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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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Trump’s new White House ballroom architect is a Jewish immigrant who has advocated for refugees
(JTA) — After parting ways with the first architect hired to carry out his vision for the White House’s East Wing, President Donald Trump has picked a replacement — turning to a firm run by prominent Jewish architect who once called on Trump to keep the country’s doors open to refugees and immigrants.
Shalom Baranes was born soon after his parents fled Libya amid antisemitic sentiment there, coming to the United States as a child with the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, now known as HIAS. He rose to prominence as an architect in Washington, D.C., where he has designed both private and government buildings, including the Pentagon, that trend toward the modern.
The White House confirmed on Friday that it had chosen his firm, Shalom Baranes Associates, to continue the East Wing project, centered around the ballroom that Trump wishes to construct. Trump clashed with the first architect on the job over the ballroom’s size.
“Shalom is an accomplished architect whose work has shaped the architectural identity of our nation’s capital for decades, and his experience will be a great asset to the completion of this project,” a White House spokesman, Davis Ingle, said in a statement on Friday.
The firm did not immediately publicly confirm its attachment to the project, and Baranes did not reply to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment.
Baranes’ selection stands out in an administration that has typically favored partisan and ideological loyalists. Baranes is a repeated donor to Democratic candidates who has openly advocated against one of Trump’s signature policies, his efforts to limit refugee admissions.
In 2017, two months into Trump’s first term, Baranes penned an op-ed for the Washington Post about the new president’s travel ban. Trump had declared a ban on migrants from seven mostly Muslim countries and refugees from around the world soon after taking office, igniting wide opposition including from Jewish groups.
“The anti-immigrant sentiment I feel today is nothing new to me,” he wrote. “When my Jewish parents arrived in the United States just a few years after fleeing persecution in an Arab regime, it was as difficult for them to be accepted here as it is for Muslims now.”
Baranes laid out his criticism gingerly while saying he hoped the travel ban would be short-lived.
“As I watch the news and see families struggling to leave their countries and escape tyranny, I wonder who among them will make it to our shores and become part of the next generation of researchers, teachers, inventors, real estate developers and, yes, architects,” he wrote. “My hope is that the Trump administration will take actions to ensure that the travel ban is indeed temporary, so that good, hard-working individuals fleeing tyranny can find a new home as I did — and that each of them will be given the same opportunity to help build this great nation that I had.”
Among the Jewish groups to lobby against Trump’s travel ban was HIAS, the organization that had helped Baranes and his family come to the United States. HIAS declined to comment on his selection as White House architect but said through a spokesperson that the organization was working to respond to Trump’s crackdown on refugees, which the president renewed last week after an Afghan refugee shot and killed a member of the National Guard in Washington.
To those who are familiar with Baranes’ style, he is a surprising pick for more than just because of his personal politics. His designs typically trend toward the modern, not the gilded classical style that Trump favors. He also has said he prefers to think carefully before tackling a project — an impossibility when it comes to the White House ballroom, which is already mid-construction.
“You have to wonder why he would risk a stellar career and near pristine reputation for a project that could possibly end up in disaster. He could be publicly fired and castigated by the developer-in-chief or ostracized among his colleagues and clients,” wrote Douglas Freuhling, the editor in chief of the Washington Business Journal, on Friday.
But Fruehling noted that a successful build at the White House — one that balances Trump’s tastes with the gravitas of the White House — would be a defining capstone for any architect’s career. “He may just be the perfect architect for the job. For his sake, I hope it turns out that way,” he wrote of Baranes.
Baranes’ portfolio includes multiple synagogue renovations. He donated his services to restore the interior of Sixth & I, the Jewish center in downtown Washington, D.C., when it was reconstructed just over two decades ago.
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It’s time to reconsider what we know about Jewish birthing rituals
For all living things, birth is our introduction to the world. So it’s a fitting theme for the first exhibit in the Museum at Eldridge Street’s new initiative, “Opening Doors to Intercultural Understanding.”
The multiyear project is centered around three themes: sacred space, sacred community and sacred time. First Light is inspired by sacred time, which focuses on lifecycle events and holidays in the Jewish calendar. The museum staff worked with curator Warren Klein, the director and curator at Herbert & Eileen Bernard Museum of Judaica, to come up with the idea for an exhibit on birth.
“Of course, there’s a universal resonance there,” Amanda Gordon, the museum’s director of public engagement, said. “But really First Light is all about examining Jewish birth traditions and different observance practices, how they’ve evolved, but also different kinds of aesthetic craftsmanship ideas.”
Visitors are first greeted with contemporary paintings from artists Tobi Kahn and Mark Podwal that depict the significance of birth both personally and biblically. Kahn’s abstract painting evokes one of his children’s sonograms through its textured exploration of rounded shapes. This is juxtaposed with Podwal’s depiction of Pharaoh’s daughter finding Moses in the Nile, using a classic Egyptian style to depict the female face looming over baby Moses, almost protectively. Further along in the exhibit are older examples of birth-related rituals both in art and in historic objects.
“These rotating exhibitions,” Gordon said. “They give us a chance to showcase not only cultures outside of Ashkenazi Jewish culture, but also contemporary work. So to have, you know, Tobi’s work and Mark Podwal’s work here in conversation with these pieces from the 19th and 18th century.”
One of the first photographs in the exhibit is of a two-seater bench; one seat is for the sandek, who holds the baby during the bris, and the other is for Elijah the Prophet.
Klein explained that Elijah is imagined to be at every circumcision ceremony, and some communities reserve a seat for him, much like how many families save him a glass of wine during a Passover seder.
“It’s hard to kind of pinpoint where the custom was created,” Klein said. “Across the board, Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities will have a chair reserved for Elijah.”
The exhibit also explores lesser-known traditions; though most people think that Jewish birthing customs are limited to “circumcision or bris milah and that’s it,” Klein said. “It’s truly not.”
For example, there is Pidyon haben, the redemption of the first born son, a tradition that dates back to the days of the high priest, when Israelites had to offer their firstborn sons as priestly assistants. In the era of rabbinic Judaism, the redemption became more symbolic, and families would offer coins on a platter to “purchase” their child back from the rabbi. In the exhibition, a photo of an ornate silver platter filled with coins illustrates the practice.
Although the exhibit could house only a limited number of physical objects, it displays a wide range of customs. There’s a decorative amulet case from the 19th century that once held a prayer to protect its holder from Lilith, a demon — or, according to some stories, Adam’s first wife before Eve — thought to harm the mother and child during labor or right after birth. One glass case hosts a printed prayer book for a German mohel, or ritual circumciser, dated to 1744. What makes this facsimile particularly interesting, Klein explained, is its depiction of women, who are usually not seen in the visual images of the bris.
Klein wanted to make sure women were more represented in this exhibit than they usually are in discussions of Jewish birthing customs. One photograph shows a girl’s baby naming in 20th-century Morocco and another depicts the outfit worn by a female baby at a Greek ceremony.
The exhibit also features a wimpel, a long piece of cloth used to tie the Torah scroll. Traditionally, wimpels are made from the cloth that swaddled a baby during his bris, and are decorated with prayers for the boy to grow strong, learn Torah and get married.
“These then would be deposited or used in the synagogue, maybe on his bar mitzvah, maybe on special occasions, and then given to the synagogue almost as a census that this person was a part of the community,” Klein said. “There would be communities that had truly thousands of these.”
“Unfortunately, this is a custom that almost died out after the Holocaust,” Klein said. “There was a resurgence in the 20th century and certain communities still practice it. But it is very rare to find.”
Both Gordon and Klein expressed hope that visitors of all backgrounds would gain something from the exhibit.
“It was my hope that, you know, visitors would come in with their traditions or their kind of preconceived notions on what maybe Jewish birth traditions and customs are,” Klein said. “And to also kind of have some ideas to take with them into their own communities.”
The exhibit First Light: Birth in the Jewish Tradition will be on view at the Museum at Eldridge Street until April 26, 2026.
The post It’s time to reconsider what we know about Jewish birthing rituals appeared first on The Forward.
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White House Releases New National Security Strategy Indicating Renewed Focus on Western Hemisphere
US President Donald Trump speaks at the White House in Washington, DC, US, Sept. 25, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
The White House late on Thursday night released its new “National Security Strategy,” indicating a sharp pivot of the nation’s strategic focus toward the Western Hemisphere while recalibrating US engagement with Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
The 33-page document only mentions Israel and the Middle East briefly, instead focusing closer to home.
“After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region,” the strategy states. “We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere. This ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.”
The strategy adds that the Trump administration wants “to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the
United States; we want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations; we want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations.”
Publication of the strategy came just after the results of a major new defense survey showed that the American public still overwhelmingly supports active US global leadership and robust military strength.
The White House argues in its strategy that more local challenges represent the most urgent threats to US sovereignty and domestic stability. At the same time, the document downplays the view that deep involvement in conflicts abroad advances US interests. While it reaffirms the importance of alliances and deterrence commitments, it rejects the role of Washington as “global policeman,” instead prioritizing a stronger homeland, resilient supply chains, and revitalized domestic industrial capacity. The strategy also calls for major investment in missile-defense capabilities, including a nationwide system sometimes referred to as a “Golden Dome for America,” echoing Israel’s longstanding layered defense architecture.
The White House’s strategy coincides with the release of data from the newly published Reagan National Defense Survey, which finds Americans more supportive of engagement and global leadership than many pundits have suggested. According to the findings, 64 percent of Americans want the US to be more engaged in world affairs, not less, and 87 percent believe maintaining the strongest military in the world is essential. Meanwhile, 71 percent of Americans say global peace is most likely when the US holds clear military superiority. The data also shows strong majorities support defending key allies if attacked, while 68 percent back building a national missile-defense system, reflecting rising concern about long-range threats.
For Israel and the Middle East, the White House strategy signals a recalibrated emphasis on preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, securing vital maritime chokepoints, and supporting Israel’s long-term security, including cooperation on advanced defense technologies.
Public support for the Jewish state remains strong, though there are indications of waning. Sixty-six percent of Americans view Israel as an ally, a decrease from 72 percent the year prior, according to the Reagan survey.
The survey indicates that 60 percent of Americans approved of the June 2025 US airstrike targeting Iranian nuclear infrastructure, though partisan divides remain prevalent. Enhanced pressure on Tehran, including sanctions and cyber measures, garner even broader bipartisan support.
Experts indicate that for Israel, a long-standing partner deeply affected by US posture in both Europe and the Middle East, the strategy’s emphasis on missile defense, deterrence, and countering Iranian ambitions will be particularly reassuring. However, some analysts argue that the strategy’s overall de-emphasis on the Middle East and apparent desire to be less engaged outside the Western Hemisphere could prove problematic for the Jewish state.