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As trial begins in Tree of Life massacre, Pittsburgh’s Jews struggle with what to reveal and what to conceal
PITTSBURGH (JTA) — On Friday afternoon, Squirrel Hill was suffused with spring breezes and pink dogwoods, and alive with the movement that typifies the coming of Shabbat.
Toddlers scrambled up the jungle gym in the JCC playground, while the chatter in cafes was about a looming storm that could soak the walk to synagogue on Saturday. Murray Avenue Kosher was emptying out of challahs.
Barely present, at least on the surface, was any indication that Monday morning would hold a turning point in the community’s greatest trauma. That’s when jury selection was to begin in the trial of the man accused of shattering Shabbat on Oct. 27, 2018, with gunfire. His massacre of 11 worshipers, in a synagogue building a 10-minute stroll from the downtown of this leafy, heavily Jewish neighborhood, was the deadliest-ever attack on U.S. Jews.
But behind the scenes, there are clear signs that the trial’s proximity is being felt. Maggie Feinstein, the director of the 10/27 Healing Partnership, which provides post-traumatic therapy for the community, said that as the trial nears, requests for treatment have spiked.
“The trauma cues that for a while bothered us right after the shooting — for some people it might be ambulances, for other people it might be media, for some people it might be the sound of multiple police cars — you get to a place where they don’t bother you as much,” she said. “But the increased media attention and the increased awareness of this upcoming trial for a number of people is bringing back for them that maybe they didn’t do their own healing the first time around.”
A Starbucks in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh is decorated with a memorial for the victims of the 2018 massacre at the city’s Tree of Life synagogue, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
There were three congregations in the building: Tree of Life and New Light, both affiliated with the Conservative movement, and Dor Hadash, which is Reconstructionist.
The 11 victims were brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal, couple Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Rose Malinger, Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Jerry Rabinowitz, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger. Seven were from Tree of Life, three were from New Light and one was from Dor Hadash.
For their families, their friends, their congregations and their broader Jewish community, the legacy of the massacre is a deep-seated longing for control, a longing to never have to think again of the gunman and of the anguish he left in his wake, while grappling with tender memories of the dead, of the decades spent in celebration and in prayer in the building.
Who narrates this story, the gunman or his victims? That struggle now looms as the alleged gunman goes to trial. The community is wrestling with questions such as where and whether to put the bullet-riddled artifacts, whether to worship at the site, whether to even speak of the massacre and how and whether the gunman lives or dies.
”We believe strongly that this antisemitic attack should not stop people from practicing and being Jewish,” Feinsten said. “For a lot of people, that’s an active choice that they have to work at. It doesn’t come easily after feeling unsafe in that environment to then work to find safety in it. But a lot of people have chosen to do that.”
On Friday, Feinstein was organizing support services for families who would, if they so choose, be sequestered in a separate room in the court where they could view the trial. (Family members may also ask to be seated in the courtroom.) She assigned six therapists to be present with the families.
Compounding the revisited trauma of the event, the families are divided over whether the gunman, should he be convicted, deserves the death penalty. The accused has a lawyer, Judy Clarke, known as “the attorney for the damned” for her determination to keep her clients from execution.
What’s clear is that the Jews of Squirrel Hill are taking the trial on with their characteristic spirit of collaboration. The community has hired public relations specialists to handle media inquiries ahead of the trial, in part to safeguard locals from being pressed to answer questions that could harm them or shatter the sense of unity. Congregants reached by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency dutifully deferred to the list of approved contacts on a list distributed by a PR agency.
On Friday afternoon, signs of unity that flooded the city in the immediate aftermath of the shooting were still visible. In a tobacconist’s window a sign with the slogan “No place for hate/Stronger than hate,” which had proliferated throughout the neighborhood after the attack, remained propped up next to a flag and an ad for the lottery. A Starbucks had on its window white paint drawings depicting “love,” “kindness” and “hope” in English and in Hebrew, alongside symbols: the Star of David, a heart and a dove.
A tobacconist window includes a poster of the “No Place for Hate” slogan that proliferated after the Tree of Life Massacre in 2018, in Pittsburgh, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
Representatives of the community talk about “doing Jewish” as a means of coping, including redoubling the very activities — allying with the city’s Black minority and advocating for immigration, refugees and gun control — that fueled the rage of the alleged attacker.
The attacker allegedly was driven in part by the partnership between Dor Hadash and HIAS, the Jewish refugee aid group, and the congregation’s sponsorship of refugee families.
“We have, if anything, doubled down on our commitment to immigrants and refugees,” said Dana Kellerman, the chair of the communications committee at Dor Hadash. “We are currently coming up on the end of our first year working with a new resettlement program to resettle a Congolese immigrant family in Pittsburgh, and we have every intention of when the year commitment is up of working with a second family.”
Kellerman said the shooting had “honestly become part of the background of our existence at this point.” In keeping with her congregation’s rules aimed at protecting their community, Kellerman declined to talk about the day of the massacre, the death penalty or about details of the trial. But she was open about the ways in which her congregation has leaned into the values it has long held, and that the gunman so reviled.
“We have become louder and more public about practicing our Judaism,” she said. Now, she said, the congregation incorporates advocacy for refugees into its service, with liturgical readings on immigration.
There are other changes. “We even have hats now! We have baseball caps!” Kellerman said with a smile, unearthing a photo of herself in a white cap with “Dor Hadash” and a stylized Magen David in blue, standing alongside gun control advocates.
“Previously we all would have shown up as our individual selves, and now we show up in our Dor Hadash baseball caps,” she said. “Mine kept blowing off.”
Steve Cohen, the co-president of New Light, said the congregation’s relationship with Black churches in the city has reached new intensity since the massacre. The congregation’s rabbi and congregants who know Hebrew partner with the churches to analyze sacred texts in the original.
“We would bring our Tanachs [Hebrew Bibles], and the Christian congregation would bring their Bible and then we would talk about the Proverbs and go through it, not just what the intention of the author was, but how different ways the same words can be translated in order to imply different things,” he said. “And so we went through the whole Book of Proverbs with the Rodman Street Baptist Church, and this past winter, we did the selected Psalms with the faith and Destiny Church on the north side.”
The interior of the new sanctuary of the New Light congregation, four and half years after a gunman massacred three of its congregants, in Pittsburgh, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
New Light took its cue from survivors of the 2015 attack on the Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in which a white supremacist murdered nine Black worshipers, Cohen said. Leaders of New Light traveled to the church and heard from its elders that it was not enough to tend to the traumatized individuals, but to the community; they emphasized outreach, bringing congregants back in.
“That’s a lot of the reason why we have an outpouring of members who never attended shul now attending shul,” he said.
Feinstein, too, said she had an intensification of religious and ritual observance among her clients: more frequent attendance at Shabbat services, forming a daily minyan, finding a study partner for daily Talmud study.
Kellerman said the community has become closer; she sees it in congregants who linger. “It shows up in things like people showing up for Friday night services, and hanging out to chat or getting on a little early to chat,” she said.
A rendition of architect Daniel Libeskind’s plans for the interior of the new Tree of Life synagogue. (Tree of Life)
In the days leading up to the trial, the community bid farewell to the most salient relic of that painful day: the hulking synagogue building on the corner of Wilkins and Shady that has stood empty since then. All three congregations have decamped to nearby synagogues, leaving behind the chain-link fence draped with paintings from children across the country wishing for strength.
“Nobody has been meeting in the synagogue since the day of the shooting,” said Carole Zawatsky, the Tree of Life CEO who is overseeing the plans to replace the building. The only people to have been inside at all, she said, were survivors and “special friends” — donors to the rebuilding and politicians.
Zawatsky said it is wrenching to even contemplate returning for some. “You can walk through the building and see where the gunman was destructive,” she said. “You can see where the gunman was apprehended, where the gunman opened fire. It’s devastating to witness.”
But some intend to: Tree of Life lost seven congregants but plans on returning once the building is rebuilt as a museum and education center focused on the dangers of extremism.
On Sunday, the Tree of Life congregation had an outdoor ceremony to say “L’hitraot,” Hebrew for “until we meet again,” to the building as it has existed up to now.
“We are grateful to God for the thousands of blessings that have passed through these doors,” Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, the rabbi who sheltered congregants and alerted police, said at the ceremony. “We cannot, we must not, permit one day … to define us, nor outweigh all the good.”
The new center is being designed by Daniel Libeskind, the architect who designed the master plan for the World Trade Center site reconstruction in New York and the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
But Dor Hadash and New Light decided their moves were permanent in part because families of their victims swore never to return to the building.
New Light is now ensconced in what once was a secondary chapel at the Beth Shalom synagogue, as if it has been there for decades: Plaques honoring past donors and presidents adorn the walls of the sanctuary. The only signs of the massacre are the 1,000 paper cranes Pittsburgh’s Japanese community gave the congregation, reflecting a Japanese tradition that folding cranes will make a wish come true. They hang at the entrance to the sanctuary, unexplained by any plaque. There is a stained glass monument to the three victims at the cemetery where they are buried.
Even with Tree of Life’s commitment to return, many questions remain about what that will look like. The congregation has yet to decide what objects will stay in the sanctuary, what will stay in storage and what will be part of a separate exhibit, Zawatsky said.
“The first work that’s had to be done for the synagogue is ‘What are the things that need to be saved and go into storage during construction?’” she said.
In some ways, she indicated, the work of rebuilding could bear some resemblance to the balancing act that the community will have to navigate during the alleged shooter’s trial.
“We are thinking deeply about how you exhibit some of these materials,” Zaslavsky said, “in ways that are both teachable moments and don’t retraumatize.”
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A gunman attacked a Michigan synagogue. Here’s what happens to the community next
On Thursday, a driver rammed his pickup truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Hills, Mich., a large Reform Temple about 25 miles from downtown Detroit. Blessedly, there were no casualties besides the shooter, whom security guards rapidly engaged. One guard was injured. Aside from that, everyone who was inside the synagogue, including 140 children attending school there, was unscathed.
“There’s hopeful news and there’s sad news about the aftermaths of these shootings,” said Mark Oppenheimer, author of Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood, a methodical, lyrical look at what happened to the Pittsburgh neighborhood shattered by the Oct. 27, 2018 shooting that left 11 people dead.
The hopeful news is that older, established Jewish communities can rely on close, long-established bonds within and outside the community to get them through.
The sad news is that people unaffected by the shooting tend to move on and forget.
“So whereas this will haunt the Jewish community for years,” Oppenheimer told me in a phone interview, “most people outside the Jewish community will quickly move on to whatever the next horrible incident is.”
What happens next
Authorities have not confirmed the attacker’s motive, although he has been identified as a Michigan man who was born in Lebanon. But among all the unknowns, we do know a few things for certain.
We know that a great tragedy was averted due to the guards’ bravery and expertise, and due to the planning and preparation of synagogue leadership.
We know such attacks have gone from being extremely rare in the United States, to being more frequent.
And we know that what happens now, in the aftermath, matters a great deal.
That’s why, in writing about the worst mass shooting in American Jewish history, Oppenheimer spent most of his time researching what came after the atrocity.
“When the cameras and the police tape were gone, what stayed behind?”Oppenheimer, who teaches at Washington University’s John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, wrote in the book’s introduction.
The power of connection
Both the Tree of Life synagogue and Temple Israel are older, deeply entrenched congregations with close ties to a number of local communities — Jewish and non-Jewish alike.
In one chapter of Squirrel Hill titled, simply, “Gentiles,” Oppenheimer chronicles how non-Jews came to the aid of the stricken congregation, including clergy, politicians and neighbors.
Emblematic of that was the capacity crowd of 2,500 people that came together at Soldiers and Sailors auditorium on the one-year anniversary of the shooting, where law enforcement, politicians and Christian, Muslim and Jewish clergy all spoke.
“There are usually people in government, in community organizations, in neighborhood organizations, who reach out, who want the Jews to know that they’re not alone,” said Oppenheimer.
Evidence of such connection was already on show in Michigan on Thursday. One reporter interviewed a woman praying outside the synagogue, who said, through tears, that the “Holy Spirit” had told her to turn her car around once she saw police cars racing past her to the scene, and go lend support.
In Pittsburgh, the 2018 shooting was also a time for the Jewish community itself to come together.
Squirrel Hill’s close-knit Jewish community crossed denominational divides to show support. An Orthodox rabbi organized a spreadsheet to manage the 24-hour vigils Jewish law prescribes over the bodies of the dead prior to burial.
“In Squirrel Hill, one of the nice things is there is a lot of community and solidarity across denominational lines and levels of observance,” said Oppenheimer, “and that’s pretty rare in American Judaism. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out in Detroit.”
A new reality
Iin recent years, the need for solidarity and resilience in the face of such attacks has become, unfortunately, more apparent.
When Oppenheimer wrote his book, he was able to state the shooting was “a unique event” in American history. It’s true that until the Tree of Life massacre, antisemitic violence had claimed just 26 lives in U.S. history. The U.S., more than any Western country, and far more than Israel itself, had truly been a safe haven for Jews.
Since Squirrel Hill, six more people have died in four attacks. The previously well-earned sense of safety has been shattered.
“While the odds that any given Jew will be attacked remain quite low, it is obviously pretty terrifying,” said Oppenheimer.
Some critics of the national focus that fell on Squirrel Hill after the Tree of Life shooting argued that the tragedy got far more attention than similar mass shootings that had befallen non-Jewish communities.
But it’s the very rarity of these attacks that makes them so shocking and, at least for American Jews, so memorable.
In this new normal, it’s even more important for Jews to form strong, mutually supportive bonds among themselves, and with others.
And the world moves on
Those bonds are especially crucial because while the victims of violence don’t soon forget and move on, the world does.
“It’s a short burst of solidarity, and then people leave. Understandably so,” Oppenheimer said.
I suspect that even though prayers of gratitude and deliverance will echo through the sanctuaries of Detroit — and in Jewish hearts everywhere — the attack will haunt its intended victims long after the police tape comes down.
What will make the difference in how the community faces those fears and moves forward is the amount of support it receives from those outside it. If the broader Bloomfield and Detroit community refuses to forget this awful incident, it will change the course of healing.
I asked Oppenheimer what lesson he learned from the Tree of Life aftermath could apply to Temple Israel.
“In Pittsburgh, there was a long history of people showing up for each other,” he said Oppenheimer. “The relationships, or lack of relationships, that exist become more noticeable when something goes wrong.”
“Where there are strong ties before a shooting, there are strong ties afterwards.”
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Political standoff causing DHS shutdown delays security grants for synagogues
(JTA) — A shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security since Feb. 14 is halting the review of millions of dollars in security funding for nonprofits, leaving Jewish institutions and other vulnerable groups in limbo at a moment of heightened concern about antisemitic threats.
The most recent threat came Thursday when an armed assailant rammed his vehicle into a large synagogue in suburban Detroit, where trained security forces shot at him and he was killed before he could injure anyone.
The closure stems from a political standoff over immigration enforcement: Senate Democrats are refusing to fund DHS unless the bill includes new oversight and limits on ICE operations, while Republicans and the Trump administration insist on passing funding without those changes. The dispute intensified after the killings of U.S. citizens during recent immigration operations.
Applications for the federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which helps synagogues, schools and community centers pay for security guards, cameras, reinforced doors and other protections were due Feb. 1 But because the program is administered through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a component of DHS, the ongoing shutdown has frozen the process before applications could be reviewed. An effort to end the shutdown failed in the Senate on Thursday.
That means organizations that spent months preparing proposals are now waiting indefinitely to learn whether they will receive funding, at a time of rising anxiety and threats.
The grant program has become a cornerstone of security planning for Jewish institutions across the United States, especially in the wake of sometimes deadly attacks. Demand for the grants has surged in recent years as antisemitic incidents have climbed and security costs have soared.
According to data from the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents in the United States have reached historic highs in recent years, with Jewish institutions frequently targeted with threats, vandalism and harassment. Community leaders say the uncertainty surrounding the grants is arriving at precisely the wrong moment.
The NSGP is designed to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars annually to nonprofits considered at high risk of attack. Organizations submit detailed applications outlining their vulnerabilities and the security improvements they hope to fund, which FEMA then reviews and awards through state agencies.
But during a federal shutdown, most DHS personnel responsible for reviewing those applications are furloughed. As a result, the process has effectively stalled.
For many nonprofits, the delay creates practical and financial uncertainty. Security upgrades such as surveillance systems, bollards, access-control systems and trained guards often depend on the grants, and institutions typically plan their budgets around the expectation of federal support.
Jewish communal security groups say the program has been one of the most successful federal efforts to help protect religious institutions. Michael Masters, CEO of the Secure Community Network, a Jewish security nonprofit, said Jewish organizations rely on federal funding to cover essential security needs, saying that it was “a challenge” that DHS was currently not processing security grant applications.
“There’s no other faith-based community in the United States that needs to spend $760 million a year, at a minimum, on security that we do,” Masters said. “That’s a reality of the threat environment that we have to adapt to, that we have adapted to.”
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A gunman rammed a Michigan synagogue. Its security preparations may have saved lives.
(JTA) — The suspected assailant, armed with rifles and smoke bombs, who rammed into Temple Israel on Thursday encountered a synagogue that was well prepared for just such an attack.
He hit and injured the congregation’s security director with his car as he plowed through the synagogue’s doors and drove down a hallway. But he didn’t manage to harm anyone else as he was found dead after trained and armed security guards shot at him
And because the rest of the staff knew exactly how to respond to an active shooter threat.
“We always worry that you can plan and plan and plan and practice and practice, and it won’t matter, because it will be something else, but it feels like a miracle that everything worked the way it was supposed to, that our team was so incredibly brave, local law enforcement’s been amazing, and that everybody’s OK,” Rabbi Jen Lader of Temple Israel told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard and West Bloomfield County Police Chief Dale Young also immediately praised the security response in the wake of the attack.
“I am deeply proud of the response, not only from the security that was on site, but also of all the police officers and the firefighters that are here right now, we train on active shooter events a lot,” Young said during a press conference outside the synagogue on Thursday. “I think that training certainly helped to mitigate what happened here today.”
Indeed, it was a situation that Jewish institutions across the United States have trained for, as antisemitism and threats of violence have ticked up in recent years, especially following the 2018 synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh that killed 11 Jews during Shabbat services. The rabbi of a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, credited a security training with enabling him to respond when a man took him and three congregations hostage in 2022.
“Everybody flees danger, and our team went straight toward it, and they were the ones who neutralized the terrorist and saved everybody,” said Lader. “And our teachers followed, you know, to the absolute letter, our active shooter training and lockdown procedures, and saved every kid.”
Beyond the synagogue’s full-time director of security, Lader said Temple Israel also has a full team of armed security guards on the premises at all times as well as a remote security system that is able to secure different areas of the building during threats.
In late January, FBI agents also visited Temple Israel to train clergy and staff about how to respond to an active shooter.
According to a social media post from FBI Detroit, the Active Shooter Attack Prevention and Preparedness course “combines lessons learned from years of research and employs scenario-based exercises to help participants practice the decision-making process of the Run, Hide, Fight principles and take necessary actions for survival.”
Michael Masters, the national director and CEO of the Secure Community Network, an organization that coordinates security for Jewish institutions nationwide, said that the outcomes of the attack Thursday reflected the preparedness of Temple Israel.
“Investing in security is an investment, it’s a down payment on the Jewish future,” said Masters. “The community that made up the synagogue, the larger Detroit Jewish community, has been making that investment for years and years, and today, that investment paid off and lives [were] saved.”
Among the security measures that Masters said his organization recommended were “bollards or fences or natural obstructions” to the building, controlling access to the facility through reinforced doors or windows and having a security presence.
“What we hope this reaffirms is that security needs to be an ongoing investment in order to allow Jewish life, faith based life, to thrive,” said Masters. “And very much that investment can result, and did result, in Jewish lives being saved, and so we all need to recognize that and commit ourselves as members of the community at every level to be a part of making that investment at whatever level we can.”
In the wake of the fatal shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington D.C. in June, the synagogue hosted a town hall on hate crimes and extremism.
Among the speakers at the town hall was Noah Arbit, a lifelong congregant of Temple Israel who represents West Bloomfield in the Michigan House of Representatives. Arbit said in an interview on Thursday that after he first learned of the attack while working on the state house floor, he immediately began to cry and raced down to his home synagogue.
“I campaigned on taking on hate crimes,” said Arbit. “To be working on these issues, and then to see it come home to roost in my own community, in my own synagogue, in my hometown that I represent is, frankly, just like my worst nightmare.”
While Arbit praised the response by security and law enforcement as the attack unfolded, he said he was “outraged and enraged and deeply pained that it was necessary in the first place.”
“Jewish communities across the country and world have watched, you know, for the past decade, as our institutions have congealed into fortresses,” he said. “We are now forced to live behind, basically, you know, militarized, institutionally securitized institutions, and what a shame that is. It’s not just a shame, It’s unfathomable, it’s unforgivable.”
For Rabbi Mark Miller of Temple Beth El, another Reform synagogue a 20-minute drive away in Bloomfield Hills, the attack on Temple Israel served as a stark reminder of why security infrastructure was essential for Jewish institutions.
“This is one of those moments when, for years and years, we have bemoaned that we have to put so much time and energy into security for our institutions,” said Miller. “And this is one of those days that reminds us that we don’t have a choice.”
Miller’s synagogue had a recent security crisis of its own, when a man drove through its parking lot in December 2022 and shouted antisemitic threats as parents walked their preschoolers into the building. The assailant, Hassan Chokr, was sentenced to 34 months in prison in September for illegally possessing multiple firearms inside a gun store after leaving the synagogue.
“It’s a terrifying day, obviously for a lot of people, especially for parents with their kids at not only Temple Israel but at ours and other temples and Jewish institutions,” Miller said.
Lader said that among her congregants, two competing sentiments had jumped out: Those who “never, in a million years, in our heart of hearts, thought it was ever going to happen to us” and others who “knew it was only a matter of time before it knocked on our door.”
But another feeling was even stronger, she said.
“I think the overarching sentiment, and the one that I want to make sure gets out there, is our absolute gratitude to our internal teams, our amazing staff, local law enforcement and our teachers for really, like, a building full of absolute heroes, who were able to keep us safe,” Lader said.
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