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In an unusual alliance, Jewish media and striking journalists are uniting to cover the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial
PITTSBURGH (JTA) — How many times should an alleged synagogue shooter’s name be mentioned in a news story about his trial, now beginning after more than four years?
For the Pittsburgh Union Press last month, the answer was seven. For the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, it was an uneasy five, in a departure from its usual answer of zero — a number chosen out of deference to a community devastated by the shooting.
The slight difference was the only discrepancy between one set of stories published by the two news organizations covering the trial of Robert Bowers, accused of murdering 11 Jews in their synagogue here in 2018.
The anomaly offers a window into an unusual partnership between the two publications — the city’s Jewish paper and the news site established by striking staffers for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — born in February when it became clear that the trial would last months.
Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle editor Toby Tabachnick was dreading the trial coverage, with a staff of just three on the editorial side: herself and two reporters, David Rullo and Adam Reinherz.
“I started getting really nervous. Like, how are we going to do this?” Tabachnick said on the eve of the trial, speaking at the federal courthouse where jury selection would soon begin. “Our regular reporters could have been here. But it would have been extremely taxing, difficult and emotional for us, because we’re so ingrained in the community too.”
Plus, she added, “In addition to this trial, which is going to be every day for three months, we’re covering the synagogues, events and the holidays, the lectures, we still have a regular community newspaper to put out.”
Tabachnick knew Andrew “Goldy” Goldstein, one of the Post-Gazette’s team that picked up a Pulitzer for their coverage of the massacre, from his time as a Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle intern. She also knew he was on strike and wondered whether he could use the extra freelance opportunity.
Instead, Goldstein immediately offered up a better idea: Join with the Pittsburgh Union Progress, the strike paper, in a joint reporting project, organized in part through the Pittsburgh Media Partnership, an incubator for local journalism. (The Jewish Telegraphic Agency is raising funds for the coverage.)
Working together just made sense, Goldstein said. The Chronicle was deeply resourced and credible in the Jewish community, and the Progress had on board Torsten Ove, a local legend.
From left to right, Bob Batz of the Pittsburgh Union Progress, Toby Tabachnick of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle and Andrew Goldstein of the Progress pose in the Joseph Weis Jr. Courthouse in Pittsburgh, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
“We have the all-star federal courts reporter in Torsten and we have a lot of really great journalists who love Pittsburgh, love this community, and we’ll do our best to cover it,” Goldstein said, noting that the Chronicle would also have access to the Progress’s photographers. “But the Chronicle brings something different entirely to the table, which is, they’re so deeply sourced in the Pittsburgh Jewish community, and they have such an interest in this trial in particular.”
Newsroom collaborations have become more frequent in recent years as publications realize they can expand their impact and audience by working together. But while there are a growing number of relationships between local and national publications and between daily and investigative outlets, ties between mainstream newsrooms and community or ethnic media are less common.
S. Mitra Kalita, the founder and director of URL Media, a network of Black and Brown community news outlets that share content and revenue, said the value in such partnerships was not just in delivering relief as media staffs shrink, but also in sensitizing mainstream media to minority sensibilities.
“Talking about who [the ethnic media outlet is] serving and why we’re doing it this way — the spirit of real collaboration is a bit of that give and take,” she said. “We make mainstream media way better because it starts to infuse mainstream media with aspects of community and thus redefine the mainstream.”
The residual trauma of the massacre in the Pittsburgh collaboration made it all the more important for the mainstream reporters to be sensitive to the nuances that the Jewish media was bringing, she said.
“Especially a story like this one, which was such an attack on a community — a community that was singled out for their sheer existence, the strategy cannot be ‘let’s just work in parallel,” Kalita said. “It’s not going to work. It has to be kind of a cross-pollination and a real collaboration.”
That’s exactly what is happening, according to the reporters and editors involved in the project, with communication easy between each publication’s editor and expertise flowing in both directions.
Ove a denizen of the Joseph F. Weis Jr. Courthouse for so long that he can tell stories about a sizable stretch of the portraits of judges that line its corridor walls; he may be the only court reporter to seek an interview with a judge after his death, to ask him why he was haunting the place. (The judge never showed, but his widow was less than surprised to hear that he was still working.)
He led a passel of Chronicle and Progress staffers through the warren-like courthouse on the Friday before the trial, handily impressing them with his intimacy with the building — he knew the provenance of the paintings in each courtroom — and its staff. Soo Song, the assistant U.S. attorney who is leading the prosecution team, smiled and nodded as she passed.
Torsten Ove, left, of the Pittsburgh Union Progress and Adam Reinherz of the PIttsburgh Jewish Chronicle confer on the first day of jury selection for the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre trial, April 24, 2023. (Toby Tabachnick)
Ove showed the reporters how to access court records for free, and while they stood around him at one of the computer terminals, the teams’ different emphases emerged: Ove predicted that jury selection, which started last week and is expected to last as long as three weeks, would not be a news generator, because in his experience, it rarely has been.
Reinherz and Tabachnick, attuned to reporting on faith communities, were not so sure: Reinherz wondered whether believing Catholics, who reject the death penalty, would be eliminated, and Tabachnick wondered whether defense attorneys would seek to keep Jews off the jury — and how they would go about doing that.
Reinherz ended up covering the first day of jury selection. “Local and national reporters decided the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle should have one seat during the initial session of day one,” Reinherz explained in a story that appeared on both news sites. He noted that the first member of the public to enter the courtroom was Daniel Leger, one of two survivors of the attack.
Working together across platforms was odd, said Bob Batz Jr., the Progress’s interim editor, but he could get used to it.
“This is uncharted territory for someone like me, and I’ve been doing this for a long time, and we don’t, you know, we don’t collaborate,” he said.
“We compete!” Tabachnick interjected.
“What we’re doing is not common, and it’s not going to be easy,” Batz said. “Surely, we’re going to tick each other off about something or somebody is going to put the wrong word in or there’s a million things that can go wrong, but the breaking of ground where you’re actually working together, it just makes sense in so many ways on this story. We’re really trying to serve the community.”
Tabachnick said she saw added value in keeping journalists she admired in the limelight while they are on strike. Journalists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette went on strike back in October over wages and working conditions, in a crescendo of mounting tensions between the paper’s longtime owners and the staff that contributed to a newsroom exodus even in 2018, when the paper won a Pulitzer for its synagogue shooting coverage. The strike is now one of the longest in journalism history, and the staffers contributing to the Pittsburgh Union Progress are doing so despite earning well below than their regular salaries.
“I feel good about getting their names, their publication’s name out,” Tabachnick said.
Each story is running in essentially identical form on both publications’ websites, with a line crediting their collaboration. Tabachnick and Batz had a brief and friendly email exchange before each clicked “publish” on their story about debate among victims’ families about the appropriateness of the death penalty.
The Chronicle is minimizing appearances of the name of the accused killer, out of sensitivity to readers who may want to see their community members centered rather than their aggressor. Some researchers and law enforcement officials have also called on journalists not to print mass shooters’ names and photographs, citing evidence that doing so may contribute to their glorification and even copycat crimes.
Batz says he totally gets the Chronicle’s thinking, despite making a different choice in his newsroom.
“We’re still feeling our way, we’re still figuring this out,” Batz said. “They don’t name the defendant in their story, and they haven’t. And our guy Torsten who’s an all-star courts reporter, he’s going to use the guy’s name. And then in real time going back and forth on email and text we came up with his solution and that story was on both websites in minutes and it was really kind of cool.”
Tabachnick picked up the account of the previous night’s collaboration as if she’d been working across a desk from Batz for decades instead of online since February.
“The solution was that I realized that with the trial starting, it really didn’t make sense not to use his name at all anymore that we really needed to as a news organization,” she said. “But that didn’t mean we had to overuse his name. And I’m not saying Torsten overused his name. He used it as much as he needed to use it in terms of style, but I took out a few of them and replaced it with ‘the defendant’ and we were all happy.”
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Mahmoud Abbas Gave Direct Orders to Name Hall After Palestinian Hitler Ally
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, meets with Adolf Hitler in 1941. Photo: German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons.
During World War II, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin Al-Husseini was a Nazi ally and an associate of Hitler, living in Germany from 1941 until the war’s end — and receiving funding from the Nazi government.
The Mufti also led the lethal 1936-1939 Arab Revolt, in which at least 400 Jews were murdered.
Now the Palestinian Authority (PA) has built and named a public hall after Al-Husseini — and none other than PA leader Mahmoud Abbas himself instructed PA officials about the naming, thereby making a public statement about which historical values the PA chooses to uphold.
When laying the building’s cornerstone, PA officials stressed that the naming of the hall is “out of loyalty to the great figures of our people”:
Text on sign: “Under the auspices of His Honor President
Mahmoud Abbas, may Allah protect him
President of the State of Palestine
His Honor Jericho and Jordan Valley District Governor Dr. Hussein Hamayel
And His Honor Jericho Mayor Mr. Abd Al-Karim Sidr
laid the cornerstone for the Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husseini Hall”
Under the auspices of [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas, yesterday, Sunday, [Feb. 15, 2026,] Jericho and Jordan Valley District Governor Hussein Hamayel and Jericho Mayor Abd Al-Karim Sidr laid the cornerstone for the Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husseini Multi-Purpose Hall …District Governor Hamayel emphasized that the laying of the cornerstone was done out of loyalty to the great figures of our people, and according to direct instructions from President [Abbas] regarding the need to commemorate the memory of the leaders and fighters. [emphasis added]
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Feb. 16, 2026]
Deciding to put a specific person’s name on a public building is a deliberate statement of values. By elevating an individual like Nazi ally Al-Husseini, Abbas and the PA aren’t just labeling a hall — they are officially endorsing Al-Husseini as a hero for the entire community.
Haj Amin Al-Husseini was also featured at a PA event held under the auspices of PA Prime Minister Muhammad Mustafa, with numerous PA and Fatah officials in attendance, during the marking of the 150th anniversary of the private, coeducational Catholic school Collège des Frères in Jerusalem.
On a huge screen, organizers displayed an image of Al-Husseini. Al-Husseini was on Yugoslavia’s list of wanted war criminals, and was responsible for a Muslim SS division that murdered thousands of Serbs and Croats. When the Nazis offered to free some Jewish children, Al-Husseini fought against their release, and as a result, 5,000 children were sent to the gas chambers.
The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this story first appeared.
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I First Experienced Antisemitism at Six Years Old; But We Must Never Let Hate Win
An Oxford student is seen chanting hateful slogans at Jews, during a pro-Palestinian march in central London, an incident captured on viral video that has drawn widespread condemnation. Photo: Screenshot
When I was six years old, my father founded Carmel College, and moved the family into the English countryside west of London. My father’s school initially only took pupils of a certain age. So, I was sent to a local Church of England village school with one teacher, located just outside the Carmel estate.
For the first time, I became aware of Christian antagonism when I was surrounded by other pupils, bullied, and told that I had killed Jesus. Even at six-years old, I had a mind of my own, and told off the other children. The teacher was furious, got in touch with my father, and insisted that he remove me from the school. Instead, he arranged for home schooling until I was able to join Carmel College.
Several years later, during school holidays, I would walk the three miles from the school to Wallingford, the nearest town, with enough pocket money to buy a ticket to the local cinema. When I got there, the manager told me that the price had gone up, and I didn’t have enough money to get in. I replied that I thought this was unfair and that as I had walked all this way, perhaps he could make an exception. But he replied that since I was a Jew, I should know all about money, because that’s all that mattered to Jews. It was another incident that reinforced my awareness that we were different and not very popular.
A few years later, when I was old enough to play on the school soccer team, we often went to play against non-Jewish schools. In almost every case, either our opponents or the local spectators would abuse us for being Jewish and often played rough either to test us or to express their antagonism. When I mentioned this to my father his response, surprisingly, was simply to tell us to repay them in kind.
The first debate I participated in at Cambridge University in the Union was on the biased subject of whether the Jews had any right to “take” the state of “Palestine” from the Arabs. I argued our case strongly and we won the vote. In those days, the voices of those who supported Israel’s right to exist were strong enough to win the argument.
I was always aware of anti-Jewish sentiment. But it was mainly low key, and I could hardly say that I suffered. Anyway, I had sufficient confidence in my Jewish identity not to let it get to me.
Later I became a rabbi in London and I accepted Chief Rabbi Jakobovitz’s invitation to become responsible in his cabinet for interfaith relations. For a few years I devoted myself to establishing good relations with the various Christian denominations and with Muslims, who at that stage were still relatively new to England and were grateful for the support and encouragement we gave them.
I enjoyed these interactions and conferences and the friendships, some of which I have to this day. But I soon became aware that the interfaith world comprised a small layer of intelligent, sensitive good men and women of all faiths. Although they got on well with each other, they seemed to have little impact on the vast majority of the members of their different religions who were still mired in prejudice and so I withdrew.
I mentioned all these little things because I am conscious of the fact that these small little things affected my sense of alienation, although I was also aware of how wonderful and rewarding the small acts of friendship and warmth were.
Many of our children will experience much more alienation than we had to. We have to fight more prejudice and one-sided information today, and indeed, there are many Jews who prefer joining our enemies. Despite everything, we must encourage good relations with other human beings — many of whom also fight against prejudice and discrimination. Little things can have a huge impact, both ways.
The author is a writer and rabbi based in New York.
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What Is the BBC Telling Children About Iran’s Nuclear Program?
A satellite image shows un‑buried tunnel entrances at Isfahan nuclear complex, in Isfahan, Iran, Nov. 11, 2024. Photo: Vantor/Handout via REUTERS
On February 28, the BBC published an uncredited report headlined “US and Israel launch attacks on Iran” on its CBBC (Children’s BBC) website’s Newsround page.
Newsround is described as “the home of trusted news for kids and young people,” and is aimed at children between the ages of six and 12.
That report opens as follows: [emphasis added]
The US and Israel have launched attacks on Iran, which is a country in the Middle East.
US President Donald Trump said in a video that the American military has begun “major combat operations” in Iran.
In a statement, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his country was working with the US to remove what he called a threat to both countries.
It comes after US talks with Iran to try and stop them from developing a nuclear weapon, something that Iran denies it is doing.
In a later section sub-headed “What are nuclear weapons,” the BBC’s young audiences are told that:
Iran has been long suspected of trying to build a nuclear bomb, which it has always denied.
It says its nuclear research is for peaceful purposes, like making electricity. For many years a United Nations body (called the IAEA) has said that Iran has not been following rules on sharing information about its nuclear programme.
While this is by no means the first time that the BBC has amplified Iran’s denials concerning its nuclear program, it is particularly disappointing to see the younger generation being fed that disinformation, especially given that the BBC has itself reported in the past that:
Nuclear power stations typically need about 3-5% of this enriched uranium to generate a controlled nuclear reaction that releases energy.
But when the aim is to make a nuclear weapon, a much higher proportion of uranium-235 is needed – about 90%.
The BBC knows full well that Iran’s levels of enrichment of uranium-235 have reached at least 60% — a level which has no civilian use and is far higher than needed to “make electricity.”
It also knows that Iran has actively (and in violation of international agreement) prevented the IAEA from inspecting its nuclear facilities, including the storage site for some of its highly enriched uranium.
The BBC is no doubt familiar with the long history of the Iranian regime’s nuclear aspirations, as well as its more recent developments.
The BBC also ought to be able to inform its younger audiences about that regime’s history of using proxies and ballistic missiles to attack Israel — and of its repeated threats to destroy the country. However, this “trusted news” article airbrushes all such important context and instead tells readers that:
Israel and Iran have been enemies for many years, but in recent times the tension between the countries has resulted in military attacks on each other.
If, for reasons best known to itself, the BBC thinks that it is ticking the impartiality box by uncritically amplifying the Iranian regime’s redundant denials concerning its nuclear program, it should at least also provide the background information that would enable its audiences — whether adults or children — to put those denials into their appropriate context.
The failure to do so means that Britain’s national broadcaster simply continues to promote the disinformation put out by a repressive, theocratic regime.
Hadar Sela is the co-editor of CAMERA UK – an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a version of this article first appeared.