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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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In Trump’s ‘Donroe Doctrine,’ echoes of Nazi justifications for aggression
When Adolf Hitler was justifying German aggression, he invoked Lebensraum — the claim that a superior nation had the right to expand into neighboring territories to secure the resources it needed. For Donald Trump, whose “Donroe Doctrine” seems to have much in common with the idea of Lebensraum, the prizes are Venezuelan crude, Greenland’s mineral wealth, and uncontested hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.
During the first year of Trump’s second term, the 47th president of the United States attempted his own version of what Germans call Gleichschaltung — the Nazis’ forced alignment of institutions and society with Hitler’s will. Trump moved to bend the federal bureaucracy, the intelligence services, the military chain of command, and the civil service into a single, obedient apparatus.
But unlike Hitler in 1933, Trump has run into real limits at home: courts that won’t bend, Democratic-led states that won’t yield, a resistance that keeps gathering strength, weak polling, and a MAGA movement that’s beginning to splinter. And so, he has shifted his gaze to the outside world — a pivot laid bare in Stephen Miller’s volcanic interview with Jake Tapper on CNN and in Trump’s own Oval Office conversation with New York Times reporters.
Sounding a bit like Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s right-hand man, Trump’s deputy chief of staff told Tapper, “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
Two days after Miller’s bellicose comments, Trump echoed the same worldview in his interview with The Times: international law is whatever the United States — meaning he — decides it is.
“I don’t need international law,” he said. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”
Regarding his push for Greenland to become part of the U.S., Trump stated, “Ownership is very important. Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.’’
There are echoes here of Hitler, who wrote in Mein Kampf that “the stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker.” In multiple speeches, Hitler made clear that the state’s own interests were supreme and that international law could be brushed aside.
Trump’s foreign policy for the Western Hemisphere comes right out of the authoritarian’s playbook for domination — threats of invasion, extortion, and exploitation of a country’s weaknesses to force that country to bend to the bullying country’s will.
When it comes to Venezuela, Trump, Miller, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are counting on Delcy Rodríguez, interim leader after Trump’s kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, to cooperate with the Trump administration in reviving Venezuela’s oil industry — with oil-sales money going not just to America, but supposedly also to the Venezuelan people.
Trump said that Venezuela “will be turning over” between 30 and 50 million barrels of sanctioned oil to the U.S. “This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!” he declared in a Jan. 6 social media post.
“That money,” Rubio told reporters, “will then be handled in such a way that we will control how it is disbursed in a way that benefits the Venezuelan people, not corruption, not the regime, so we have a lot of leverage to move on the stabilization front.”
The American president has not hidden the fact that his motive all along has been to get control of Venezuela’s oil reserves. Only recently, and mostly as an afterthought, has Trump talked about eventually allowing new elections in Venezuela.
In Trump’s mind, at least, he is now dictator of Venezuela.
The Trump–Rubio game plan for Venezuela, as developed so far, hinges on U.S. control of Venezuelan oil as the lever for everything else: a Washington-run “stabilization” period in which the United States sells Venezuela’s crude, controls the revenue, and dictates the terms of economic reopening; a caretaker role for Delcy Rodríguez and the remaining bureaucracy to keep order and carry out U.S. directives; and, somewhere down the line, a vague promise of elections once the country has been reshaped to Washington’s liking.
But how realistic is this plan?
History offers plenty of warnings about how often great-power fantasies collide with the realities of occupation.
When Nazi Germany invaded Norway in 1940, one of its aims was to control Scandinavian resources — including Swedish iron ore and Norwegian shipping routes. Norwegian fascist Vidkun Quisling proclaimed himself head of the government, becoming a puppet of Berlin.
But Quisling never delivered the stability Berlin expected. His government was despised, resistance spread, and the occupation became far more volatile and costly than the Germans had planned. After the war, those who had collaborated with the Nazis paid dearly. Thousands of Norwegians were convicted and 25 — including Vidkun Quisling — were executed.
Venezuela is not Norway. But the assumption that a hand-picked local leader will quietly manage a country whose sovereignty has just been shattered is a dangerous one. Venezuela is thick with armed actors who may see cooperation with Washington as betrayal — heavily armed pro-government paramilitary groups called the colectivos, splintering factions of the military, and a constellation of irregular forces operating along the borders.
For the moment, Trump insists no American boots will be needed on the ground. But that could change quickly, especially if U.S. companies establish a significant presence at Venezuelan oil facilities and an insurgency threatens to topple what many Venezuelans may view as a collaborationist regime in Caracas.
In his interview with The New York Times, Trump said it could take years before Venezuela becomes the stable, petroleum powerhouse he envisions. Which means that U.S. control of Venezuela — however the White House chooses to describe it — will pass to whoever succeeds him as president.
Whatever the outcome of Trump’s Venezuela power grab, the troubles it will unlease may well persist far into the future. And if Trump continues to rattle sabers over Greenland, the consequences could be even direr, raising the specter of Denmark’s NATO allies mobilizing to defend the island against the ambitions of an American president.
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The Holocaust Torah that survived a Mississippi synagogue fire was brought there by the state’s only survivor
When firefighters cleared Beth Israel Synagogue after an arson attack this month, the library floor was slick with water and ash. Prayer books lay swollen and blackened. Smoke clung to the sanctuary walls.
Two Torah scrolls burned. A third Torah did not.
That Torah, displayed for decades in a glass case near the front of the synagogue, survived unscathed. Its presence at Beth Israel was not incidental. It was brought to Mississippi by Gilbert Metz, the state’s only concentration camp survivor — a man who retrieved it from Europe and brought it to the American South. It, too, had survived the Nazis.
“The million dollar question is: How in the hell did he get to Mississippi?” his grandson, Joseph Metz, recalled in an interview on Tuesday.
From Auschwitz to Jackson
Gilbert Metz was born in 1929 in Alsace-Lorraine, France. At 13, the family was forced into hiding. When people fled Nazi Germany, they often gathered silver or jewelry. Gilbert’s mom packed her prayer books and Rashi commentary instead. She had taught her son Hebrew and Talmud, and she refused to leave those books behind.
They snuck back and forth to their summer home in northeastern France, but were eventually captured by the Nazis and sent to an internment camp. From there, a 14-year-old Metz and his family were sent to Auschwitz. His mother and 10-year-old sister were murdered in the gas chambers shortly after their arrival. His father later met the same fate.
Metz survived multiple concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau, and was liberated by American troops in April 1945. He was eventually bar mitzvahed after the Holocaust at 16, a delayed rite marking a childhood interrupted and then resumed.
Relatives who had settled in Mississippi sponsored Metz to come to the United States. He finished high school in Natchez, attended Tulane University, and served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War — at one point having to reapply for citizenship after being deployed overseas.
He eventually moved to Jackson, where he raised a family and became a traveling salesman before co-founding Metz Industries, a wholesale lingerie business that sold brassieres, hosiery and feather boas to stores across the region — the work of an ordinary American life rebuilt mile by mile. He and his wife, Louise, were married for more than 50 years.
Bringing the Torah to Mississippi
In 1992, Robert Berman, a longtime congregant and former Beth Israel president, heard about an international effort to restore and redistribute scrolls damaged, desecrated or orphaned during the Holocaust. He and his sisters, Joan and Brenda, along with their families donated the funds to acquire one. Shul leaders decided there was only one person who should retrieve it.
Metz and his son, Lawson, traveled to London to bring the Torah back to Jackson. At a restoration warehouse, he was shown piles of scrolls — some burned, some torn, some riddled with bullet holes — many painstakingly pieced together from fragments. They chose a Torah rescued from Prague and took turns carrying it on their laps during the international flight.
Other Torahs rescued from the Holocaust made similar southern journeys, to congregations in Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Joseph Metz said his grandfather felt honored to be the one chosen from Beth Israel to collect the Torah, and that bringing it to Mississippi was closure for him — a full-circle moment.
A welcoming committee from the shul — including Berman, the rabbi and others — greeted the Metzs and the Torah at Jackson’s airport. “They sang prayers,” recalled Berman, now 94.
Beth Israel held a dedication ceremony at the synagogue and the Torah was installed in a glass case near the front doors, where it remained for decades. The words “Memory sustains humanity” is etched across the top of the case. Next to it hangs a photograph of Metz as an adult wearing the yellow star he was forced to wear under Nazi rule.
The scroll is displayed unfurled to a chapter in Exodus that comes after the Red Sea has closed behind the fleeing Israelites and before the Ten Commandments are given — a narrow span of time when survival has been achieved but meaning has not yet arrived. The scroll has remained that way for years, suspended between catastrophe and covenant.
“The congregation understood exactly whose story that Torah represented,” said Stuart Rockoff, a historian and longtime member of the 165-year-old Beth Israel. “This was a synagogue with one Holocaust survivor.”
Behind its building, Beth Israel also maintains a Holocaust memorial garden, dedicated to Metz and to Gus Waterman Herrman, a U.S. Army officer from Mississippi who fought in Europe during World War II and later became a philanthropist. The garden, which features stained-glass sculptures and is used for Yom HaShoah commemorations, was not damaged in the fire.
Berman’s daughter, Deborah Silver, had her bat mitzvah and wedding at the synagogue. She’s now a jazz singer, nominated for a Grammy this year, and plans to perform charity concerts in New York City and Jackson to benefit the shul. “We will be back,” she said, “and we will recover.”
Surviving another act of antisemitism
Saturday’s fire at Beth Israel is being investigated by federal authorities as a possible hate crime. A local teen, Stephen Spencer Pittman, confessed to igniting the blaze.
The bulk of the damage was concentrated in the library and administrative offices, which are also home to the Institute of Southern Jewish Life. It’s the same part of the building targeted in a 1967 Ku Klux Klan bombing.
After the fire, the congregation moved the Torahs to the nearby Northminster Baptist Church, which offered its space. There, five Torah scrolls from the sanctuary were carefully unfurled and laid out across long tables, allowing soot and smoke to dissipate.
On the advice of a sofer, a ritual scribe, the Holocaust Torah was not unrolled.
“It’s extremely delicate,” said Sarah Thomas, Beth Israel’s vice president. She said it appeared to have no visible damage and is now wrapped and stored for safekeeping until the congregation is able to move back into the building.
The Torah’s survival can be explained without invoking a miracle: it was protected by its glass case and by where it stood. Still, for those who know its history, the moment carried weight.
What survives
Gilbert Metz spent decades speaking publicly about his Holocaust experience. His oral testimony is preserved in Holocaust archives, and his story has been taught in schools across Mississippi.
That inheritance was also ritual: For decades at Beth Israel, the shofar on the High Holidays was blown by Metz’s son, Lawson, and later by his grandson, Joseph.
Joseph Metz — now the president of the Jewish federation in Mobile, Alabama — has written a book about his grandfather’s survival, Behind the Silent Doors — a phrase Gilbert used to describe the gas chambers. Joseph regularly appears at Holocaust remembrance events and in classrooms. When he does, he pins his grandfather’s yellow star to his jacket before he speaks — the same object that once marked Gilbert for death now marking the story as one that refuses to disappear.
Metz, who died at 78 in 2007, bore the tattooed number the Nazis assigned him at Auschwitz for the rest of his life: 184203. Joseph and his sister, Caroline, each later chose to replicate the number on a tattoo of their own, as an inheritance. He said his grandfather survived so the story would not end with him, but be carried forward.
The Torah Metz carried across an ocean — and across a lifetime — remains.
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This California synagogue was just vandalized with anti-Zionist graffiti, one year after being destroyed by wildfire
(JTA) — The remains of a synagogue in southern California destroyed in last January’s Eaton wildfire were vandalized over the weekend with anti-Zionist messages.
The rabbi of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center and the Anti-Defamation League decried the vandalism as antisemitic.
“The vandalism of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center is antisemitism — full stop,” ADL Los Angeles senior regional director David Englin said in a statement. “This was a deliberate act of hate meant to intimidate a Jewish community already rebuilding after last year’s fire, and it comes at a time when antisemitism is already at unprecedented levels in California and nationwide. Targeting a synagogue is simply unacceptable and represents an attack on our entire community.”
Photographs of the graffiti showed that it was scrawled in black spray paint on an exterior wall fence and read “RIP Renee” followed by “F— Zionizm” [sic].
This is the remaining outside wall of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center. The Temple burned down last year in the Eaton fire. Intersectionality in all its glory. pic.twitter.com/4Z3CbfdUVl
— Gregg Mashberg (@gregg_mashberg) January 12, 2026
The first words appeared to be a likely reference to Renee Good, the 37-year-old unarmed Minneapolis resident shot whose killing by Immigration and Customs Enforcement is igniting a nationwide spate of anti-ICE activism.
Anti-Zionist graffiti has been painted on synagogues around the country over the last two years amid a spike in anti-Israel sentiment during the war in Gaza.
The vandalism came days after congregants from the Conservative synagogue gathered at the burnt site of their spiritual home to commemorate one year since the wildfire tore through their synagogue. Dozens of members also lost their homes or were forced to evacuate due to last year’s fire, which was the second-deadliest in the state’s history.
The vandalism also came a day after an arson attack at a Mississippi synagogue that had been bombed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1967 in retaliation for the rabbi’s involvement with civil rights activism. The man charged with the crime said he targeted that synagogue due to its “Jewish ties.”
No suspect has yet been named in the Pasadena vandalism, which the Altadena station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department first received a call about on Sunday at 9 a.m.
“Acts of antisemitism and hate have no place in our diverse communities,” Altadena Station Captain Ethan Marquez said in a statement. “Crimes motivated by bias impact far more than a single victim, they harm the sense of safety and unity of our entire community. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department takes all hate-motivated incidents seriously and is committed to thoroughly investigating these acts and holding individuals accountable. The community of Altadena has endured significant hardship over the past year and acts of hateful vandalism will not be tolerated.”
Detectives with the department’s Major Crimes Bureau will be taking over the investigation, the Altadena station said in a statement.
During the fire recovery process, PJTC, a century-old congregation, welcomed a new senior rabbi, Joshua Ratner, a former lawyer who became the synagogue’s permanent religious leader in August.
A representative from the synagogue did not respond to a request for comment. But in an email to congregants, Ratner described the vandalism as “hateful and antisemitic.”
“It was devastating in many ways,” Ratner said about the graffiti to The New York Times. He also told the newspaper that in his prayer for the dead over the weekend’s services, he had included Renee Good’s name.
Local political figures joined in condemning the vandalism.
“I am horrified by the vandalism of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center, especially coming just days after we marked the one-year anniversary of the Eaton Fire that tragically destroyed its entire campus,” Rep. Judy Chu, a Democrat who represents the district in Congress, shared on X. “For over a century, the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center has been a beloved community institution and safe haven for our Jewish neighbors and loved ones. I stand with the congregation and the Jewish community as we await the results of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s investigation. Hate has no place in the San Gabriel Valley.”
The Jan. 5 commemoration was the first time most congregants had been back to their synagogue building since last the fire. For the past year, services have been held in a neighboring church; Hebrew school services have also been held offsite. PJTC is home to about 450 member families, mostly from Pasadena and neighboring Altadena.
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