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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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‘Mr. Jambo’ is the sendup of Paul Simon that we need now
Paul Simon may be having his quiet celebration, but a viral music video refuses to let the musical icon go quietly for his classic, but often questionable, forays into Africa.
Jewish comedian and musician Kyle Gordon’s song “Mr. Jambo” is both tribute and critical sendup of 1986’s Graceland, Simon’s seminal ethnomusicology experiment, for which he controversially broke a cultural boycott of Apartheid South Africa.
While the music video starts with a spinning globe a la Toto’s “Africa,” the jaunty rhythm and Gordon’s appearance in a Mets cap leaves no doubt the artist he had in mind when he self-financed a trip to South Africa and Eswatini.
Gordon’s character is a wide-eyed and willing fetishizer of Africana, bothering a beleaguered man he calls “Mr. Jambo” (likely a misunderstanding — Jambo means “hello” in Swahili). Jambo responds to Gordon’s requests for enlightenment and wisdom in Zulu, and our protagonist admits “I couldn’t speak his language, I couldn’t even understand a word. But I knew the meaning was what I decided I had heard.”
The meaning leads us to the chorus, a litany of cliches about nature, love and “ancient scrolls,” which, admittedly, does sound a lot like Toto. (Jambo’s true words, visible if you watch with subtitles, translate as “I don’t speak English. Do you have a translator? Stop yelling at me.”)
Gordon’s satire, a collaboration with local African musicians, nails Simon’s sound while simultaneously poking fun at the use of decidedly non-African brass instruments as played by men in traditional garb.
Now Graceland is an iconic record and the work of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, whom the album elevated to international attention, is sublime. But there is undoubtedly a bit of weird anthropological tourism behind the endeavor. (Norman Mailer would have notes.)
I had the opportunity to see Simon live at Tanglewood last month, where he performed to a crowd composed in no small part of his demographic contemporaries. He played some songs from Graceland (following his soporific “Psalms”). When he broke into “Under African Skies,” the opening line of which is “Joseph’s face was as black as night/The pale yellow moon shone in his eyes,” it took a lot to suppress the cringe.
Gordon’s riff could, in fact, be a sort of antidote, acknowledging that yeah, the music is good, but also kinda messed up right?
As the “Planet of the Bass” star told Vulture, the Africans weren’t only in on Gordon’s joke, they were laughing at him.
That is both a miracle and a wonder.
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For this fashion-forward rabbi, shoes and scripture are intertwined
The rabbinate doesn’t have one look, and Reform Rabbi Arielle Stein’s version is chic, creative and fashion-forward. Stein, who serves as assistant rabbi at Rodeph Sholom, a congregation on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, has been using her Instagram to demonstrate the diversity of what being a rabbi can look like.
“We’re in a moment where so many people that wouldn’t have necessarily seen themselves on the Bima are in Jewish leadership,” she said.
Stein grew up in the Conservative movement as part of a very “intensely culturally Jewish family” with a lot of variation in practice and denomination. The rabbinate was a family tradition, filled with many Jewish academics; from a young age, Stein understood being a rabbi as “a job that exists that you can do.”
She studied Studio Art at NYU Steinhardt, exploring primarily drawing and sculpture. Initially, Stein had aspirations of working as a visual artist, and later worked as an artist’s assistant and in galleries, but upon graduating college, she realized the art world was “not going to be the best fit.” While trying out various jobs for the next few years, the idea of being a rabbi began to speak to her.
Stein sought out different kinds of religious egalitarian spaces to determine what kind of rabbi she wanted to be. She spent a year at the Hadar Institute, an egalitarian yeshiva where she intensively studied Talmud and other Jewish texts. Though she discovered she had a deep passion for learning, she also realized that a traditionally Halachic lifestyle wasn’t for her — “I’m not great with rules,” Stein told me. Ultimately, she was drawn to the interpretive nature of the Reform tradition and attended Hebrew Union College, interning at various congregations throughout her schooling.
Stein’s interest in art didn’t disappear with her new career; in fact, she sees it as deeply Jewish, and describes Judaism as “intensely spiritually creative.” For Stein, the process of creation allows her to enter into a different spiritual space, one where “the world of spirit or God feels the most accessible.” Across her Instagram, there are illustrations of pomegranates, long-haired women surrounded by Hamentashen, and other pieces both sensual and captivating.
Stein says she is drawn to the concept of Hiddur Mitzvah, or the ‘beautification of the commandment.’ She loves Jewish material culture, she told me, and “helping people find the Jewish objects that help facilitate their Jewish life.” In one video, Stein talks through the preparation of a mezuzah.
“I hope to one day work on a project where we are making real Judaic objects in a serious, fine art way,” she said.
Stein also finds a creative outlet through fashion. Her shoe collection has been the subject of several videos and inspired an article in Vogue last November. Her selections are eclectic, yet tasteful and religiously meaningful: a shoe for a Bris with an egg-like heel to symbolize the circle of life, Tory Burch shoes clad with a toe ring for weddings. She sees fashion as a conversation starter, one that humanizes her.
“It also helps people feel like they can have these interests and still be Jewish,” she told me.
As a rabbi today, Stein believes it’s important “to integrate all the parts of yourself,” and for her, fashion is “an important piece that can have spiritual significance and creativity.” With the help of her friend, Rabbi Rafi Ellenson, Stein has established a “Rabbinic Fit Check” Instagram account, which showcases the diverse style of rabbis across the country.
Stein stumbled upon content creation when she met a woman who previously worked for TikTok, who suggested that Stein share about her career — it was a “niche that isn’t really being filled outside of the Orthodox world.” Initially, she wasn’t interested, but after the woman followed up a few times, she decided to try it out.
Stein’s videos showcase her “freaky” shoe collection, but also delve into lessons on scripture and Jewish things she finds incredibly boring or chic (boring: a fixed idea on how rabbis should dress; chic: intentionality about eating). Recently, she’s been working on a “Two Minutes of Torah” series with the Reform Judaism Instagram. Stein describes her account as a “vehicle” that allows people to “stumble upon Jewish knowledge and Jewish content and Jewish culture in a way that you don’t necessarily need to be looking for it.”
Stein told me that her content has been especially helpful for Jews interested in progressive Judaism, who might not have a welcoming synagogue accessible to them. “It’s a way for people to find community and learn,” she said. According to Stein, many viewers have “followed the rabbit hole” and ended up attending services at her congregation or contacting Stein to officiate life cycle events.
Her content has also been met with confusion from some non-Jews and those of other denominations. Though most people ask questions with “positive curiosity,” some viewers have responded negatively to Stein being a female rabbi and not dressing particularly tsnius, or modest. Stein believes this is because “they had actually never encountered a rabbi that was different from their childhood rabbi or the images they had been taught.” In response, she likes to draw on the example of Osnat Barzani, a woman from 16th century Kurdistan who is often said to be the first female rabbi.
“She’s an amazing character for people to learn about, to say, yes this has not been the norm for most of our history, but it is actually not solely a 20th, 21st century phenomenon,” Stein said.
For Stein, teaching has become a deeply meaningful activity, whether that be adult Jewish education or guest classes at universities. She recalls a memorable moment at a class she taught at Colby College on the Song of Songs. The course was open to Jewish students and non-Jews alike, and explored the text through visual art.
What makes the college classes especially worthwhile for Stein is the ability to shape the next generation of rabbinical leaders. The rabbinate isn’t a career that often comes to mind, and Stein told me that she loved “being able to suggest it to students.” She believes that, through her content and practice, a new generation might see themselves reflected in the rabbinical field — realizing not only that it’s “a job, but it’s maybe a job that I could do.”
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French Jewish DJ Barbara Butch is defiant after concert disrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters
(JTA) — The popular French Jewish DJ Barbara Butch is striking a defiant tone after pro-Palestinian activists disrupted her concert in Grenoble, France, vowing not to be cowed from performing.
Butch has also drawn support from Jewish activists who demonstrated outside the office of the far-left party whose top Grenoble official called for her performance to be canceled and has since doubled down, drawing support from anti-Zionist French Jews in the process.
Butch, who came to prominence after appearing at the opening ceremony of the 2024 summer Olympics in Paris, had to be escorted off the stage at the Cabaret Frappé festival on Saturday, barely 20 minutes into her set.
The City of Grenoble filed a complaint against what it called “persons unknown” following the incident. Mayor Laurence Ruffin said authorities had evidence of violence and sabotage of electrical equipment. She rejected arguments that the protest was peaceful.
“There were actions that are unacceptable,” Ruffin said, adding that while Grenoble has consistently supported the Palestinian people, demonstrations “must be peaceful and democratic.”
According to Butch, protesters shouted insults and threw objects, including glass bottles that shattered near her DJ console. In a video statement posted to social media on Monday, she said she had been frightened and described the attack as “the next stage in a campaign” that, she said, had sought for months to exclude her from artistic and public life. She added that legal complaints had been prepared and she vowed: “I will return to the stage.”
The attack on Butch came after pro-Palestinian activists called to boycott or cancel her appearance, citing her support for legislation widely viewed as pro-Israel and her travel to Tel Aviv.
A leader of the effort was Allan Brunson, the Grenoble chair of the far-left party France Unbowed, which has a pro-Palestinian platform. (Its leader, Jean-Luc Melenchon, has been accused of echoing antisemitic stereotypes and dismissing the threat of antisemitism.) After politicians from other parties called for him to be sanctioned over his calls, Brunon tweeted ahead of the concert, “What a pleasure it would be for me to be sanctioned for calling on activists supportive of the Palestinian people to organize against the arrival of B. Butch.”
After its disruption, he posted a video of pro-Palestinian activists rallying in Grenoble and said he would next take aim at the city’s formal relationship with the Israeli city of Rehovot.
The legislation, known as Yadan after the French lawmaker, Caroline Yadan, who proposed it in 2024, aimed to combat “new forms of antisemitism” by expanding terrorism-related offenses and criminalizing calls for the destruction of a state recognized by France — a provision widely understood to be aimed at calls for Israel’s destruction, although the bill did not explicitly name Israel.
Supporters argued the legislation was a necessary response to the rising antisemitism following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Critics said the bill risked restricting freedom of expression by blurring the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
The proposal divided public opinion and the bill was withdrawn in April, a month after a group of artists signed a March 2026 essay in Le Point supporting it. Butch, who has cited her participation in the French Jewish scouting movement as formative, was among the signatories.
Following the Grenoble incident, Butch and her lawyer, Audrey Msellati, co-authored an op-ed in Le Monde arguing that the protest had crossed the line from political disagreement into intimidation and violence — “the one separating protest from coercion, disagreement from intimidation, speech from violence. We were no longer responding to an artist: we were chasing her off the stage.”
They wrote that while people are free to criticize an artist or disagree with Butch’s views, “one cannot organize her disappearance,” arguing that campaigns to pressure venues into canceling performances threaten artistic freedom and democratic principles.
Yonathan Arfi, the president of CRIF, France’s communal Jewish body, said in a statement that the demonstration against Butch is part of a worrying pattern, which he attributed to France Unbowed, of intimidation of Jewish artists that he said was “turning cultural stages into political tribunals.” He called on the French government to “urgently” create a plan to combat boycotts in the arts.
The European Jewish Congress, too, expressed support for Butch, saying, “We stand in full solidarity with Barbara Butch. No one should be intimidated, threatened or targeted for being Jewish or for speaking out against antisemitism.”
The Union of French Jewish Students, along with a handful of other liberal Jewish groups, rallied near France Unbowed’s Paris headquarters on Monday in support of Butch. Brunon has drawn support, on the other hand, from anti-Zionist French Jews who say the Yadan bill represents an exploitation of antisemitism concerns to silence criticism of Israel.
The Grenoble incident is the latest in a series of controversies involving Butch, who became internationally known after performing in drag during the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
She filed criminal complaints after receiving death threats and online abuse after the ceremony. Four men were later convicted in connection with the online harassment campaign against her.
The latest incident has also drawn attention from abroad, eliciting support for her from fellow artists and followers on social media.
One widely shared Instagram post by @YiddishFeminist described Butch as “a proud, loud queer Jewish woman” who had faced “antisemitism, homophobia and fatphobia.”
“No one should ever be forced to leave a stage because a hateful crowd resorts to intimidation and violence,” the poster said. “Today, we are all Barbara Butch.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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