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911 dispatcher and rabbi take the stand on first day of Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial
PITTSBURGH (JTA) — When Shannon Basa-Sabol was asked to recount the events of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in court on Tuesday, what stood out was her memory of the death of Bernice Simon.
Basa-Sabol, a 911 dispatcher, took the stand for close to an hour, describing the ins and outs of her job.
But when the crowded courtroom heard a recording of Simon’s 911 call from the Tree of Life Congregation, Basa-Sabol paused and began to sniffle. She described telling Simon to stay quiet, then hearing multiple gunshots over the phone.
“Are you still with me?” Basa-Sabol said on the recording of the call. “Bernice, can you hear me?”
Speaking on the witness stand on Tuesday, Basa-Sabol said she had realized Simon no longer had “sufficient breathing for life.”
“I was hearing her being shot,” she said.
Basa-Sabol was the first witness in the trial of Robert Bowers, the man accused of murdering 11 Jews in their Pittsburgh synagogue on Oct. 27, 2018. For months, survivors, relatives of victims and the Jewish community of Pittsburgh have anticipated the trial, which began Tuesday, hoping for closure while worrying that the proceedings would retraumatize people, even as no one doubted the culpability of the accused.
As the prosecution and defense gave their opening statements, it was clear that the trial would air graphic details from the attack. But while lawyers and witnesses recounted the events of the day, the courthouse was also the scene of embraces, tears of comfort, discussions of Jewish tradition and even laughter as those who lived through the tragedy connected with and supported one another.
Defendants’ families were in the courtroom and monitoring via videolink elsewhere in the Joseph Weis Federal Courthouse in downtown Pittsburgh. Social workers and psychologists were on hand to help them through the proceedings. Reporters were asked not to conduct interviews in the building.
At a break, Tim Matson, a policeman injured in an exchange of fire with the suspect, sought out Andrea Wedner, who was shot and whose mother, Rose Mallinger, was killed. They hugged.
Maggie Feinstein, the director of the 10/27 Healing Partnership, which provides post-traumatic therapy for the community, watched closely over the nine or so family members in the courtroom, and handed them tissues.
“Today marked the beginning of a very difficult and painful trial that is the direct result of an incredibly terrible action by one person,” Feinstein wrote in an email after the court was adjourned. “It represented an important step in the process of justice, because these court proceedings are a way for our society to take up the burden of remembering and telling the truth about what happened on October 27, 2018.”
On the witness stand, Jeffrey Myers, the rabbi of Tree of Life Congregation, cried as he described how he recited the Shema, thinking he was about to die.
“I thought about the history of my people, how we’ve been persecuted and hunted and slaughtered for centuries,” he said. “And about how all of them must have felt in the moments before their death, and what they did was recite Deuteronomy, chapter 6, verse 4, ‘Hear, O, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”
The defendant is accused of murdering 11 people and wounding six at three congregations that met in the same building — Tree of Life, Or L’Simcha and Dor Hadash. He faces 63 charges, 22 of which are death penalty charges that relate specifically to allegations that he targeted Jews: 11 counts of obstruction in free exercise of religious belief resulting in death, and 11 counts of hate crimes resulting in death. Prosecutors previously rejected a guilty plea so that they could pursue the death penalty — a punishment that families of victims and congregational leaders have debated.
Jury selection began last month and took three weeks, culminating in the selection of 18 jurors and alternates — 11 men and seven women.
In their opening statements, prosecutors and defense lawyers alike warned that the trial would revisit the attack in horrific detail. Judge Robert Colville emphasized the presumption of innocence, telling the jury that Bowers had a “clean slate” unless the prosecution was able to persuade them otherwise.
He warned jurors to avoid reading about the case in the media, and not to discuss it with friends or even with each other. And he added what he acknowledged was a recent and novel caution: “Persons, entities or even foreign governments may seek to manipulate your opinions,” instructing them not to click through if they saw messages relating to the trial pooping up on their computer.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Song Soo’s 31-minute statement, delivered in a steady tone that only occasionally fluttered with emotion, set forth her case in vivid terms: A community that had come together for decades in love and caring for each other, and for Jewish tradition, was shattered by a gunman determined to murder Jews.
“In the Tree of Life synagogue, the words ‘Tree of Life’ are written in Hebrew high above the bookstand that holds the Torah, the holiest book in the Jewish faith,” she said. “The Tree of Life synagogue had anchored the corner of Wilkins and Shady for decades. As they did every Saturday men and women of the Jewish faith made their way to the synagogue to observe Shabbat.”
She noted that the Torah portion that week, Vayera, “was from the Book of Genesis and was about welcoming strangers.” She went on to describe the warmth of those who were killed and dwelled on Cecil and David Rosenthal, men in their 50s with developmental disabilities who loved to greet congregants.
“In many ways, they were like children, childlike because of their mental disabilities, trusting and pure,” Soo said, adding that fellow congregants would help them “tie a shoe lace, tuck in a shirt, find a page in a prayer book.”
“That morning David Rosenthal stood at the front of the chapel helping to lead the opening prayer” he had memorized, she said. “His devotion to the faith made up for the fact that he could not actually read the prayer book.”
Then, she described the carnage, referring to the defendant’s alleged statements of hate on Gab, a social media platform friendly to right-wing extremists. He allegedly condemned HIAS, the Jewish refugee aid group that partnered with Dor Hadash.
“That same morning the defendant was making his own preparations to destroy, to kill and defile,” Soo said. “He hated Jews, he called them ‘the children of Satan … the most bloodthirsty, evil demons who ever walked the face of the earth.’”
She read out the Gab entry Bowers allegedly posted while he was parked outside the synagogue complex. “HIAS likes to bring in invaders that like to kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch our people get slaughtered, screw your optics, I’m going in.”
“And the defendant did go in,” Soo said. She described some of the congregants’ deaths in detail, and concluded by reading out the 11 names of the murdered: Cecil and David Rosenthal, couple Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Rose Malinger, Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Jerry Rabinowitz, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger.
The defendant, clad in a green sweater over an open-collared light blue shirt, stared ahead and scribbled notes. He never looked at Soo, who spoke at a podium to his right.
In her opening statement, Bowers’ lead attorney, Judy Clarke, said the defense would not contest the events, or Bowers’ responsibility for them. Clarke is known as “the attorney for the damned” for her determination to keep her clients from execution. She has defended the Unabomber, the Boston Marathon bomber and one of the conspirators who planned the 9/11 attacks.
“This senseless act, the loss and devastation, were caused by Robert Bowers,” she said. “There is no disagreement, there is no dispute and there will be no doubt as to who shot the 11 congregants. On Oct. 27, 2018, Robert Bowers, the man seated at that table, loaded with ammunition and firearms entered the synagogue.”
Clarke suggested that her defense would focus on whether the defendant’s motives met the standards required by the government’s charges, particularly regarding the 22 death penalty charges.
“We can at least do our best to uphold the rule of law by figuring out, to the best of our ability, what were Mr. Bowers’ motives and intent,” she said. She argued that her client’s statements, which focused on his deluded belief that Jews were intent on replacing white people, do not make clear that his intent met the standards enshrined in federal law.
“These statements are outrageous,” she said. “The fact that they were made raises more questions than they may answer.”
Carol Janssen, another employee from a 911 call center, testified, and in the afternoon, for a number of hours, Eric Olshan, a Jewish U.S. Attorney, asked Myers to guide the jurors through a tour of a physical scale model of the synagogue that was brought into the courtroom. Myers described the building, its congregations and the fundamentals of Judaism to an attentive jury.
Shabbat ends “when three stars are in the sky,” said Myers, who wore a black suit and white kippah and delivered his testimony in measured tones. He wore a kippah because “it reminds me that I’m in God’s presence wherever I go.”
Myers occasionally smiled at the jury when he cracked a joke, eliciting laughter, as when he recalled what a SWAT team advised him when they reached him in the synagogue: “Rabbi, run your ass off.”
And, as the defendant stared at him, Myers memorialized his murdered congregants, affectionately recalling their self-appointed roles during Sabbath services. He remembered one of the victims, Cecil Rosenthal, who always beat him to the synagogue so he could be in place to greet all comers. “I would say to him jokingly, ‘Cecil did you sleep here again?’”
David Rosenthal, he said, sang prayers “loudly,” while Rose Mallinger routinely led the prayer for peace, “that all people can live together in freedom and peace.”
As he recalled the moments of the shooting, Myers said, he felt he would not be angry at God, “because it was not God who did this. I was prepared to meet my fate.” He sobbed.
The scheduled Torah reading from Genesis 12, he said, narrates how Abraham welcomes three strangers.
“I was going to talk about the Jewish imperative to welcome all guests whoever they may be,” he said. “But I never gave that sermon.”
The defense declined to cross-examine the rabbi.
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UNRWA in Gaza Has Been Replaced; It’s Time to Shutter the Agency
Palestinians pass by the gate of an UNRWA-run school in Nablus in the West Bank. Photo: Reuters/Abed Omar Qusini.
The UN Relief and Works Agency — or UNRWA — in Gaza has been replaced by over a dozen other aid organizations. UNRWA’s decades-long monopoly on aid and services has finally been broken, presenting a rare opportunity for deradicalization and, eventually, peace.
What’s more, the international community now has a model for how to replace UNRWA everywhere it operates, not just in Gaza.
The UN Security Council approved President Donald Trump’s proposal to build a “Board of Peace” on November 17 that will oversee the deradicalization of Gaza and the dismantlement of Hamas’ terror state. But Trump’s vision will not succeed until UNRWA is shuttered.
UNRWA was created with a temporary mandate after Israel’s 1947-1948 War of Independence to provide aid and services to approximately 750,000 Palestinian Arabs displaced by the war.
Over the past 75 years, UNRWA’s mandate has ballooned. Not only does UNRWA continue to provide a myriad of services in the jurisdictions where Arab refugees from 1948 immigrated, but refugee status has been passed from generation to generation. As a result, what was a relatively small refugee population in 1948 (compared to other 20th century refugee populations) is today a large and growing 21st century refugee population with no end in sight. UNRWA counts 5.9 million Palestinian refugees and has an annual budget of over a billion and half dollars.
UNRWA schools teach the belief that Palestinian refugees and their millions of descendants would all return to the modern state of Israel — an outcome that would immediately erase Israel’s Jewish majority.
The focus on “return,” coupled with the well-documented glorification of terror and incitement — including arithmetic problems involving numbers of Palestinian “martyrs,” antisemitic tropes, and naming schools and soccer fields after suicide bombers — has produced generations of indoctrinated and radicalized Palestinian children.
UNRWA staff participated in the horrors of October 7, praised the violence on social media, and Israeli hostages were held captive in UNRWA facilities for months during the war.
Once Israel exposed the extent of UNRWA’s involvement in terror, Israel’s Knesset passed legislation in October 2024 to end coordination with UNRWA and to rescind the special privileges and immunities that Israel granted the organization. Israel’s actions made it difficult for UNRWA — which had used the Jewish State as its base of operations for decades — to continue delivering its services.
UNRWA advocates warned that Israel’s new law would have catastrophic consequences. It didn’t.
Israel’s justified decision to cease cooperating with UNRWA demonstrated quickly that other organizations and state actors — without the proclivity towards terror — were willing and able to step in.
UNRWA candidly describes itself as a quasi-state actor. This is true. For decades, UNRWA in Gaza provided services — like trash collection, education, and health clinics — that should be the responsibility of the state. In Gaza, this meant that Hamas outsourced its governmental obligations to UNRWA — with the international community picking up the bill — financially freeing Hamas terrorists to hoard weapons and build a terror fortress underneath Gaza.
Before October 7, UNRWA was the second biggest employer in Gaza and provided basic services like sanitation, health, and education to over a million people. After Hamas launched the war, UNRWA — swiftly announcing that it was not the terror organization’s responsibility to care for distressed Gazan civilians — went into high gear, taking over additional aid distribution functions.
In January 2025, when Trump negotiated the first ceasefire between Israel and Gaza, the UN established a new initiative with a dedicated online tracker to monitor aid entering Gaza. The tracker reports that UNRWA has not brought any aid into Gaza since January.
According to an Israeli official familiar with aid delivery in Gaza, the basic services performed by UNRWA before and during the first year of the war are now performed by other actors in the enclave. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is managing most of the waste management in the enclave. Fuel distribution is managed by the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS). The World Central Kitchen has been effective at delivering food alongside the World Food Program (WFP), which is also handling the broader logistics function for aid delivery in Gaza — a function WFP performs worldwide. UNICEF has taken a larger role in children-related humanitarian responses, and the World Health Organization (WHO) is providing medical aid to field clinics and hospitals.
This is how the rest of the world manages humanitarian crises caused by wars and natural disasters, and the correct way to manage the crisis in Gaza: with organizations that have a temporary mandate to deliver aid. Once the crisis has passed, those services should once again be the responsibility of the state.
Funding UNRWA — a self-described quasi-state — for over three quarters of a century to run services that should be the responsibility of a state government has been a calamity for Gaza and the region.
US taxpayers have historically been UNRWA’s largest donor, and have contributed over seven billion dollars to the UN agency since its creation. Congress has voiced consistent but limited support for ending UNRWA funding, and both Presidents Trump and Biden previously cut taxpayer dollars to the UN agency.
UNRWA supporters — including UNRWA’s US organization that lobbies Washington for support and funding — railed against attempts to cut funding, arguing that “UNRWA is irreplaceable,” a slogan often employed by UNRWA staff and advocates.
The reality is that UNRWA in Gaza has already been replaced.
Sadly, UNRWA’s multi-generation radicalization campaign in Gaza is not unique. The same brainwashing is happening wherever UNRWA operates, breeding terrorists and terror sympathizers across the region.
The UN and the international community can use the Gaza model to replace UNRWA’s corrosive monopoly on aid to Palestinians across the region.
The Trump administration now has an opportunity to wield its influence with other major UNRWA donors — namely the EU, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Canada, and Japan — to redirect their UNRWA funding to relief organizations that can deliver the much-needed aid and services without the radicalizing agenda. This critical reform should be implemented if the world truly wants to bring about peace.
Enia Krivine is the senior director of the Israel Program and the National Security Network at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow her on X @EKrivine.
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In New York City, Jews Are Accused of Breaking ‘International Law’ for Supporting Israel’s Existence
New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference at the Unisphere in the Queens borough of New York City, US, Nov. 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kylie Cooper
Last month, New York City’s Park East synagogue hosted a talk on matters of American Jewish interest, including immigration to Israel.
Outside, a crowd of protesters raged against the event’s Jewish participants, including cries of “we need to make them scared,” “f—king Jewish pricks,” and “globalize the intifada” (a phrase the United States Congress officially recognizes as a call for violence against the Jewish people).
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s response has been described by some Jewish leaders as “ambivalent” or “hollow.”
It was not ambivalent, and it was not hollow.
Mamdani’s statement was outright terrifying:
The Mayor-elect has discouraged the language used at last night’s protest and will continue to do so … he believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation, and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”
(Spokesperson for Mayor-elect Mamdani, November 20, 2025. Emphasis added)
International law?
A lecture at a synagogue violated international law?
To be clear, in addition to being absolutely protected by America’s First Amendment, a talk about Jewish immigration at a synagogue does not even remotely violate any international law, convention, or treaty.
It is well known that the Mayor-elect promised to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he ever visit New York City, supposedly for reasons of “international law.” Ironically, doing so would actually violate both US Federal law as well as several of the very international laws Mamdani claims to uphold — a legal topic I’ve previously discussed in depth.
Yet in this case, the soon-to-be mayor of New York City was not accusing a foreign leader of war crimes: he was accusing Jews.
Not Israeli leaders — Jews. American Jews. New York Jews.
For attending a talk at a synagogue.
Let that sink in for a minute.
While you do, let’s recall Amsterdam, November 2024: the local Muslim population carried out an actual, modern day pogrom against visiting Israeli soccer fans, literally hunting them through the city streets. For hours, the Dutch police were nowhere to be found.
It’s important to note that Amsterdam’s city government speaks about Israel, and treats its local Jews, in a manner starkly similar to Mamdani.
Just one example: Amsterdam police have the right to refuse assignments on moral grounds. One of the assignments police frequently refuse is protecting Jewish sites, including Holland’s National Holocaust Museum. On “moral grounds.” And with the legal support of the government.
The New York City police will soon be under the command of a mayor who accuses American Jews of war crimes. In a city where violent antisemitic attacks have already reached shocking levels, the police are about to become unreliable at best, and perhaps even hostile.
Matters under the mayor’s direct authority, such as police protection, are only the beginning. Dozens of city agencies could be next.
For example, Mamdani has promised to cut New York City’s relationship with Israel’s Technion University via Cornell University. The mayor does not directly control this decision, but he does have the power to appoint members of the board of management of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, which can then force Cornell into decisions against the partnership.
In the coming years, New York City will see dozens of other political appointments, some visible and others subtle, and they will impact every aspect of the City’s culture, education, and safety, for years to come.
So what can we do about it?
To answer that question, one must first understand the scope of the problem.
At a 2001 conference in Durban, South Africa, the Palestinian Authority and its various allies (including Qatar and Iran) launched what later became known as the “Diplomatic Intifada.” Their target was the generation just being born: today’s 18-24 year old cohort. Their timeframe was decades, and their budget was essentially unlimited.
I saw this tsunami of antisemitism fast approaching during the Gaza war in 2009, and I moved to Israel shortly after. But Aliyah is not a viable or attractive option for everyone. I have dedicated my career to doing everything I can to make a meaningful change on an appropriately large scale.
For your part, you can do these things: Be utterly committed to truth at any cost and speak without compromise.
Some Jewish leaders irresponsibly called Mamdani’s statement “ambivalent” or “hollow” instead of what it was: terrifying and malicious. If uncompromising honesty endangers your job, get a new one. If it endangers your place in your community, find a new community. And if it endangers your safety — move. Yes, this takes courage, maybe even sacrifice. Yes, this is blunt, hard, and perhaps even costly advice. Yet the cost of silence will ultimately be far greater. (Remember 1938?)
Raise your children (or your future children) to understand and appreciate the importance of Israel, of Judaism, and of basic respect for truth itself. Teach them to be strong, unafraid, and true to their values. Learning starts at home, values start at home, and it all starts early.
Daniel Pomerantz is the CEO of RealityCheck, an organization dedicated to deepening public conversation through robust research studies and public speaking.
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At My School and Others, Students for Justice in Palestine Continues to Erase History
Rutgers University students holding an anti-Zionist demonstration on March 19, 2024. Photo: USA Today Network via Reuters Connect
On the two-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, the University of Florida’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) hosted a vigil directly in front of our school’s library to “honor the martyrs,” where they continued to promote the genocide libel.
I asked them, “Why do this on the anniversary of the 10/7 massacre?” Almost mindlessly, as if they were still taking cues from a toolkit, they dodged the question and centered their preferred victims with: “Do you know how many Palestinians were killed on October 7th?”
There was no mention of the Nova festival or the kibbutzim. No condolences for the 1,200 innocent people murdered or the 251 taken hostage. No acknowledgment that this attack, perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists, was and still is widely supported in Palestinian society. SJP students were more interested in legitimizing their heroes by comparing Hamas to the Black Panther Party.
The US Civil Rights movement achieved its goals through nonviolent protests like sit-ins and boycotts, not stabbing attacks, blowing up public places, or calling for the annihilation of American citizens. Hamas was founded with the express goal of eradicating Israel and murdering Jews.
Since the IDF didn’t enter the war that SJP claims has been a “genocide” until 20 days later, why pick 10/7 to hold the vigil? It seems like they did so to invalidate Jewish mourning and bolster Hamas propaganda.
This kind of narrative erasure is not new for the Palestinian National Movement.
Nakba Day is held on May 15, supposedly to mark the “catastrophe” of Israel’s creation, and the embarrassment of losing the 1948 war (which they started). But on May 15, 1948, the refugee crisis that Palestinians claim to mourn hadn’t even begun. It was the day after Israel announced its independence, when five surrounding Arab armies invaded, along with help from the local population (now known as the Palestinians). Yasser Arafat chose this day for the same reason SJP chose 10/7, to overtake Jewish memory in public discourse.
Clearly, they don’t want to convince anyone based on the merits of their position. It appears they want to coerce the public into agreeing with them, which is why they responded to my question the way they did.
The histories of Palestinians and Jews are intertwined, and it is dangerous to distort part of history to fit one’s agenda. We must hold ourselves to the same standard, and acknowledge the suffering of Palestinians throughout the history of this conflict, but that doesn’t mean blaming Israel for everything. Doing so is dangerous, especially towards the Jewish students at the University of Florida (UF), which comprise nearly 20% of the undergraduate population.
There is a future in which Jewish and Palestinian voices can work together, but only when SJP is open to hearing other perspectives and participates in an actual campus dialogue. I urge members of SJP to think critically about the accusatory messages they are spreading. By spreading this propaganda, it tarnishes innocent Jewish and Zionist students, distorts truth, and makes reconciliation more difficult.
I also encourage every student to conduct their own research, and not get caught in this cycle of misinformation. By engaging effectively with both SJP and pro-Israel organizations, and doing research for themselves, a safer and more educated campus is possible.
When the peace deal was brokered and the hostages were finally returned home, I hoped to see SJP celebrating alongside their Jewish peers. It didn’t happen — but it is only when we come together to celebrate these victories and remember our shared history that we can end this cycle of violence.
David Caine is a CAMERA fellow and second-year journalism student at the University of Florida.