been lionized by white supremacists, including some who cited him as an inspiration for their own violent acts.
And in both cases, there is an understanding that a conviction does not heal the wounds opened by the shooter.
“This trial has produced no winners, only losers,” said the judge in the Charleston shooter’s trial, Richard Gergel, according to the New Yorker. “This proceeding cannot give the families what they truly want, the return of their loved ones.”
Still, some who are watching the Pittsburgh trial closely hope that it will bring new facts and connections to light. Amy Spitalnick, the executive director of Integrity First for America, a nonprofit that spearheaded a multimillion-dollar victory in a civil trial against the organizers of the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, hopes that the Pittsburgh trial illustrates the links among different white supremacist shootings — such as the attacks in El Paso, Texas; Christchurch, New Zealand; and at a synagogue in Poway, California.
Those attackers spouted similar conspiracy theories and referenced other recent violent attacks in their manifestos. Spitalnick said that the accused Pittsburgh shooter allegedly communicated with the organizers of the Charlottesville rally on the social network Gab, which is known as a haven for right-wing extremists.
“Trials like this can really be illustrative of how deep the poison of white supremacy and antisemitism goes,” she said. In the Charlottesville trial, she said, “The reams and reams of evidence… really helped pull back the curtain on what motivated the defendants, how they operated, the tools and the tactics of the movement, the conspiracy theories at its core.”
There’s also the possibility that, with the attack resurfacing the shooter’s motivations, and putting him back in the spotlight, it will act as an inspiration for other white supremacists. In the years following the synagogue shooting, Pittsburgh became a kind of pilgrimage site for the defendant’s admirers — leading to continued harassment of local Jews.
“We’re giving a platform to an individual who is a Jew hater, who wanted to kill all Jews,” Orsini said. “What does that spark in other like-minded people? We need to be very cognizant throughout this trial on what kind of chatter is going to be out there on the deep dark web, or even in open portals.”
In the face of concerns about retraumatization, Greenblatt said the ADL is preparing resources on how to discuss the trial with students and amid the Jewish community.
“To relive the horrors of, the grief of, the event — this thing being constantly in the news — it’s going to be hard to avoid, it’s going to be difficult and it could be grisly and upsetting,” Greenblatt said. “I would much prefer this trial didn’t happen — I would much prefer this crime never happened, I would much prefer that those people were all still with us today — but this is where we are.”
He added, “If there might be some ability to raise awareness among the non-Jewish population of what we’re facing, [that] would be of value.”
One potential challenge for American Jews as a whole, Spitalnick said, is that federal prosecutors don’t necessarily share the needs of Jews who will be following the proceedings. While the trial will conjure a mix of emotions for Jews locally and beyond, she said, prosecutors will be more focused on the nuts and bolts of what happened that day and the details of the accused attacker’s actions and motives.
“We’re going to probably spend a lot of time hearing from the prosecution about what motivated him, but it’s not through the lens of what we as Jews think about when we think about Jewish safety,” she said. “It’s through the lens of making the case that this guy did what he did motivated by this extremism and hate… It’s going to be very deliberate and tactical and precise, versus where we as American Jews have been thinking about this from a deeply personal, communal safety perspective.”
The deliberate and detailed work of prosecutors, however, may not be at cross purposes with the emotional needs of Jews, Orsini said. When the trial ends, he said, the establishment of Bowers’ guilt may itself prove to be transformative for how Jews relate to the tragedy, in Pittsburgh and beyond.
“The fact that this individual has not been fully brought to justice… and is not convicted yet of this mass shooting — in some way, yes, that closure and finality will be done at the end of this trial,” he said. “The community can kind of regroup and truly become resilient once this phase is over with.”
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The Cross-Continental Threat: Iran and Venezuela’s US-Defying Partnership
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro meets with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, Oct. 24, 2024. Photo: Miraflores Palace/Handout via REUTERS
Bad actors stick together. Few relationships prove that more clearly than Iran and Venezuela’s. The regimes’ close ties are on full display with Iran’s foreign ministry on November 15, threatening the United States with “dangerous consequences” over the US military buildup near Venezuela’s shores.
It’s not just talk: the Iran-Venezuela strategic partnership has matured into a robust, multi-dimensional alliance, impacting both regional security and US foreign policy calculations. Iran and Venezuela’s cooperation spans the social, political, diplomatic, economic, and military domains — and is directly influencing the US posture toward Venezuela, including the recent military buildup near its shores and targeted strikes on drug trafficking operations.
The Iran-Venezuela partnership began in the 1950s and has deepened substantially, especially after former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez declared the countries “brothers” in 2005.
Chávez signed a formal partnership in 2007 with then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The presidents developed a notably close personal and political relationship, highlighted by frequent state visits, public demonstrations of solidarity, and formal agreements spanning the economic, energy, and industrial sectors. Today, both countries maintain comprehensive diplomatic ties via their official embassies and frequent high-level exchanges. The partnership intensified under current Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and includes regular presidential meetings, official delegation visits, and joint commission sessions.
Iran has used this leverage to establish a robust foothold in Latin America, constructing a dense network involving both direct state-to-state links and the integration of proxy actors like Hezbollah. The bilateral relationship has been solidified by defense pacts, including a 20-year agreement signed in 2022, and joint manufacturing of Iranian drones and weapons on Venezuelan soil, including potential deployments of loitering munitions and jamming devices.
Economically, the alliance is built on mutual circumvention of Western sanctions. Iran and Venezuela have exchanged oil, gold, and infrastructure assistance, often using Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Hezbollah-linked front companies for money laundering and sanctions evasion. This economic cooperation enables the Maduro regime to survive by generating hard currency and illicit financial streams, while also facilitating transnational criminal activity including drug trafficking, with groups such as Cartel de los Soles and Tren de Aragua working with Hezbollah proxies to move drugs into US territory. The proceeds fuel both regimes and deepen their partnership and resilience to international pressure.
Simultaneously, Iran and Venezuela collaborate on energy trade that is inimical to US interests and enriches Russia. Iran not only exports refined crude oil to Venezuela to enrich itself, but also helps Venezuela build and fix energy infrastructure, increasing Venezuelan storage and refining capacity. In turn, that boosts Caracas’s appetite for Russian naphtha, a petroleum product that further enables Venezuela to dilute and export its oil, giving Russia a new and growing energy market for its exports to replace Europe and undermining Western sanctions.
As the US presence in the region grows, Venezuela and Iran have enhanced their military coordination. Recently, Venezuela requested additional Iranian drones, military electronics, and asymmetric warfare technologies. Iran provides technical personnel and expertise, optimizing Venezuela’s capacity for electronic warfare and irregular tactics, thereby enhancing deterrence and complicating US intervention plans.
Against this backdrop, the United States has deployed significant naval assets and possibly special operations elements off the coast of Venezuela, amounting to the largest regional buildup since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Officially, the United States has justified this surge to counter escalating drug trafficking, with at least 20 recent kinetic strikes on alleged narco-trafficking vessels departing Venezuelan ports. Many of these drug networks are tied to Venezuelan state actors and Iran-linked proxies. It would not be a stretch to assume that the Maduro regime is leveraging its Iranian connection as strategic insurance.
Venezuela provides Iran and Hezbollah with greater access to the Western Hemisphere. This expanding axis has regional security consequences beyond criminality and drug flows. Venezuelan threats toward neighbors like Guyana, coupled with the risk to Western energy interests and the broader use of Iranian technology, could draw the United States and its partners into more direct conflict. Furthermore, Iran’s strategy of exporting proxy warfare to the Western Hemisphere — mirroring tactics used in the Middle East — creates parallel dilemmas for US policy in both regions.
To counter these threats, enhanced sanctions enforcement against the Iranian–Venezuelan illicit oil trade, improved intelligence and interdiction of military shipments, and regional efforts to dismantle Hezbollah networks are essential. Disrupting the financial pipeline sustaining both the regime and its Iranian backers is critical for neutralizing their broader destabilizing potential.
Iran — along with its proxy Hezbollah — and Venezuela are force multipliers. All three work in concert to enrich the Iranian regime, strengthen Venezuela’s military and imperil regional stability, and facilitate transnational crime that threatens the US homeland. Washington should not allow this Venn diagram of threats to continue converging.
LTG Ray Palumbo, USA (ret.) is the former Deputy Commander of US Army Special Operations Command and a 2021 Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) Generals and Admirals Program participant. Yoni Tobin is a senior policy analyst at JINSA.
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Israel Moves to Admit Entire Bnei Menashe Community From India Amid Rising Ethnic Tensions
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu participates in the state memorial ceremony for the fallen of the Iron Swords War on Mount Herzl, Jerusalem, Oct. 16, 2025. Photo: Alex Kolomoisky/POOL/Pool via REUTERS
The Israeli government on Sunday approved a plan to revive long-stalled efforts to bring the entire Bnei Menashe Jewish community from northeast India to Israel amid rising ethnic tensions, seeking to reunite families and advance their integration into the country.
According to a statement from the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, the plan envisions the relocation of 1,200 members of the Bnei Menashe community by the end of 2026, with another 4,600 expected to follow by 2030.
Amid rising instability and ethnic violence in their home region in India, members of the ethnic community from the northeastern states of Mizoram and Manipur are seeking to rebuild their lives through reintegration into Israeli society.
As part of government efforts to repopulate the northern part of the country, which was heavily affected by last year’s war with the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, the new immigrants are expected to settle in Nof HaGalil and other northern cities after thousands of residents were forced to flee.
“I welcome the important and Zionist decision adopted today by the government, which will bring about an additional wave of immigration of the Bnei Menashe community to the Land of Israel,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement.
“The new immigrants will settle in the north of the country, as part of the government’s policy to strengthen and develop the North and the Galilee,” the Israeli leader continued.
In coordination with the Indian government, the plan was initiated by Netanyahu and Aliyah and Integration Minister Ofir Sofer, with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Minister Zeev Elkin, who oversees the Northern Rehabilitation Directorate, also involved in the decision.
“This wave of immigration joins the blessed immigration we have seen over the past two years from many Jewish communities around the world — an immigration that strengthens the resilience, solidarity, and renewal of the State of Israel,” Sofer said in a statement.
In the past two decades, approximately 4,000 members of the community have made aliyah to Israel under previous government efforts, with authorities now moving to complete the community’s settlement in the Jewish state.
Under this initiative, the government will provide initial financial support, Hebrew language instruction, job guidance, temporary housing, and social programs to help newcomers settle, allocating approximately $27.4 million for the first phase.
Next week, an Israeli delegation will travel to India, joined by officials from the Chief Rabbinate, Conversion Authority, Aliyah and Integration Ministry, Population and Immigration Authority, Foreign Ministry, and the Jewish Agency, to evaluate the community members’ eligibility under a 2007 decision allowing groups to enter Israel for conversion and naturalization purposes.
After receiving approval from Israel’s Chief Rabbi and the president of the Great Rabbinical Court, the government confirmed that the new immigrants will enter on A/5 visas, allowing them to undergo conversion and ultimately gain Israeli citizenship.
Identified as descendants of the biblical tribe of Manasseh, one of Israel’s “lost tribes,” the Bnei Menashe largely practiced Christianity before converting to Judaism and gaining recognition from Israel’s Chief Rabbinate.
Until 2005, Israel did not formally endorse Bnei Menashe immigration, when the then-Sephardi Chief Rabbi officially recognized the community as descendants of one of Israel’s lost tribes.
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What does Mamdani’s response to synagogue protests mean for Jews? No one will like the answer.
New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s ambivalent response to last week’s protests against an Israeli immigration event at an Upper East Side synagogue pleased no one. But his words were meaningful precisely because they were so frustrating. They revealed something essential about not just Mamdani’s politics, but about the fabric of New York Jewish life today.
When Park East Synagogue hosted an event with Nefesh B’Nefesh, a nonprofit that facilitates immigration to Israel, last Wednesday, protesters outside chanted slogans like “death to the IDF” and “globalize the intifada.” The event’s attendees said the protest made them feel unsafe. But Mamdani did not respond with either full-throated endorsement or condemnation, as many on both sides of the issue wanted him to. Instead, his spokesperson issued a statement condemning “the language used at last night’s protest,”” and specifically reiterating his belief that “every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation.”
Yet in the same statement, Mamdani also argued that “sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.” Specifically, his team said he was referring to the fact that Nefesh B’Nefesh has ties to Israel settlement activity in the West Bank.
Mamdani’s ambivalent response to the protests represent an attempt to knit together two competing imperatives, which are not easily reconciled.
As the mayor of a city with political activists on multiple sides of contentious issues, he wants to protect the right to protest. And he surely shares some of the protesters’ criticisms of Israeli settlement activity. American immigrants to Israel are more likely than other Jewish immigrants to move to West Bank settlements; Mamdani is making the point, in this context, that an event like the one at Park East can carry clear geopolitical implications.
Yet at the same time, Mamdani, who has committed to increasing funding for hate crime prevention by 800% and pledged “to root the scourge of antisemitism out of our city,” knows how problematic it is that protesters used threatening language in front of a house of worship. (On Friday, Mamdani told Rabbi Marc Schneier, son of Park East’s rabbi and a vocal critic of Mamdani’s, that he’d consider a pitch for legislation prohibiting protests outside houses of worship.) His insistence that no one should feel intimidated entering a synagogue is not merely rhetorical, but represents a genuine commitment to religious freedom, to public safety, and to basic respect.
These two impulses — protecting the right to protest, and safeguarding houses of worship — pull in different directions. They do not lend themselves to a tidy, one-line slogan. Yet Mamdani’s ambivalence is not just a political calculation; it is an expression of something deeply Jewish about New York City.
The city’s Jewish community — the largest of any city on earth — is not monolithic. Some New York Jews view Zionism as foundational to their identities, as a spiritual and cultural demand that goes beyond mere politics. Others see Zionism as a fundamentally political ideology, one to be critiqued or resisted, especially when tied to the realities of the occupation of the West Bank.
These are not just academic debates. They mark how Jewish people across the city — and the country — build meaning, pray, mourn and hope.
New York City embodies Jewish pluralism. It is where so many different strains of Jewish identity cross paths: Orthodox, Reform, secular; Zionist and anti-Zionist; immigrant Jews, native-born Jews. And it is also a city where immigrants from all around the world live together in relative peace, where countless religions worship together, where just about any kind of food on earth can be sampled.
With his nuanced response, Mamdani is showing that he is trying to represent that city. He is not offering reassurance to one side by abandoning the other; instead, he is straining to hold multiple truths at once.
Navigating a city of such profound pluralism is necessarily messy. And for many people, that very messiness will be unsatisfying. To critics, Mamdani’s statements may feel evasive, insufficient or morally suspect. Some argue he should never have questioned the legitimacy of a Jewish gathering about making aliyah. Others contend he should never have condemned the slogan “globalize the intifada” in the first place.
But sometimes, leadership over this diverse metropolis means recognizing that people will feel uncomforable, and still forging a space where dissent and belonging have to coexist, even if uneasily.
Mamdani must be pressed to clarify what concrete steps he will take to ensure that places of worship are protected from intimidation. His words to Schneier, and the apology that police commissioner Jessica Tisch — who will retain her role under Mamdani — offered to the synagogue are steps in the right direction.
And Mamdani must engage more deeply with Jewish communities who feel their identity and safety were undermined by this incident. Theirs are legitimate and necessary demands.
But if we reduce this episode to a clear binary, in which Mamdani is seen as either supporting the protesters or the Jewish community , we erase a crucial reality. Part of what makes political life in New York City, and Jewish life in New York City, so vibrant is that both are too complex to allow for neat explanations.
And at a time when the reigning political culture wants to force people into simple black-and-white boxes, we need to make more space for that ambivalence.
Because in the end, Mamdani’s response is not a statement of political convenience. It is a mirror of the divisions and tensions that exist within ourselves and our communities. It reflects back to us a city where protest and prayer, dissent and belonging, identity and ideology coexist.
That tension may be painful. But while the struggle to speak honestly across differences may be messy, it is also indispensable.
If we want leaders who represent all of us, we might have to live with their ambivalence, and, in so doing, accept that our community is stronger when its contradictions are acknowledged and not erased.
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