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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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Jewish and Muslim leaders avoided the hardest interfaith topic for years, and now face a ‘massive fault line’
It’s been a quarter century since a wave of distrust and violence against Muslims swept across America in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. But in some pockets of New York City and across the U.S., Jewish neighbors extended a hand of friendship and an interfaith movement was reborn.
Dialogues turned into dinners. Dinners spawned theatrical collaborations. Collaborations turned out volunteers to feed the homeless and sent interfaith teams to Capitol Hill.
Still, as the Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada continued to unfold in the Middle East, even the most promising partnerships avoided the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“We deliberately parked it on the side,” said Daisy Khan, the former executive director of American Society for Muslim Advancement and founder of the Women’s Islamic Initiative. “We called it the elephant in the room that none of us could handle.”
Now, 25 years after the terrorist attacks that inspired a movement, leaders realize that silence was a critical mistake.
As this year’s Jewish High Holidays, a time of remembrance and repentance, begin at sundown on the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, American Jewish leaders are reflecting on mistakes made and words they wish they could take back, confronting rising antisemitism, and along with their longtime Muslim partners, asking: Where do we go from here?
“Rosh Hashanah is known as Yom Hazikaron, the day of remembrance,” said Rabbi Joshua Davidson of Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El, adding that remembrance usually refers to the hope that God will remember the covenant with the Jewish people. “When you talk about a day of remembrance, you also talk about the experiences that have shaped us into who we are. 9/11 certainly is an experience that has shaped us into who we are. Anyone who lived in New York is forever changed by that day.”
Interfaith bridge-building
On Sept. 11, 2001, Davidson was a young associate rabbi at another Manhattan institution, Central Synagogue. Feeling otherwise helpless that morning as the towers fell, he headed straight to the nearby mosque on 55th Street to assure his Muslim neighbors that they would not be judged by the actions of the terrorists – his instinct born from years of interfaith dialogue already underway.
The same instinct led President George W. Bush to the Islamic Center of Washington D.C., a week later to proclaim, “Islam is peace.” But that perspective did not prevail in all corners.
Prominent evangelical figures condemned Islam as “evil and wicked.” Mosques were set ablaze, and the Justice Department in the three months after the attacks labeled nine murders as “possible hate crimes.” Despite the community’s fear, the term “Islamophobia” was not widely embraced, as if it was a product of Muslims’ imaginations.
“So many American Muslims were experiencing the anxiety that President Bush recognized right away,” Davidson told the Forward. “So 9/11 crystallized for many the importance of the work of interfaith bridge building … We can learn from one another. When the world becomes complicated and your own community is in jeopardy or is being targeted, you realize how valuable it is to have those friendships.”
Those existing friendships and the ground rules that had sustained them laid the foundation for the aftermath of Sept. 11 and propelled many individuals and groups working behind the scenes to publicly counter what seemed to be an anti-Muslim zeitgeist. While the previous approach to interfaith work had been intimate Shabbat dinners, Ramadan iftars, and discussion groups, the new approach involved rallies, live performances and large-scale programs.
On the morning of Sept. 12, Israeli cellist Udi Bar-David called someone with whom he had collaborated a few times – Majid Alsayegh, an Iraqi-born Muslim engineer and architect in Philadelphia. Determined to offer a constructive response, they formed a team and in Spring 2002 launched a nonprofit for creative intercultural exchanges.
“Because of the tensions of Muslim and Jewish, Arabic and Jewish communities, because of the violence, we felt we needed to speak up and do more,” Alsayegh told the Forward, “to help them understand that dialogue in many forms, including music, is much more powerful than shooting each other.”
Seeking to help audiences listen with less anger, more empathy, artists from B’nai Jeshurun, a synagogue on New York’s Upper West Side, teamed up with Methodists and Muslims to present hard truths gathered from more than 100 New Yorkers. The project titled “Same Difference” later became a documentary.
In the years that followed, connections became more purposeful and direct. In 2008, Rabbi Marc Schneier’s Foundation for Ethnic Understanding launched an annual Weekend of Twinning, which paired scores of synagogues and mosques to explore the parallels and similarities within their traditions. It also enabled them to compare notes about the discrimination each faced as religious minorities and band together to fight the hatred that targeted both.
Khan cherishes the time she spent in synagogues and the friendships she formed there.
“We had such deep ties and such deep relations we weren’t afraid to go to bat for one another,” Khan said. “I think those relationships have even served us to this day.”
‘A massive fault line’
Still, cracks began to show. In 2010, Khan and her husband at the time, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, proposed Cordoba House, a mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan. Modeled after JCCs across the country and named for a city in Spain that once had been a center of peaceful coexistence, the proposed facility would offer prayer space, a wedding venue and a swimming pool.
Opponents focused on the location: two blocks from Ground Zero. Many Jewish leaders endorsed the project. Abe Foxman, longtime leader of the Anti-Defamation League, did not.
“We believe that in this place of tragedy and pain and anguish … if you want to heal, the best way to heal is not to do it in your face.”
Foxman, who died in May, never apologized for his remarks, but his successor Jonathan Greenblatt later acknowledged “we were wrong, plain and simple.”
In 2011, when U.S. Congressman Peter King of New York, then-chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, held hearings on Capitol Hill denouncing the radicalization inside American mosques, Jewish friends showed their support by helping to organize a “Today, I am Muslim too” rally in Times Square.
Those shows of solidarity grew throughout the years. Jewish partners joined crowds at airports to protest the Trump administration’s executive order on immigration. Congregations helped each other pick up the pieces when their houses of worship or sacred sites came under assault. But the tougher conversation, probing where people stood on the Middle East conflict and why, remained largely untouched.
As anyone in interfaith relations or diplomacy of any kind will tell you, constructive conversations are best had before there’s a crisis. That crisis arrived on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, murdering more than 1,200 and taking 250 hostages. The war that followed in Gaza sparked virulent protests on college campuses and in public squares and a spike in antisemitic incidents. It also created a chasm of grief too deep and wide for many partnerships to survive.
“When Gaza happened, it created a massive fault line,” Khan said. “For Jews it reinforced existential fears about Jewish safety. For the Palestinians: ‘It’s our existential thing too. We feel we’re getting wiped out.’”
But because many conversation partners had for years avoided the hardest topic of all, they missed the opportunity to feel the emotional weight carried on both sides and hold that tension. When the grief, trauma and fear of Oct. 7 was thrust upon them, leaders could not adequately navigate the emotional landscape to offer moral clarity or comfort, Khan said.
“We could have called for calm,” she said. “We could’ve said that human loss is terrible. We could’ve said a lot of things that calmed people down. None of that happened. It became very tribal.”
Laboratory phase
Dr. Ari Gordon, director of Muslim Jewish Relations for American Jewish Committee, said while some Muslim partners have walked away from their joint advocacy work, some have stayed in touch. Khan and Alsayegh remain committed and hold out hope that their Muslim peers will return and give it another try.
“Everyone in this space has had the hits they’ve taken after Oct. 7,” Gordon said. “Relationships are a long-term investment. They can take dips and turns, peaks and valleys. On a personal level, as a friend, you have the right to say I want to engage with a person. I don’t want to. As a Jewish community we have a responsibility to keep our doors open.”
But it’s also important to keep the trajectory and time frame in perspective. The transformation of Christian-Jewish relations offers a lesson in that regard.
“The idea that a relationship can be beset by conflict and challenges for centuries and undergo transformation,” he said, “is one that I carry in my mind all the time.”
Gordon calls the past 25 years a “laboratory phase of Muslim-Jewish relations.” The Shabbat dinners, iftars, dialogue groups, coalitions, concerts – they all have fortified a connective tissue between American Muslims and Jews that did not exist 25 years ago.
“That trust may not have been sufficient to meet the stress test of October 7 and the continued war but it was definitely there and it didn’t go away,” he said. “After October 7 we entered a new phase and it’s one where we’re not going to go back to the way it used to be, but build something new.”
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Documentary alleging Israel committed wanton killing in Gaza gets standing ovation in Venice
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – A documentary presenting testimony from Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers who say the IDF knowingly killed large numbers of civilians during its campaign in Gaza got a 25-minute standing ovation Thursday at the Venice Film Festival.
“NAZA,” directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, is based on interviews conducted over three years with 24 Israeli soldiers who said they were involved in Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, most of them intelligence officers whose work was carried out remotely. The soldiers describe surveillance, target selection and decisions about strikes in which civilians were expected to be killed. Their identities are concealed in the film.
The Israeli army has rejected the claims in the film, saying it rips out of context conventional military considerations about the utility of hitting a target versus the collateral damage that might ensue.
Shot at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv, the 80-minute documentary takes its name from the Hebrew military acronym for “collateral damage,” referring to civilians expected to be killed in an attack on a military target.
Abraham and Szor, whose previous film about Israel’s West Bank occupation, “No Other Land,” spurred controversy as well, wrote in the left-wing Israeli publication +972 on Thursday that NAZA focuses on what they describe as a military system in which anticipated civilian deaths were calculated in advance rather than being unintended consequences of strikes. In their account, one intelligence officer describes knowingly authorizing strikes on homes occupied by families, telling the filmmakers, “You understand that the objective is to destroy.”
The Israel Defense Forces has denied the central allegation underlying the documentary: that it has deliberately killed civilians as a matter of policy.
Responding to his 2024 investigation into the military’s use of an AI-powered database, known as Lavender, that generates potential targets for attacks, the IDF in April of that year said Hamas embeds its operatives and military assets among civilians, while Israel directs its attacks at military targets and operatives and conducts strikes under the rules of war that include proportionality and taking precautions to avoid civilian deaths.
The IDF said every target requires an assessment of the expected military advantage and likely collateral damage, and that the military does not carry out a strike when the anticipated civilian harm would be excessive in relation to the military advantage. The IDF also said intelligence systems described in the film are tools for analysts rather than autonomous target-selection systems and that targets require independent human review before any action is taken. “The IDF outright rejects the claim regarding any policy to kill tens of thousands of people in their homes,” the military said in a statement carried by The Guardian.
“We made this film for one simple reason,” the directors wrote in +972. “We understood that testimonies from officers and soldiers in the army that annihilated Gaza — those who conducted the surveillance, who calculated how many innocent people were likely to be killed in each house, and who repeatedly gave the green light to bomb entire families — would make it even harder to deny the crimes.”
The filmmakers said some of the soldiers’ accounts were so urgent that they published them before completing the documentary in a series of investigations for +972, its Hebrew-language sister site Local Call and The Guardian. The Guardian also produced NAZA with James Wilson, while Jonathan Glazer, the director of the Oscar-winning movie about Nazi-era complicitness, “The Zone of Interest,” served as an executive producer. Glazer’s remarks in his speech in the 2024 Oscars linking his film’s thesis to Israel’s conduct in Gaza spurred a backlash.
In a statement published by the Venice Film Festival, Abraham and Szor said the documentary allowed them to examine “not only the words being said but also those that are not said, the silence.” The filmmakers said the documentary was intended not only for international audiences but “inward, toward Israeli society.”
“NAZA” is the only documentary among the 21 films competing for the Golden Lion at Venice this year. One of the seven jurors deciding the festival’s main prizes is Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, whose Gaza film “The Voice of Hind Rajab” won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize last year. The film, about a young Palestinian girl killed during the war, received what was then a record 23-minute standing ovation at its premiere. Israel has said it is investigating the circumstances of Rajab’s killing.
Haggai Matar, executive director of +972 Magazine and co-director of Local Call, wrote on X ahead of the premiere that the soldiers’ testimonies were ones “every Israeli must hear.” His post drew angry responses from some Israeli users.
One X user, who said he had fought in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, wrote that there “was never a situation in which entire families were killed intentionally” and accused Matar of “slandering hundreds of thousands of fighters” who had risked their lives to minimize harm to noncombatants. Another accused those promoting the film of joining those who “slander Israel around the world,” adding: “Shame.”
“NAZA” reunites Abraham and Szor after “No Other Land,” which they made with Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal and which won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2025. Adra and Ballal said they were blacklisted and barred from entering Israel while making that film, so the four filmmakers carried out their joint editing in Masafer Yatta, a cluster of villages in the West Bank.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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A case pitting Indiana Jews against an abortion ban heads back to court
(JTA) — A landmark legal battle to determine whether Jewish women have a religious right to an abortion entered a critical new stage in Indiana.
The state Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Thursday in a case that began with a local Jewish group’s 2022 religious freedom challenge to Indiana’s near-total abortion ban. The state is appealing a permanent blocking of the ban that a lower court imposed in March.
The arguments, held in Indianapolis, explored a legal theory that the state’s abortion ban impedes Jews’ religious freedom because many interpretations of Jewish law prioritize the life of the mother over that of the fetus.
The case, one of the recent major challenges based on Jewish law to an abortion ban, could carry significant ramifications for how the American legal system weighs Jewish religious rights against conservative Christian doctrine, which strongly opposes abortion.
Indiana was one of several states to pass severe abortion restrictions following the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning its 1972 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing the right to an abortion. Separately, Christian groups and businesses have prevailed in national religious freedom cases determining whether they can be compelled to pay for contraception that can be used to perform abortions, arguing doing so violates their religious views.
But Kenneth Falk, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, argued before the court Thursday that it was the abortion bans that curtailed the free exercise of religion. “Under Jewish law, the human life does not begin until the first breath,” said Falk, who argued the case on behalf of Hoosier Jews for Choice, a group formed explicitly to challenge the state’s abortion law, as well as two anonymous plaintiffs. While liberal Jewish denominations are generally permissive of abortion, Orthodox scholars offer more mixed interpretations.
In response to a question by Chief Justice Loretta Rush about what the state should do “further along in a pregnancy,” Falk said, “I don’t think anyone is going to be advocating for abortions of a viable fetus.”
In his arguments, Falk compared the Jewish women’s standing to what he called “secular” exceptions to the abortion ban in cases of rape or incest.
“What is the reason for allowing these secular exceptions, but not a religious exception?” Falk asked the justices. He also referred to permitted religious exceptions to healthcare laws in other cases, including vaccine mandates.
In March, a judge in the Marion County Superior Court ruled in favor of Hoosier Jews for Choice, permanently blocking the state’s near-total abortion ban in cases where it would “substantially burden their religious exercise.”
That ruling prompted the appeal from the state now under consideration, as well as conservative backlash, with Republican Indiana Sen. Jim Banks calling for the judge’s impeachment.
“Our nation’s long tradition of respect for religious exercise has never been understood to encompass a right to intentionally destroy human life, any more than a right to abusively punish children,” Indiana Solicitor General James Barta argued before the state Supreme Court on Thursday.
Barta otherwise largely sidestepped the Jewish group’s religious arguments in his own presentation. Instead he insisted that the plaintiffs did not have proper standing because they were not actively seeking abortions themselves, though one is hoping to get pregnant but worried about getting proper care if an abortion were required.
Their case, Barta insisted, was “purely hypothetical.”
A similar argument briefly prevailed in Kentucky in 2024, when a judge threw out a religious freedom lawsuit brought by three Jewish mothers against that state’s abortion law. The plaintiffs, the judge said in that case, lacked standing because none of them were currently pregnant. One of the plaintiffs, who was considering a pregnancy via in vitro fertilization, was allowed to appeal the case, which resulted in a partial victory this May when a judge struck down part of Kentucky’s abortion ban — related to a definition of when human life begins — as unconstitutional.
Many mainstream and progressive-leaning Jewish organizations, including the National Council of Jewish Women, the Anti-Defamation League and representatives of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements, are supporting Hoosier Jews for Choice and have signed onto briefs on the group’s behalf in court.
In a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the NCJW noted that questioning from the justices Thursday “appeared to focus on more procedural matters,” rather than “the merits of the case.” Yet Darcy Hirsh, the group’s vice president of government relations and advocacy, said she was “hopeful” the court would rule in the Jewish groups’ favor.
“No individual should be forced to abandon their religious beliefs in order to comply with a narrow, Christian belief of when life begins,” Hirsh said.
A representative for the state of Indiana did not return a JTA request for comment following the oral arguments.
There are also Jews on the other side of the debate. The Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty, a legal advocacy group, has filed amicus briefs in support of the state.
“From a theological perspective, it’s hard to say what is the single Jewish teaching on abortion,” Josh Blackman, an attorney with the coalition and professor at the South Texas College of Law, told JTA following the oral arguments.
Blackman added that, of all major religions, Judaism has “the strongest basis for the right to terminate a pregnancy.” But, he said, Jewish groups should be mindful of advocating for a system “where Jews in Indiana can have an abortion but Catholics cannot.”
“At a time when there’s growing hostility between people on the right and Jews, I”m not sure this is the best use of Jewish resources,” Blackman said. “This could actually backfire in significant ways.”
There is no timeline for when the state Supreme Court might issue a decision on the case.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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