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In Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial, Jewish rituals feature as prominently as the carnage of the day
PITTSBURGH (JTA) — Testifying at the trial of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, Carol Black described how, right before he opened fire, she had taken her yarmulke and tallis out of her velvet tallis bag.
But first, she had to explain what a yarmulke, tallis and tallis bag were.
“In my briefcase is a blue velvet bag that has a zipper on it,” she said. “I have a Ziploc bag of yarmulkes I would wear and a tallis I would wear.” A yarmulke was a “head covering,” she explained, and a tallis was a “prayer shawl.” The items, she said, “just signified being in the presence of God and being respectful.”
Black, 71, was the second witness to testify on Wednesday, the second day of the capital murder trial of the alleged gunman, Robert Bowers. She was one of a few witnesses who interspersed heart-rending testimony about the trial with, effectively, a crash course on Jewish ritual.
Black recalled how she sat in the second seat in from the aisle, because the aisle seat was where her brother Richard Gottfried sat, and they shared gabbai duties. Then Black explained the role of a “gabbai” — calling congregants to the Torah and helping them read through a passage. She described Pesukei d’Zimra, the morning service’s opening prayers, and spelled out the Hebrew name of the morning service, Shacharit, for the court reporter.
“I had just started to open the bag and I heard a loud bang,” she said. “To me it sounded like somebody had dropped a table on the metal floor.”
She added, “The first two sounds, I didn’t recognize them as gunfire. You don’t go to a synagogue and expect to hear gunfire.”
The focus of the trial is the gunfire — the shooting on Oct. 27, 2018 that killed 11 Jews praying at three congregations: Tree of Life, New Light and Dor Hadash. But for the prosecution, explaining the synagogue — and the practices that take place in it — is also proving to be crucial. The painful collision on that Shabbat morning of the sacred and the profane is key to the prosecution’s case that the defendant merits the death penalty.
Of the 63 federal charges Bowers is facing, 22 are capital crimes: two for each of the 11 fatalities that morning, including Black’s brother, Richard Gottfried. One is “obstruction of free exercise of religious beliefs resulting in death” and the other is murder, enhanced with a hate crime charge. So prosecutors, seeking to show that the shooting was motivated by antisemitism, are probing witnesses about their Judaism and how they express it.
“As they did every Saturday, men and women of the Jewish faith made their way to the synagogue, to observe Shabbat,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Soo Song said in her opening statement on Tuesday. “To pray to God in the sanctity and refuge of their shared Jewish faith.”
Conversely, defense lawyer Judy Clarke is out to prove that her client targeted the congregants not because of their religion per se but because of a delusion that they were facilitating an immigration invasion to replace whites. Both she and prosecutors have said in court that he committed the attack.
Clarke occasionally objected when the testimony veered into how American Jews worship, or into explaining what animates Jewish practice. None of her objections to explaining Judaism were sustained — including one where she had tried to preempt the director of one of the congregations’ religious schools from explaining its educational precepts.
Describing the curriculum, Wendy Kobee, the director of the religious school of Dor Hadash, a Reconstructionist congregation, said, “Religious prayers, religious practices, cultural values.”
“Among the cultural values taught at the school was the concept of welcoming the stranger?” prosecutor Mary Hahn asked.
“Yes, that would have been incorporated into the curriculum in an age-appropriate way,” Kobee said.
Both the defense and prosecution acknowledge that the defendant, a white supremacist, targeted the building because Dor Hadash had partnered with HIAS, the Jewish refugee aid group, to celebrate what the group called National Refugee Shabbat.
The trial is shaping up as a seminar on American Jewish tradition. Witnesses have provided the judge, jury and spectators with an impromptu glossary of Jewish terms, and an introduction to parts of modern Jewish thought. Dan Leger, a member of Dor Hadash who was injured in the attack, outlined the teachings of the Reconstructionist movement’s founder, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan.
Kaplan’s “approach is one of looking at the Bible, the Torah specifically as something that guides our life in ways that give value in social interaction,” Leger said. “One of the ways it is most highly demonstrated is welcoming those into the community who need assistance, who need support whether or not they are Jewish, welcoming immigrants into the country.”
Prosecutors also asked witnesses about Jewish practice in order to explain what happened on the day of the shooting. Song asked Leger to explain tallit katan, the small prayer shawl colloquially known as tzitzit that observant men traditionally wear under their clothing, and why he did not have a cell phone handy when the gunman opened fire. It was Shabbat, when some Jews abstain from using electronic devices, he explained.)
Another prosecutor asked Barry Werber, who testified later, why he preferred to attend services at New Light on Friday night and for Sunday breakfasts and not on Saturdays. He liked to sleep in on Saturdays, he said, but he went to services on the morning of the shooting because he felt obliged to honor his mother on her yahrzeit. He explained that a yahrzeit was “the anniversary of someone’s death.”
Like Tree of Life’s rabbi, Jeffrey Myers, had on Tuesday, Leger testified that he recited the Shema when he believed he was dying, after the gunman shot him in the abdomen. He translated the Torah verse and central Jewish prayer for the jury. Leger, a retired registered nurse, and another Dor Hadash congregant, Jerry Rabinowitz, a physician, had run into the shooting to help the injured. Rabinowitz was killed.
“I thought about the wonder of my life, the beauty of it all, the happiness I had experienced, the joy of having two beautiful sons and a wonderful wife and the wife previous to that wife, all the wonderful friends I have in the world,” Leger said. “I prayed for forgiveness for those who I have wronged in my life. I was ready to go.”
The defendant, wearing a dark blue sweater and a light blue collared shirt, his arms folded, stared at Leger.
The stories on the witness stand offered windows into American Jewish families and history. Gottfried started attending New Light after his mother died in 1992, Black testified about her brother, but she said she remained uninterested in frequent synagogue attendance until she injured a hip running about a decade ago. Gottfried, who was younger, encouraged her to come to services, and she celebrated her bat mitzvah as an adult.
“In Uniontown [Pennsylvania] where I grew up, in our Conservative congregation, which incidentally was called Tree of Life, girls did not get bat mitzvahed,” she said.
Black and Werber both discussed the social aspect of Shabbat services, describing the propensity of Melvin Wax, a New Light congregant, to tell jokes. Werber recalled that just before the shooting, Wax was telling jokes to Cecil Rosenthal.
Yet along with descriptions of how ritual and prayer bound the synagogue communities together, the testimonies all came back to the horrific details of the shooting itself.
After sitting with Wax, Werber said, Rosenthal went back upstairs, where the gunman shot him multiple times. Down in the New Light sanctuary, Rabbi Jonathan Perlman led Werber, Wax and Black into a storeroom behind the bimah. Richard Gottfried was in an adjacent kitchen with another New Light congregant, Dan Stein, preparing breakfast for the next morning. He called 911.
The gunman came down the stairs and killed Gottfried and Stein. There was a pause, so Wax peeked out of the storeroom to see what was happening. The gunman shot him twice, and he fell at Black’s feet. The gunman hovered a while in the area and then retreated.
Eventually, emergency responders found the group hidden in the store room. Wax’s body still lay there.
“I had to step over him to get past him,” Black testified, her voice cracking. “Quietly to myself I said goodbye to him and followed the officers.”
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An unvarnished look at Polish Hasidic life before the Holocaust
In the decades before the Holocaust, Warsaw still teemed with Hasidim. Muranowska Street was virtually lined with shtiblekh (prayer and study houses), each with its own dynastic affiliation. But one day, a young man established a new shop on the street and brazenly kept it open on the Sabbath. Modernity had arrived.
Some Hasidim didn’t seem too concerned. As we read in the new English translation of Yechiel Hofer’s Hasidic Warsaw: Reb Zalmen and the Aleksander Shtibl, the protagonist, Reb Zalman, dismissed the whole scandal. The Sabbath, he shrugged, was simply too holy to be violated by people so unworthy. And in truth, Warsaw’s Hasidic enclaves continued to thrive, albeit in a more concentrated form.
Most Yiddish authors assumed the inevitable demise of Jewish tradition. In story after story, we read about pious, aging parents watching helplessly as their sons and daughters reject their ancestors’ ways to become Zionists, revolutionaries, assimilationists and, of course, Yiddish writers. Nobody, it seemed, could hold back the tide of progress.
But many interwar Polish Hasidic leaders were actually galvanized by the challenge of secularization. They launched ambitious, transnational fundraising initiatives, refurbished thousands of heders [traditional primary schools], and built hundreds of Hasidic yeshivas and Bais Yaakov girls’ schools. And as Hofer’s book shows, their shtiblekh recovered and proliferated down to the bitter end.
Hasidic Warsaw is one of the few works of modern Yiddish literature to present Hasidism as something other than moribund. Reminiscent of I.B. Singer’s In My Father’s Court, but more gracious, Hofer’s stories bring us into one corner of this impossibly thriving world: a Warsaw shtibl attended by followers of the Aleksander Rebbe. Reb Zalman, an irritable luftmensch (unemployed dreamer), is the shtibl’s most zealous member and the Hofer family’s most frequent Sabbath guest.
Reb Zalman’s pauper’s arrogance exasperates even his fellow Hasidim, who cannot resist pranking him. They appoint him “Purim Rabbi,” ply him with liquor, and get him to accept bribes. They lure him out of his Hasidic enclave to experience Gentile taunts and glares. Some try to help him gain a livelihood, but he proudly self-sabotages. Their most lucrative scheme, a tavern in the shtibl, fails because Reb Zalman decides to give all the liquor away.
Then there is Reb Zalman’s misogyny. He disdains his kind host, Hofer’s mother, who is “strictly observant, pious and indeed a Hasid in her own right.” She tactfully challenges his prejudices by recounting stories of her Grandmother Brayndl, a passionate follower of a Hasidic group called the Porisover Hasidim, who used to travel regularly to see the Rebbe, Reb Yankev Hersh [and] was deeply respected at the Rebbe’s court.” Yet Reb Zalman scoffs at even the most revered Hasidic women.
Hofer, in short, doesn’t romanticize interwar Hasidism. But he doesn’t dismiss it either. His family’s Sabbath table, he writes, provided even the ungrateful poor with a slice of Heaven. In the Aleksander shtibl, “deep seriousness combined with high-minded joy reigned.” Reb Zalman’s gift for quirky storytelling almost redeemed him in Hofer’s eyes.
Jonathan Boyarin is among the few scholars able to grasp not only the external, quantitative significance of the Polish Hasidic shtibl but its inner life: imperfect men swaying in prayer, chants, and study, occasionally halting to make a toast with vodka and herring or recount another edifying story. Yet Boyarin remains deeply attuned to Hofer’s gentle irony.
Hasidic Warsaw, with its multitude of stories-within-stories, is in a sense a work of collective authorship. We behold a community of storytellers constantly striving to make each other better by means of humorous, cautionary tales. Secularist Yiddish writers drew liberally from such stories, stylizing and serializing them to great acclaim while assuming the demise of the very movement that sustained them. But only physical annihilation could do that.
The reader of Hasidic Warsaw is left with a deep sense of loss. Without storytelling, how can we hope to regain that kind of connectedness? How can future Jewish literature emerge as easily and naturally? In honoring the art of storytelling, Hasidic Warsaw reminds us of yet another world that was lost in the Holocaust.
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Peter Lorre, decades after ‘Casablanca,’ is the breakout star of ‘Coyote Vs. Acme’
The character actor Peter Lorre died in 1964. The doctor Peter Lorre is alive, quite possibly immortal and has never looked better.
In Coyote Vs. Acme, the long-awaited legal comedy in which Wile E. Coyote sues the mega-corporation behind all his contraption needs for decades of grievous injury, the Good Doctor is seen smuggling evidence outside of Acme labs. Soon thereafter, the company’s security forces him to step into a black hole in the ground that is then rolled up like an old carpet.
As a man who knows too much, he’s a threat to the business.
If it seems strange that the Hungarian-born Jewish performer known for his turn as a child murderer in M and black market peddler Ugarte in Casablanca should be revived as a whistleblower, you may be forgetting his earlier appearances in the Looney canon.
The first was as himself, voiced by Mel Blanc, sitting with a crowd of celebs in Ciro’s nightclub and admiring an oversized bubble covering up a burlesque performer. That short from 1941 scans as uncomfortably close to the house style of the Der Stürmer cartoonists. In subsequent episodes, Lorre was caricatured as a mad scientist, though shrunk down considerably even as his role grew.
In Hair-Raising Hare, Dr. Lorre lures Bugs Bunny into his castle in the hopes of feeding him to the gargantuan red monster Gossamer. (A flashing neon sign on his lair indicates that he is an “Evil Scientist.”) Bugs gets the upper hand by providing a manicure to the tennis-shoed behemoth, jousting him into a tin can and ultimately spooking him by drawing his attention to the fourth wall.
When Daffy Duck tricks his way into Lorre’s suburban home in Birth of a Notion, the diminutive doc tries through a series of booby traps to recover his wishbone for a science experiment. (Stan Freberg voices Lorre in this one.) When Daffy manages his escape, Lorre’s eyes turn toward his dog, Leopold, prompting the pooch to make his exit.
In these treatments Lorre is a lonely, depressive psychopath of the sort Lorre excelled at playing. His revival for 2003’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action reimagined him as a different sort of villain: an underling for the Acme Corporation.
What Coyote Vs. Acme does is revolutionary not just for exploring the liability implications of cartoon case law, but for the redemption it offers Lorre, a kind of fitting tribute to a Hollywood legend whose life and career was cut tragically short by chronic pain and addiction.
This Lorre, who’s had a bit of a glow-up, sacrifices himself to sound the alarm for Acme’s evil R&D methods. It’s an apt arc for a refugee from Nazi Germany, among whose most recognizable work is his role in perhaps the greatest anti-fascist film of all time. While Ugarte takes advantage of refugees desperate for exit visas in Casablanca, the real Lorre helped many flee Europe ahead of World War II, just as cartoon Lorre works on behalf of his fellow toons. (His role as a complicit scientist also recalls his lone directorial effort, The Lost One, in which he plays a Nazi chemist haunted by the war.)
Coyote Vs. Acme’s Lorre also plays piano — not with a disembodied hand — and is revealed to be in a long-lasting — 80-plus years! — marriage with Tweety’s doting owner Granny.
With the film marking the largest-ever opening for Ketchup Entertainment, which snagged the distribution rights after Warner Bros opted to ditch the flick for a tax write-off, it’s too soon to tell if it will herald a Looney Tunes renaissance. However it shakes out, it has singlehandedly upped Peter Lorre representation in the films of 2026.
For those who don’t despise him — or who give him any thought — that’s victory enough.
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Bedouin shepherds found it. A bishop sold it. An Israeli agent bought it. Now you can see it up close.
The magnificent 717-centimeter ancient Isaiah scroll on view right now at The Israel Museum, for the first time in 60 years, is drawing so many people that the museum has set strict guidelines for visitors.
To see the scroll — meaning the original, handwritten, non-facsimile, version that survived for two thousand years in jars hidden in a cave — with your own eyes, all 23 1/2 feet of it, you need to register by 8 a.m.
Once you are at the exhibit entrance, you need to wait your turn; you have to watch a film first about the incredible story of how the Isaiah scroll was found by Bedouin shepherds in a remote cave near the Dead Sea, sold to Archbishop Samuel, head of the Syrian Orthodox Monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem, then read and evaluated by a professor whose son became Israeli military royalty, photographed by an American scholar, sent by the bishop to the U.S. for a tour of several leading universities in the hope of snaring a very high price, and then at long last, clandestinely purchased by an agent hiding that he was representing Israel from a small and seemingly innocuous ad in The Wall Street Journal. Then you have exactly 10 minutes in a temperature-controlled room with the scroll.
There is something spiritual and moving about seeing this gigantic, complete, handwritten scroll that was literally hidden in a cave for millennia. What is remarkable about it, Professor Noam Mizrahi of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem explains in a video you can watch after you check the scroll out for yourself, is first of all its age.
“It is over two thousand years old,” he explains. To be precise, the scroll was written in 125 BCE. The other amazing aspect of it is its fullness — not only are all 66 chapters there, but the Hebrew is written in a full way.
What does that mean, exactly? Consider the first line, “This is the vision of Isaiah the son of Amotz,” written in the scroll as “Yishayahu ben Amotz.” You can see with your own eyes that the original scribe wrote “Yeshaya,” and that another, later, scribe, added a letter, the ayin, so that it now reads “Yishayahu” as Isaiah is pronounced in today’s Hebrew.
It offers a glimpse into ancient pronunciation, Mizrahi explained. I would add that it also offers a glimpse into editing — writers are never done.
And maybe the Jewish people are never done discussing what the vision of Isaiah is, and what it means. This particular scroll wasn’t a museum artifact in the early days.
“It was in use for at least 100 years,” Mizrahi said — you can tell from the corrections.
But back to that fullness. This is a neatly written scroll of a text so many of us recognize — timeless, the curator Hagit Maoz commented in the video, and about peace, and justice. Maybe my vision is failing, but it was hard to make out psukim, or verses, I knew by heart.
This is not because the handwriting wasn’t neat — each aleph was distinct and perfect — but because the letters are small. I found myself cheating by taking a picture with my phone and enlarging it. Then I felt guilty for wasting a bit of my precious ten minutes on technology.
My group included a woman with a seeing-eye dog. If I could barely make out the letters, what could she see?
But the scroll is not just about seeing. It is about feeling. You can feel that this text is connected to this place. It’s the feeling of being here, of being near something written thousands of years ago by hand, something ours, something whole. There is the feeling that this is where Isaiah roamed, and this is where this incredible book — this timeless piece of Jewish literature — began.
Once the ten minutes are up, visitors are ushered into another room with a copy of the Isaiah scroll enlarged, and with key verses highlighted. There was the dream of peace, I thought as I looked at individual verses — the wolf dwelling with the lamb — and then there is the reality. The other day, I heard a young guy tell a date he had done 600 days of miluim, or reserve service.
I found myself refocusing on the true story of how the Isaiah scroll made it to the public. I couldn’t get enough of the details.
From shepherds to The Wall Street Journal
When Bedouin shepherds chased a sheep sometime in early 1947, they reached challenging terrain across from the northwest rim of the Dead Sea that no one else was willing to enter.
They heard a piece of pottery in a cave crack.
Curious, they went inside and found seven scrolls inside jars in the cave. They took them out, not knowing what they were. The museum explains that the bishop, who purchased the scrolls, consulted Eleazar Sukenik of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who immediately realized he was looking at an ancient Isaiah scroll and copied some sections; he told the bishop he was interested in purchasing the scrolls, both the ones in his possession and those still with the shepherds.
According to the Israel Antiquities Authority website when Sukenik learned of the scrolls’ discovery, he set out to investigate their significance. “Braving Arab-Jewish tensions, he travelled to meet the Armenian dealer at the British divided military zone of the Jerusalem border. In this clandestine meeting, the dealer held up a fragment of leather for the professor to examine. As Sukenik peered through the wire, he recognized the ancient writing.”
Incredibly, on Nov. 29, 1947, on the very same day as the United Nations vote on the Partition Plan, the historic vote which led to the establishment of Israel, Prof. Sukenik bought three of the seven scrolls.
Meanwhile, the bishop decided to get another opinion on his four scrolls, from an American scholar in Jerusalem who was the first to photograph them. By March 1948, convinced of the scrolls’ value and concerned for their safety as the War of Independence raged, the bishop had his assistant take the scrolls to a bank in Beirut, where they were held in a safe.
In Dec. 1948, the bishop headed to Beirut, picked up the scrolls, when gone to New Jersey, where he hoped to sell them.
Echoes of history
Learning of the scrolls, I couldn’t help but think of the great Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever and the Paper Brigade in Vilna. As the Nazis tried to annihilate the Jewish people, great writers risked their lives to save Jewish literature and culture, to hide it for the future. It’s a repeating theme in Jewish history — the military battle and the cultural battle, continuing at the same time.
Sadly, Professor Sukenik lost a son to battle in the war.
Then the professor himself died.
But the family’s passionate connection to the Isaiah scroll was not over. The professor’s other son, Yigael Yadin, who would become both a major scholar and a military leader, was in New York in the early 1950s and happened to read a small advertisement in The Wall Street Journal offering four scrolls. He guessed that the Isaiah scrolls his father wanted had been spirited off to the United States; he wired Israel to tell the new government to find $150,000. (Here, some Jewish philanthropy helped.)
It turns out that the bishop’s representative had tried to sell — to the Library of Congress, the Walters Gallery in Baltimore, Duke University, and The University of Chicago — but all refused. He failed because Jordan claimed the scrolls belonged to it because of where they had been found, while Israel claimed they were theirs because of cultural heritage.
Yadin hired an agent to conceal that Israel was the actual buyer, and the four were purchased on July 1, 1954. On July 9, the Isaiah scroll was separated and spirited to Israel by plane, with other planes escorting it for safety.
The Israel Museum built the Shrine of the Book to house the scroll, and it was opened to the public in 1955. But in 1968, the real scroll was replaced with a very good facsimile for the scroll’s continued safety.
Now, in honor of the museum’s 60th anniversary, the real thing is on view. My advice — don’t miss it.
“A Voice from the Desert: The Great Isaiah Scroll” is on view at the Israel Museum through Oct. 3.
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