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As jury launches deliberations in Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, defense concedes shooter’s hatred of Jews
PITTSBURGH (JTA) — After 11 days of graphic and emotionally fraught testimony in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial, and a 90-minute closing argument that included gruesome photos and the replay of harrowing 911 calls, it was time for the defense to speak.
A lawyer for Robert Bowers, accused of being the gunman who murdered 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue, on Thursday walked across the courtroom to a podium, faced the jury, and spoke for just 19 minutes.
Elisa Long acknowledged the immensity of the crime on Oct. 27, 2018, and offered only half a defense. Bowers did not intend to keep Jews from worshipping, she said, but he did appear to hate Jews.
“There is no question that his posts on Gab.com and his statements that day reflected animosity and hatred toward Jews,” Long said, referring to a social media site that is a virtual redoubt for extremists.
It was a critical concession that 11 of the government’s charges, that Bowers committed capital hate crimes, may be irrefutable.
A prosecutor took another 20 minutes to rebut Long’s barebones defense, and then Judge Robert Colville ordered the jury to begin deliberations. Seven women and five men filed out of the court at 2:30 p.m., and clerks followed them with wheeled carts piled with evidence. They retired Thursday without arriving at a verdict.
The defense, which barely registered as a presence during the guilt phase of the trial, appears to be reserving its arguments for the death penalty phase, which begins a week after the jury returns a verdict, if it determines that Bowers is guilty of any of the 22 capital crimes out of 63 charges in the indictment.
Defense lawyers in March said they would bring up Bowers’ mental health, including evidence that he suffers from epilepsy and schizophrenia. On the first day of the trial, Colville forbade them from doing so during the guilt phase of the trial, but said they may raise mental health during the penalty phase.
In her closing argument, Long devoted most of her time to sowing doubt about 11 of the capital charges, that Bowers “intentionally obstructed by force … the enjoyment of free exercise of religious beliefs,” resulting in 11 deaths.
“It is vitally important not to convict him of crimes he did not commit,” she said.
The free exercise of religious beliefs “does not include the engagement in good works or conduct that may or may not be part of religious belief,” she said.
Then jurors would have to determine whether Bowers was seeking to stop a religious service “or to stop people who were supporting the resettlement of refugees,” she said.
One of the three congregations housed in the Tree of Life synagogue, Dor Hadash, was partnered with HIAS, the Jewish immigration advocacy group. She quoted Bowers’ Gab posts in which he identified Jews with what he believed was a planned genocide of white Americans to be carried out by immigrants.
“HIAS is a huge enabler of refugee invasions,” Bowers posted on Oct. 25, Long pointed out, two days before the massacre. Dor Hadash, she noted, was on that Saturday planning a “Refugee Shabbat.” His responses were “shocking and irrational,” she said, but “after learning about HIAS” and its advocacy, “Mr. Bowers’ sense of urgency increased.”
Long began her closing argument by acknowledging, as lead defense attorney Judy Clarke had done in her opening argument, that Bowers had carried out the massacre.
“There is no dispute that on Oct. 27. 2018, armed with an AR-15, he shot and killed 11 people and seriously injured two others who were in their sacred space,” Long said. The defense on day one of the trial promised “we would not offer justification, and we have not done so,” she said.
Summing up, Long appeared to anticipate the mental health arguments the defense would make during the penalty phase, while being careful not to violate Colville’s order not to explicitly raise the topic.
She described a 46-year old man “living alone in an apartment” where he slept on a mattress on the floor and who was obsessed with computers, coding and guns. “How and why this man who lived a quiet and law abiding life until 2018” committed the crimes may be “inexplicable,” she said.
In the months before the massacre Bowers “spent an immense amount of time on the internet absorbing hate,” she said.
Long did not argue that the government had proved the 11 capital hate crimes. But she also did not argue that it had not, telling the jury, “These are the charges the federal government has brought and these are the decisions you as jurors must make.”
In his rebuttal, Eric Olshan, a U.S. attorney, ridiculed Long’s claim that obstructing worship was not germane to Bowers’ intentions.
Facing the jury, he spun around and pointed to Bowers.
“On Oct. 27, 2018, that man, Robert Bowers, went into Tree of Life, where three congregations, not just Dor Hadash” were getting ready for services. The other two are Tree of Life and New Light. “He didn’t focus on Dor Hadash, he focused on any Jew he could find to kill or try to kill.”
He accused Long of cherrypicking Bowers’ Gab posts, and reminded jurors of evidence that in the months prior to the attack, Towers had “liked” just two posts mentioning HIAS, while “liking” some 400 mentions of “Kike,” an antisemitic epithet, and some 2,300 mentions of “Jew.”
“Did he go to a refugee resettlement meeting? Did he go to the border to stop Jews” from facilitating the entry of immigrants? Olshan asked. “Did he go to the HIAS office in Maryland? He drove about 30 minutes from where he lived to Squirrel Hill, the center of Jewish life in Pittsburgh.”
Again Olshan pointed at Bowers. “That person intended to obstruct them from free exercise of religion,” he said. “This is not rocket science.”
In any case, Olshan, who is Jewish, said HIAS’s work is inextricable from Jewish faith. “Welcoming the stranger” appears 36 times in the Torah, he said, including in the passage the congregations would be reading that morning. “That just proves his guilt,” he said.
Throughout the day, Bowers never looked toward the jury. Clad in a gray sweater with a collared blue shirt, he stared at a computer screen where he monitored evidence and scribbled notes, occasionally whispering to his lawyers.
Bowers’ aunt and a cousin were present in the courtroom, as were survivors of the attack and families of the victims. There was an expectation that a verdict would be quick; the overflow room for families was packed. Maggie Feinstein, who counsels the victims, was in the court room. So was Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, who testified on the first day that he expected to die where he was hiding, and recited the Shema prayer. He wore a white kippah emblazoned with the synagogue’s symbol, a blue tree.
The day began with Colville warning the jury that his instructions to them would be exceptionally long; he took 80 minutes. Then Soo Song, an assistant U.S. attorney, spoke for 90 minutes, reconstructing the day of the massacre, Oct. 27, 2018, detail by gory detail. Of the 11 people killed, she said, six were shot in the head.
She anticipated the argument Long would advance, repeatedly emphasizing the rituals Bowers interrupted with deadly results. Using bloody photos of victims in their place, she focused especially on religious implements.”The defendant committed mass murder in a synagogue,” she said. “He turned that sacred space into a place littered with prayer shawls and prayer books and 11 deceased worshippers.”
She concluded naming the 11 victims: Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger.
Olshan ended the day holding two evidence bags, each with half of a bloodstained kippah. “No longer a reminder of God’s presence,” he said. “This is what he did to Irving Younger, leaving this tattered reminder found amid the shocks of Irving younger’s white hair.”
The obstruction of worship was “the natural and probable consequence of his actions,” Olshan said.”The only justice is a verdict of guilty in every charge in this case.”
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The post As jury launches deliberations in Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, defense concedes shooter’s hatred of Jews appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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On my first Shabbat in NYC, the sanctuary was attacked
I don’t often go to synagogue. Outside of the High Holidays, it is not somewhere I would ordinarily find myself on a Friday night.
In the last few years, I have made a point of spending Shabbat with my grandmother. We light candles, eat together and let the week recede for a few hours. I don’t see it as an obligation so much as the comfort of doing something that has been done before, by people I love, in a rhythm that existed long before I did.
And yet, synagogues have a strange way of finding me when I need them.
Last summer, while travelling through Europe to visit two of my closest friends, I found myself in London, exhausted from weeks of constant movement. I happened to walk past a synagogue and realized that Shabbat was the following day. I reached out and asked if I could join their services. I remember thinking that perhaps this was exactly what I needed: a few hours to sit still, focus, and breathe.
And I was right.
There is something uniquely grounding about entering a synagogue in an unfamiliar place and discovering that the ritual is familiar. You may be thousands of miles from home, surrounded by people you’ve never met, but you know when to stand. You recognize the melodies. You open the same prayers. You know that somewhere else in the world, other Jews are doing some version of the same thing.
So when, only a few days after moving to New York, I was connected with a member of Central Synagogue through a potential landlord and they invited me to join them for Shabbat services, I thought: Why not?
I had just arrived in a city where I was beginning a new job at the Forward, a new life, one that, for the first time, was entirely mine to shape. That is a daunting task. What better way to spend my first Friday night than doing something that has always made the unknown feel a little more manageable.
Moments after services began, I was sitting in the sanctuary, allowing myself to take in the week that had just passed — my first week in New York — when a man entered and began moving violently through the congregation.
He knocked down the Shabbat candles that had just been lit. He moved through the rows of congregants. I watched him strike another person.
People around me ran toward the sides of the sanctuary. My own body went into the same instinctive state of shock and survival: Where is the danger? Where can I go? What do I need to watch for?
The security response was swift. The intruder was stopped, we re-lit the candles, and services continued.
Those around me who knew I was new to the synagogue immediately went into protection mode. They checked on me, expressing disbelief that something like this could have happened there, especially given the level of security they pride themselves on maintaining. They told me that in the nearly three years since October 7, nothing like this had happened.
The clergy, too, seemed to understand what the moment required. They gave us strength and courage, using the same voices that had moments earlier been leading us in song and prayer to restore some sense of calm. Throughout the service and again afterward in their online response, they returned to the same idea: it was our duty to keep joy alive.
Joy, one of the rabbis said, is itself an act of resistance.
I understood the sentiment. But my body hadn’t quite caught up.
Shabbat is one of the rare times when I allow myself to become completely uninhibited. I sing. I look up from the prayer book. I watch the rabbis and the people around me. I let myself become absorbed in something larger than whatever has been occupying my mind that week. For a few hours, I am not thinking about work, or apartment hunting, or navigating a new city. I am simply there.
That is also why the disruption was so jarring. I had come to Shabbat to let my guard down, and suddenly I found myself unable to do so.
I kept my eyes toward the front of the room, watching for movement. When it came time to turn around during Lecha Dodi, I felt a jolt of anxiety at the thought of putting my back toward the congregation. I could no longer surrender myself completely to the moment and what it required of me. I knew, rationally, that the threat had passed. But my body had learned something different: that even here, even now, even in this room, I might need to be ready.
For a moment, I considered leaving. But the people around me seemed to embody a quiet confidence that everything was going to be okay. They had chosen to stay, and I followed their lead. There is a certain strength in knowing that you are not standing alone.
I had come to Central Synagogue because I wanted to feel at home in my new city. Instead, on my first Shabbat in New York, I was reminded how quickly the simple act of practicing Judaism can become an exercise in vigilance. And yet, looking around the room that evening, I also understood that vigilance does not have to mean retreat.
The post On my first Shabbat in NYC, the sanctuary was attacked appeared first on The Forward.
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Anti-Israel Republicans tests their strength in Florida primaries
Some insurgent Democrats have found success by making criticism of Israel central to their campaigns. Now a group of Republican candidates is trying to tap into a similar movement on the right, even if they are unlikely to win.
That divide is on display in Florida’s Republican primaries, set for Tuesday, where several long-shot candidates are challenging the party’s traditionally strong support for the Jewish state. Congressional candidates Dan Bilzerian and Jake Lang and gubernatorial hopeful James Fishback have made opposition to Israel and AIPAC part of their political identity. But they have also gone further than most progressive critics of Israel, using rhetoric that has been widely condemned as antisemitic.
Bilzerian is a professional poker player and a social media personality once known as the “King of Instagram” for flaunting a lifestyle of luxury, fast cars, women, and guns. He is challenging incumbent Rep. Randy Fine, one of four Jewish Republicans in Congress. Fine has made support for Israel central to his political identity, while also drawing condemnation for inflammatory rhetoric about Muslims and Palestinians.
Fine is a favorite to win reelection, has the endorsement of President Donald Trump and has a large fundraising advantage. He represents District 6, which is located just under the northeast part of the state and includes Daytona Beach, and is facing four primary challengers. Among them are Aaron Baker, an “America First” candidate who has criticized the “influence of foreign lobbies” and what he calls America’s “endless wars.” Baker also said he would oppose providing Israel with offensive weapons.
But Bilzerian’s attacks on Fine, who often wears a yarmulke in public, have gone well beyond criticism of Israel. He has repeatedly promoted conspiracy theories about Jews, including that Jews killed President John F. Kennedy. On social media, where Bilzerian has more than 30 million followers, he has asked if Adolf Hitler was a “good person,” has called Jews “dumb,” Judaism a “terrible” religion and referred to Fine as a “fat Jew.”
Bilzerian’s campaign treasurer, Patrick Krason, also served as treasurer for Kanye West’s short-lived 2024 presidential campaign. The rapper, who changed his name to Ye, engaged in a spate of antisemitic remarks and Holocaust denial in recent years. A Combat Antisemitism Movement report found that 33% of Bilzerian’s content on his campaign account was anti-Israel and antisemitic.
In recent days, Bilzerian posted antisemitic dog whistles, including that Florida’s “District 6 understands the Jewish problem,” and that “a vote for Randy is a vote for Israel.”
The imagery in Bilzerian’s closing campaign message has become quite provocative. In one AI-generated video, Bilzerian accuses Fine and his wife of engaging in “transgender pride groups that perform for children.”
Another AI video, posted Thursday, says Fine “wants you to die for Israel” and calls the congressman a “psychopath” who wants to watch “goyim cattle” die. He labels Fine a “Jewish supremacist” and “Satan’s creepy little minion” and says that the “fat Jew Randy” needs to be “tarred and feathered.” The video also includes AI-generated imagery of Fine dressed in a cheerleader’s outfit emblazoned with the Israeli flag and says it’s time for voters to “throw out Shylock and all his tricks.”
Fine said the video is “celebrating Hitler,” adding: “We have a choice on Tuesday, to embrace the kind of Nazism that led to the Holocaust or to repudiate this filth and reaffirm American values and character.”
Wonder if I can get them to play this on the radio in the district pic.twitter.com/IAXVV7pNp7
— Dan Bilzerian (@DanBilzerian) August 13, 2026
Other Republican primaries
A similar, if less blatantly antisemitic, theme is also showing up in the Republican primary for Marco Rubio’s former Senate seat.
Jake Lang, a far-right provocateur who was pardoned by Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, is running for the Senate seat held by Republican incumbent Sen. Ashley Moody. Lang, who said his mother is Jewish, renounced his connections to Judaism and Israel and built an online following around Christian nationalism and attacks on both Muslims and Jews. This included performing a Nazi salute outside AIPAC’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., and an “anti-Islamification” rally against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani outside Gracie Mansion.
In the crowded Republican primary for governor to replace the term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis, James Fishback has made opposition to Israel and AIPAC central to his campaign. Fishback, who said “Americans shouldn’t die for Israel,” has attacked the frontrunner, Rep. Byron Donalds, over support from pro-Israel donors. Fishback, who is polling at 18%, promised to pull Florida’s investments from Israel Bonds. Running what The New York Times described as a “rage bait” campaign, Fishback has associated himself with antisemitic personalities on the far-right. He also criticized politicians who “visit another country” only to end up “kissing a stupid wall,” a reference to prayer visits to the Western Wall.
Florida Republicans are not expected to abandon their party’s longstanding alliance with Israel when they vote in Tuesday’s primary. But these long-shot candidates have large online followings, and their campaigns are testing whether the growing anti-Israel movement on the right can also find its place in electoral politics.
In his recent memoir, Vice President JD Vance recounted a conversation with conservative activist Charlie Kirk months before he was fatally shot, in which Kirk warned about a growing strain of anti-Israel sentiment on the American right that has at times slid into outright antisemitism.
Fine’s stance
Meanwhile, since winning the special election in 2025 to replace now-Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz, Fine has made his Jewish identity and support for Israel central to his political persona. Fine also served as Ron DeSantis’ Jewish outreach chair during the 2018 gubernatorial election.
Known for his combative nature, Fine has built his political brand as one of Israel’s most outspoken defenders in Congress, frequently using social media to target his critics. He has also said he began wearing a yarmulke in solidarity with Jewish students facing antisemitism on college campuses after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
Last week, vandals spray-painted a swastika on one of Fine’s campaign signs outside an early voting location in Flagler Beach. Police are investigating the vandalism, which Fine described as an antisemitic attack.
There are roughly 750,000 Jewish residents in Florida, making it the third most-populous Jewish state after New York and California. Jews make up 4% of the Florida electorate. Nearly 60% of the state’s Jewish electorate identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, according to the American Jewish Population Project at Brandeis University.
Some Florida Democrats have also shown less interest in following the anti-Israel shift seen among progressives elsewhere, like in the Michigan Democratic primary win of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed for U.S. Senate.
Last week, the Hillsborough County Democratic Party canceled a planned keynote address at its annual gala by former New York Assemblyman Michael Blake, who made attacks on AIPAC a major part of his unsuccessful congressional campaign against Rep. Ritchie Torres. The Florida event also featured Democratic gubernatorial candidate, former Rep. David Jolly, a longtime supporter of Israel.
The contrast ahead of Tuesday’s primary is striking: In Florida, the loudest challenge to bipartisan support for Israel is coming not from the progressive left, but from the Republican right.
The post Anti-Israel Republicans tests their strength in Florida primaries appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish watchdog urges NYPD to use cutting-edge detection tech after synagogue attack
(JTA) — A Jewish security watchdog is doubling down on safety measures in the wake of a Friday night attack against worshipers at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, calling on police to identify cutting edge tactics to identify hot spots for potential hate crimes and to place more officers in those areas.
But Mitchell Silber, CEO of the Community Security Initiative, acknowledged that preventing situations like Friday’s is not straightforward.
“It’s difficult, because you’re trying to balance being open for the public for worship, and at the same time, keeping our sanctuary safe,” Silber told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Sunday.
On Friday night Larry Montes, 46, was able to make his way into Central Synagogue’s main sanctuary before he disrupted the service with antisemitic slurs and was apprehended by a security guard. Silber said he’s been in contact with Central Synagogue security leadership about the incident and understood that Montes had not initially raised any red flags when he entered the building.
“There wasn’t something so out of place that it required them to pull him aside, but they noticed him as not someone they were familiar with,” he said. According to CSI, the synagogue’s team was able to quickly defuse the situation anyway due to the training it had received.
In the wake of the incident, Silber said the CSI is sending a bulletin to synagogues about steps to improve synagogue safety, a copy of which was shown to JTA.
The CSI has begun discussions with the NYPD about using tools like “datamining, crime cluster mapping and pre-emptively deploying against hot spots” in order to prevent hate crimes before they can happen. The CSI coordinates security for Jewish institutions and communities in the New York area, and is jointly funded by the UJA-Federation of New York and the Jewish Community Relations Council. (70 Faces Media, the parent company of the JTA and New York Jewish Week, receives UJA funding.)
The CSI bulletin is also encouraging other synagogues to partner with the Community Security Service, another Jewish nonprofit that trains congregants to volunteer as greeters who can provide more personalized discernment of possible threats.
“Central Synagogue isn’t Park East, Park East isn’t KJ, KJ isn’t Congregation Beth Elohim — they’re all so different, and that’s why having members of the synagogue trained can really be a force multiplier,” Silber said, listing some of the city’s most prominent congregations.
In the incident on Friday night, Montes yelled during the service, disrupting it, and then struck a 63-year-old congregant and headbutted a member of security personnel who was escorting him out.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the congregation’s senior rabbi, was away for a family event when the incident occurred on Friday, according to The New York Times. But she wrote on Instagram that the security director “heroically restrained and escorted” Montes out of the synagogue, which occurred within one minute of him disrupting the service.
Montes has three previous arrests in New York City, each for a robbery between 2019 and 2023, according to police.
He was arrested at the scene and arraigned in criminal court immediately that night, where, according to police, he was charged with four counts of assault as a hate crime, two counts of assault, criminal mischief as a hate crime, criminal mischief, disruption of a religious service, criminal trespassing as a hate crime, two counts of aggravated harassment and two counts of harassment.
The District Attorney’s office requested bail at $50,000 cash with $150,000 bond and the judge set bail at $10,000 cash with $30,000 bond. Montes’ next court date is August 20, according to the DA’s office.
The attack comes as antisemitic hate crimes against Jews in New York City have risen by 8.5% compared to 2025, as of the end of July. Debate has swirled this year over whether North American synagogues need to step up their security in the mold of European congregations in the wake of attacks like the attempted one in West Bloomfield, Michigan, in which a man drove a fireworks-laden truck into a synagogue.
A number of politicians have weighed in to condemn Friday’s attack.
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish official in the U.S., wrote, “When American Jews say they feel unsafe, this is why. Antisemitism is real and it’s increasing by the day.”
Some have ascribed a lack of safety to rhetoric used by the city’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a longtime Israel critic who turned heads with his recent video panning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ofir Akunis, consul general of Israel in New York, called the attack “a direct result of Mayor Mamdani’s sustained campaign of incitement” in a post on X.
Meanwhile, some of Mamdani’s Jewish allies have pointed out that a Facebook profile that appears to belong to Montes has shared a number of posts criticizing the mayor.
Mamdani wrote that he was “horrified by the assault” at the synagogue, and that all New Yorkers “must be able to observe their religion without fear of violence.”
Montes’ social media posts include sharing a video of a Prager U commentator taking down Israel critics and multiple photos that suggest support for Israel, including a hand shaded with the Puerto Rican flag shaking another hand shaded with the Israeli flag.
His aunt, who lives in Puerto Rico, told the New York Post that her nephew “might not have been in his right mind,” and that he has expressed a desire to become Jewish.
“I told him he had to be careful with that because those things are sacred — you have to approach them seriously,” she told The Post in Spanish.
A woman named Michele Anenberg-Poma posted a photo of herself on Instagram with wounds on her lip and arm, and wrote, “I am the woman who was assaulted last night at Central Synagogue.”
She added, “You will not punch out our Jewish light. You will not stand and cause harm to our eternal light.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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