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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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Republicans made inroads with Jewish voters. Democrats won anyway.
Jewish voters appear to have moved toward Republicans in Tuesday’s midterm elections, even as Democrats won a sweeping victory and regained control of both chambers of Congress.
A national NBC News exit poll found that 68% of Jewish voters supported Democrats, compared with 31% who backed Republican candidates. The same polling firm found in 2024 that 78% of Jews backed Kamala Harris. In Michigan’s closely watched Senate race, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed underperformed in precincts with large Jewish populations compared with other statewide Democratic candidates.
That suggests a smaller Democratic advantage than in previous elections, though differences in polling methods make it difficult to measure the size of the shift.
But some Jewish Democrats dispute the idea that Jewish voters are turning away from their party.
Halie Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, argued that “the Jewish vote was a critical component of a winning democratic coalition,” given that the blue sweep was so big. “This election was a tsunami. It was not won by any one state or by any one election. And therefore, I think it’s important to look at the national numbers, which indicate that the Jewish vote is unchanged from where it was in the last midterm election.”
Soifer pointed to a GBAO Strategies exit poll scheduled for release Thursday, showing that 72% of Jewish voters supported Democratic candidates. That is nearly identical to the 71% who voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 survey also sponsored by J Street. But it is slightly lower than the 74% who supported Democrats in the 2022 midterms and the 77% who backed Joe Biden in 2020.
The results show a complicated picture. Jewish voters remain overwhelmingly Democratic even as some have grown frustrated with the party’s direction on Israel and antisemitism. And any Republican gains among Jewish voters were not enough to overcome the broader Democratic wave.
That was especially clear in Michigan, where El-Sayed, a fierce critic of Israel, defeated Republican Mike Rogers despite concerns among some Jewish Democrats about his views and rhetoric. An exit poll found that 60% of Jewish early voters still supported El-Sayed, while Rogers made some minor gains.
In New York’s 17th Congressional District, Republican Rep. Mike Lawler lost his reelection bid to Democrat Cait Conley, despite receiving overwhelming support in the heavily Hasidic neighborhoods of Rockland County.
Measuring the Jewish vote
Exit polls are not actual vote counts, and the Jewish samples in national surveys are relatively small. Steve Sheffey, a pro-Israel Democratic activist, warned in a Times of Israel essay last year that national polls not specifically designed to measure Jewish voters can produce significantly different results.
The same caution applies when comparing this year’s results with previous elections. Differences in sampling, religious identification and turnout make it hard to measure exactly how many percentage points the Jewish vote has shifted.
Two national surveys conducted earlier this year show Jewish voters remain firmly in the Democratic camp. A September poll by the Jewish Electorate Institute found that 71% of Jewish voters planned to support Democrats for Congress, compared with 23% who planned to support Republicans. Another survey, conducted by GBAO Strategies, found Democrats with a 67%-26% lead among Jewish voters. A 2021 poll found that 74% of Jewish voters approved of the way Joe Biden was handling the U.S.-Israel relationship and 68% had planned to vote for Democrats in the 2022 midterms.
JDCA’s Soifer said “widespread speculation” that Jewish Americans may be leaving the Democratic Party “proved to be absolutely false” nationwide. The outcome “was the largest repudiation of a sitting president that we’ve ever seen, and Jewish voters played a role in that,” she said.
Jewish Democrats crossed party lines in Michigan
Still, a stable Democratic majority does not necessarily mean Jewish voters are satisfied with the party.
The Jewish Electorate Institute survey in September found that 35% of Jewish Democrats said the rise of anti-Israel candidates made it harder to identify with their party. Michigan offered one of the clearest tests of whether those concerns could cause Jewish Democrats to cross party lines in particular races without abandoning their party altogether.
The Mercury Public Affairs survey of 482 Jewish voters who cast ballots before Election Day found that, among Jewish voters who said they backed Sen. Elissa Slotkin in 2024, 23% voted for Rogers this time, and among those who voted for Harris in the presidential election, 18% crossed over to Rogers, while another 11% voted for someone else or skipped the Senate race.
A Republican Jewish Coalition spokesperson pointed to election returns in heavily Jewish precincts as further evidence of a shift. Sam Markstein said unofficial results of Huntington Woods showed a 30-percentage-point shift toward Rogers compared with 2024, while Southfield Township shifted 12.9 points, Birmingham 11.4 points and West Bloomfield Township 7.1 points. The RJC spent $2 million to target the approximately 50,000 Jewish voters in those neighborhoods.
Analysis by Millions of Michiganians, a progressive Super PAC, of 72 precincts with the highest number of Jewish voters, showed El-Sayed receiving 60% of the vote, underperforming the Democratic gubernatorial nominee by just 6.2 percent, with a shift of 1.3 percent compared to 2024.
What comes next?
The larger question is what these results mean for the Democratic Party’s relationship with Jewish Americans.
Soifer acknowledged concerns about the direction of her own party, but maintained, “This election wasn’t about Israel, including for Jewish voters.” She added that the group, along with other liberal Jewish organizations, plans to “play a large role” in helping set the agenda of the new Democratic majorities in Congress.
Nonnegotiable Michigan, a coalition of Michigan rabbis and Jewish Democrats opposing El-Sayed, said in a statement on Wednesday that they hope the party “will govern by reuniting our coalition, delivering for the American people, and rejecting the divisive voices and worldview of those who traffic in antisemitism.”
Other organizations called for continued engagement with leaders in both parties to confront antisemitism and extremism. “We don’t need to agree on everything to know that their partnership will be key to countering antisemitism and protecting democracy,” said Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.
Democrats also celebrated major victories by prominent Jewish politicians, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff. Their success could strengthen their standing in the party in shaping the debate over Israel and antisemitism and raise their profiles as possible contenders for the 2028 presidential nomination.
The post Republicans made inroads with Jewish voters. Democrats won anyway. appeared first on The Forward.
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From pop icon to outspoken Zionist: Boy George’s emotional visit to Nova
(JTA) — RE’IM, Nova Festival Memorial Site, Israel – Iconic 80s pop star Boy George is in Israel this week. He’s made all the usual stops on a celebrity visit: met with the president, placed a note in the Western Wall and, of course, performed two concerts. But it was his visit to the Nova Festival Memorial Site near Kibbutz Re’im on Tuesday that underscored the main reason for his visit.
An outspoken supporter of Jews and Israel, even as he has faced a backlash from within the music industry, the iconic ’80s pop star said that hearing about the massacre and seeing the site where more than 360 people were killed on Oct. 7, 2023 had only strengthened his convictions.
“I saw what happened on October 7… I was up very early, and I saw it, and it just horrified me,” Boy George told a press conference on Tuesday, following a tour of the memorial with former hostages, survivors and other members of the Tribe of Nova Community Association.
“But what horrified me more was hearing people that have no connection to what happened telling me it wasn’t true, that it was made up, and that I shouldn’t believe it,” he said.
Boy George, a British singer who achieved international fame in the 1980s with Culture Club and hits such as “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” and “Karma Chameleon,” holds a pioneering place in modern pop history. With his androgynous look, Rastafarian-inspired dreadlocks and oversized hats, the white singer challenged conventional ideas about gender and sexuality at a time when doing so could come at a cost.
He countered convention again in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, speaking out on behalf of Jews and Israel when parts of an entertainment industry were calling for boycotts and blacklists of Israeli performers and their allies.
Boy George, 65, told journalists in Israel this week that he had lost long-time friends over his position on Israel, but said he was not particularly troubled by it, because he felt he was doing the right thing.
“I feel odd being thanked for doing what’s just normal,” he said. “Music should make people feel safe, celebrated, and like they belong. That’s the music I want to make.”
The singer said some of the reactions to his support for Israel have been “shocking to me, but also a bit predictable.”
He said that the attacks against him have ranged from bashing his music to calling him “irrelevant,” and even accusing him of being a “Zionist.”
“Until I started getting called a Zionist, I hadn’t really explored what it meant, and then I was like, ‘well, I guess it must be,’” Boy George said. “In the end, I just put a thing up [on social media] saying, ‘I’m a Zionist, get over it.’”
Two incidents this year solidified his support for Jews and Israel. In April, he arrived in the London Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green and witnessed the aftermath of the stabbing of two Jewish men. He later went on British television, tearily condemning the attack and calling for support for “our Jewish community.”
In May, at a travelling exhibit about the Nova attack, he heard the testimony of a young survivor, May Hayat. The 33-year-old Tel Avivian witnessed the murder of two friends before Hamas terrorists set her free.
Moved by Hayat’s story, the singer wrote “We Will Dance Again,” a slogan he borrowed from the Tribe of Nova community. Released on July 26, its lyrics include, “you say genocide / I say war.”
“One of the things I’ve always hated doing is explaining why I’ve written something,” Boy George said of the song, which drew massive criticism from some in the music industry but has become an anthem for Israelis.
“Very often, what I write is sort of personal, a little bit surreptitious, secretive… but I’m afraid with ‘We Will Dance Again,’ there was no secrecy or subtext whatsoever,” he said.
“I kept hearing that word [genocide] over and over and over and obviously, I’ve done a bit of research on the word, and I know it wasn’t the right word and I felt, well, if it’s being bandied about by every single person that I speak to, then maybe I should put it in the song,” he said.
The singer also highlighted another line from the song: “If you’re ever confused / I stand with the Jews.”
The singer said he doubted the song would get airplay, “but it really wasn’t about that… it was about what do I need to do about what I feel deeply inside.”
Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Hayat said she was flattered that Boy George was inspired to write a song after hearing her story, but added that this was precisely why she now devotes her time to telling others what happened on Oct. 7.
“If I was saved and I am still alive, then I have to tell this story for myself and for those who can’t tell their story,” she said. The song “strengthens me in doing what I am doing.”
Boy George said that being at the site of the Nova festival was “very powerful.”
“Obviously, you can see there’s a lot of healing that’s gone on, and that’s really important because an outsider never knows what they’re supposed to feel,” he said, after touring the memorial, which includes photos of each victim, as well as tributes from friends and family.
Boy George was accompanied to the Nova site by Sylvan Adams, president of the World Jewish Congress Israel. Adams, together with the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem and Live Nation Israel. Boy George was accompanied to the Nova site by Sylvan Adams, president of the World Jewish Congress Israel. Adams, together with the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem donated 1,500 concert tickets to Nova survivors and bereaved families so they could attend Saturday night’s concert.
“At a time when too many international artists have chosen to boycott Israel or remain silent in the face of antisemitism, you chose to come,” said Adams. “You used your voice and your international platform to stand with the Jewish people, despite the threats and boycotts. That takes courage. And moral clarity.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post From pop icon to outspoken Zionist: Boy George’s emotional visit to Nova appeared first on The Forward.
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Wisconsin referendum on freedom to worship fails at the ballot box
(JTA) — A Wisconsin referendum that would prohibit state and local governments from closing places of worship in response to a declared emergency was rejected in Tuesday’s election by 52% of voters.
The question was raised in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, during which places of worship were subject to public health orders restricting large gatherings. If approved, the Wisconsin Constitution would have gained language prohibiting the state to “order the closure of or forbid gatherings in places of worship in response to a state of emergency at the national, state, or local level, including an emergency related to public health.”
Critics said that the language of the referendum was vague because it did not define what a “place of worship” was, leaving uncertainty over whether it could encompass someone’s home in which religious services are hosted. The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, which opposed the referendum, said the measure is a threat to public health. It added that the law as it stands does not “prevent any person from worshipping God, as such worship can and is practiced on an individual basis in one’s own home during an emergency.”
Rabbi Joel Alter, who leads Milwaukee’s predominant Conservative synagogue Congregation Beth Israel Ner Tamid, said that while he understands the concerns the referendum stemmed from, he voted to reject the prohibition. “I don’t think the state constitution is the way to respond to concerns that people have,” he said. “I would much rather see advisory panels and possibly legislators hold really thoughtful hearings and studies to make recommendations for the next emergency—whether it’s a health emergency or some other emergency—about how to handle houses of worship in the interest of public health.”
The Wisconsin Family Council, a conservative Christian organization, had advocated in favor of the prohibition, saying it would ensure “that your local church is never treated as ‘non-essential’ by the government again.” Other proponents, including a number of local churches, argued that places of worship are “lifelines” during times of crisis, and that closing them is a violation of religious freedom.
Other states—including Kentucky, Oklahoma, Florida and New Hampshire—have adopted similar protections, but the Wisconsin referendum would have offered stronger protections for churches, synagogues and other places of worship than other essential locations, such as schools or grocery stores. Texas adopted a constitutional protection against government restrictions on religious services in 2021.
Because the governor cannot veto a constitutional amendment, the Republican-run state legislature put forth constitutional amendments to bypass the veto of Gov. Tony Evers, who did not run for reelection. Evers vetoed a bill containing similar protections for places of worship in 2021. In addition to the religious freedom referendum, Republican lawmakers also introduced two others, one that would further limit the governor’s partial veto powers, which passed with 51% of voters favoring, and another that could restrict affirmative action and some diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which passed with 56% of the vote.
David Crowley, Democratic governor-elect, said he would vote “no” on all three questions.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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