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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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The post In Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial, Jewish rituals feature as prominently as the carnage of the day appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Exclusive: As Ceasefire Extended, Iranian Voice Describes Deepening Repression, Waning Hope Under Regime’s Grip
People attend the funeral of the security forces who were killed in the protests that erupted over the collapse of the currency’s value in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 14, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
As a fragile ceasefire halting the US-Israeli military campaign in Iran continues, some Iranians say the pause in fighting has not brought relief but rather fear that the regime is regaining strength while internal repression intensifies.
In western Iran, a former schoolteacher who asked to be identified as “Maddie Ali” for security reasons says the ceasefire has left many ordinary citizens feeling abandoned and exposed, watching authorities tighten control while hopes for meaningful change fade.
“People actually felt more hopeful when the war was ongoing. Now, with the ceasefire in place, many feel discouraged and disappointed about the future, which feels increasingly uncertain,” Ali told The Algeminer in an exclusive interview.
Ali lost her job after authorities imposed a nationwide internet blackout when fighting erupted earlier this year — a disruption that continues to shape daily life and restrict communication with the outside world, effectively cutting millions of Iranians off from independent reporting on the war and access to global news.
Internet access remains unstable across much of the country, forcing many people to rely on illegal black-market virtual private networks (VPNs) — tools that bypass government censorship — to stay connected beyond Iran’s borders, with access reportedly costing millions of tomans per gigabyte. (A toman is one-tenth of the rial, the official currency of Iran.)
Iran’s nationwide internet blackout has become the longest recorded of its kind, as authorities continue restricting access to the outside world in an effort to suppress internal opposition and silence domestic dissent.
Iranian authorities have even warned that citizens suspected of accessing the internet through VPNs could face arrest or imprisonment. According to state media reports, Iranian security forces have arrested several citizens in recent weeks for using the Starlink satellite internet system, which allows users to bypass state-controlled terrestrial infrastructure.
Human rights groups have warned that the regime repeatedly uses nationwide internet shutdowns as a tool to intensify its crackdown on opposition movements and conceal ongoing abuses from international scrutiny.
Ali said many people in Iran fear the ceasefire is giving authorities time to regroup and rebuild.
“People are deeply disappointed that the US and Israeli sides agreed to a ceasefire without taking the Iranian population into account,” Ali told The Algemeiner. “The regime has repeatedly proven its capacity to rebuild and recover time and time again.”
The US–Iran ceasefire, which took effect on April 8, was initially set to expire on Wednesday night if no agreement was reached. US President Donald Trump told Bloomberg on Monday that he was “highly unlikely” to extend the truce without a deal with Tehran.
“I’m not going to be rushed into making a bad deal,” the president said.
On Tuesday, however, Trump announced that he was extending the ceasefire indefinitely, to allow the two countries to continue peace talks to end the war.
In a statement on social media, Trump said he had agreed to a request by Pakistan, which has mediated the talks, “to hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Noting Iran’s government was “seriously fractured,” Trump said the US military would remain ready and continue its blockade on Iranian ports but continue abiding by the ceasefire “until such time as [Tehran’s] proposal is submitted, and discussions are concluded, one way or the other.”
According to Ali, who spoke with The Algemeiner before Trump’s announcement, reconstruction efforts began quickly after the fighting stopped, even as widespread infrastructure damage remained and internal repression intensified.
“There is frustration that the ceasefire may help the regime recover,” she said. “They started reconstruction for damaged sites and internal repression is still going on.”
Ali also said security forces remain highly visible across the country, especially after a sweeping crackdown earlier this year following mass demonstrations.
“We don’t have an option to really be out on the streets right now. It is really hard because of what happened in January. People are too afraid,” she said, referring to the nationwide anti-government protests, which security forces violently crushed, leaving tens of thousands of demonstrators tortured, imprisoned, or killed.
Checkpoints and surveillance now shape daily movement across many areas of the country.
“There are security forces on the streets stopping people, checking phones to see who they have been in contact with and reviewing messages — and they even make arrests,” Ali said.
Despite the risks, Ali said frustration with the regime runs deep after years of sustained crackdowns and tightening control.
“Most Iranians want an end to this regime. People are exhausted after decades of repression, arrests, executions, surveillance, and control,” she said. “Everybody was waiting for Israel and the US to do something and help us.”
“At the same time, people don’t support war itself — they support removing the regime, which is deeply rooted throughout the country,” Ali continued.
She said many Iranians initially saw the outbreak of fighting as a rare opening for change after years of failed internal protest movements.
“When the war began, many people actually felt hopeful,” Ali told The Algemeiner. “It’s not that they didn’t try to overthrow the regime themselves before — they did. But nothing worked.”
Even those who opposed the war, she said, are not necessarily defending the government.
“Those who were against the war mostly believed it would not lead to real change in the end — not that they supported the regime,” she explained.
More broadly, Ali said many citizens viewed outside military pressure as a necessary catalyst rather than something they welcomed.
“For many Iranians, support for the US and Israeli strikes came out of necessity and exhaustion — not because they support war,” she said.
Despite significant leadership losses during the conflict, Ali said the regime’s structure remains deeply entrenched nationwide.
“The regime and its ideology are embedded at every level — in cities, towns, and institutions across the country,” she said.
“From what we can see, the system is still functioning almost completely intact,” she continued. “It remains coordinated at both the national and local levels, and internal repression is actually increasing.”
“It feels suffocating and extreme, but at the same time it isn’t surprising,” she added.
For some inside Iran, Ali said, this reality has reshaped how people understand the scale of effort needed to dismantle the regime’s entrenched security apparatus.
“People support Israel and the United States, but they also believe airstrikes alone are not enough,” she said.
“Many believe that only a military ground intervention with troops on the ground could remove the regime from its roots,” she continued.
At the same time, she said many Iranians feel especially frustrated by what they see as political solidarity between Muslim-majority governments and Tehran’s leadership rather than support for ordinary citizens.
“Just because a government presents itself as Islamist does not give it the right to repress dissidents and crush its own people,” she said.
“Many Muslim countries have continued to cooperate with this regime, shaking hands with a killer regime instead of standing with the Iranian people,” Ali added.
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Netanyahu heckled at Israel’s official Memorial Day ceremony as bereaved families grasp for comfort
(JTA) — TEL MOND, Israel — Thousands of Israelis gathered in cemeteries all over Israel to commemorate the nation’s fallen soldiers and terror victims on Memorial Day, as public mourning collided with political anger, fresh wartime uncertainty and the private aftershocks consuming bereaved families.
In a Memorial Day message to bereaved families, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also addressed the war against Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, saying Israel has “already removed an existential threat.”
A short while later, President Donald Trump told CNBC’s Joe Kernan that he “expects to be bombing” Iran again if talks collapse ahead of Wednesday’s ceasefire deadline.
“We have returned all our hostages, struck our enemies hard, and made Israel a nation stronger than ever before,” Netanyahu said at an official Memorial Day ceremony at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.
His comments prompted a heckler in the crowd to yell out, “Some of them died in tunnels,” in reference to the Israelis kidnapped to Gaza by the Hamas terror group and held underground.
Skirmishes broke out during a speech by MK Ofir Sofer, of the far-right Religious Zionist party at the Kiryat Shaul military cemetery in Tel Aviv, when attendees attempted to snatch signs held up by protesters that read “Government of death” and “I refuse to hear words of comfort from a government of criminals.”
At a cemetery in Tel Mond, Eyal Golan, whose sister Shirel died by suicide on her 22nd birthday, a year after surviving the Nova massacre near the Gaza border, also had harsh words for the government.
Reflecting on Knesset debates he attended after his sister’s death, as he pushed for a law in her name to provide unlimited, comprehensive mental health care to victims of terror, Golan said he was furious at what he described as the performative behavior of politicians from both the coalition and opposition.
“Off camera, they speak to each other normally,” he said. “But the moment the cameras turn on, it’s showtime. They fall into their roles, shouting and attacking each other. I’m sitting there thinking, how can this be real?”
“Instead of coming together, they just deepen the divide,” he said, but he credited two Knesset members from opposite sides of the political aisle — Moshe Gafni of United Torah Judaism and Merav Michaeli of Labor — with taking up the cause and advancing the legislation.
Eyal and other members of his family say the government failed Shirel as she grappled with acute PTSD in the months after the attack. Now advancing the bill, he said he hopes it will spare other families the same fate.
“The whole point of my crusade is to save others. No one will be able to bring back my sister. If I’m able to save one more soul, I’ve done my job,” he said.
The legislation, known informally as the Shirel Golan law, passed a preliminary reading in January 2026.
Sitting close to his daughter’s grave, covered in flowers, wreaths and candles, Eyal’s father Meir said he has fallen into a strange nightly ritual. Every night, he wakes up at 3 a.m. and makes himself a cup of coffee. He opens the smart TV to her YouTube account and for an hour or so watches the videos she had liked and subscribed to, including trance music emblematic of the Nova scene. At 4 a.m., he returns to bed.
“As soon as I turn it on, it says, ‘Hello Shirel, welcome back,’” Meir said, adding that it gives him a measure of tranquility, as if his daughter “is still around.”
Later, as Eyal made the 45-minute drive back to his home in the central Israeli city of Holon, he described the journey as the emotional hinge between mourning and the return to ordinary life.
“It’s a kind of magic hour during which I store the grief of the day in a box in my mind,” he said. “By Independence Day, I’ll go back to my main role, being a father to two daughters.”
He added, “That journey is a microcosm of Israeli society.”
Meir’s late-night visits to his daughter’s digital world are part of a wider private language of mourning that has taken hold among bereaved Israeli families, many of whom continue to reach for their dead through screens. On phones across the country, especially on the popular messaging platform WhatsApp, parents and siblings keep sending messages to loved ones who were killed, writing as if the conversation never ended. The messages, some of which were recorded in a special Memorial Day project by the Ynet news site, come at unguarded moments, during a football game, before a birthday, or in the middle of the night.
“What a goal, Yahav,” one father, Nir Maayan, wrote to his son, Yahav, who was killed in Gaza in January of last year.
Texting his son from his graveside, Nir wrote: “There are days of collapse, of longing, of not being able to accept reality. Moments when I try to imagine your final moments. What did you think? What did you feel? Answers I will never know. So I just rest my head on you, and somehow you comfort me and hold me. Someone is watching over me from above.”
“Tomorrow is your birthday, send mom a message,” a sister wrote to her deceased brother.
“The sky is beautiful today,” another wrote.
Dorit Ron keeps on texting her son Itai, who was killed on Oct. 7 at the Nahal Oz base near the Gaza border. “I expect an answer, a sign that he’s okay and with his father,” she said, according to the report. “Even though I know he won’t reply, to me he’s alive, just nearby, in another dimension.”
The post Netanyahu heckled at Israel’s official Memorial Day ceremony as bereaved families grasp for comfort appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel jails soldiers who smashed Jesus statue in Lebanon, installs a new one
(JTA) — An Israeli soldier who bludgeoned a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon and another soldier who photographed the act have both been dismissed from combat duty and sentenced to 30 days in military detention, the Israeli military said on Monday.
“The IDF expresses deep regret over the incident and emphasizes that its operations in Lebanon are directed solely against the Hezbollah terrorist organization and other terrorist groups, and not against Lebanese civilians,” the IDF said in a statement.
The military also announced it had replaced the damaged statue with a new one “in full coordination with the local community of Debel in southern Lebanon.” The town is a Christian enclave within a region that is a Hezbollah stronghold.
A short while ago, in full coordination with the local community of Debel in southern Lebanon, the damaged statue was replaced by IDF troops. The Northern Command worked to coordinate the replacement of the statue from the moment it received the report of the incident.
The IDF… pic.twitter.com/nGh1s1iia1
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) April 21, 2026
Photos of the incident, which depicted the soldier striking an overturned Jesus statue, were quickly condemned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the IDF as they spread on Sunday.
By Monday, a letter condemning the act had drawn over 80 signatures by prominent Jewish leaders, including former Israeli cabinet minister Michael Melchior; American antisemitism activist Shabbos Kestenbaum; and Orthodox rabbis in Israel and the United States.
“This act is a chillul Hashem — a desecration of God’s name,” the letter said. “It is an affront to the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East and to Christians all over the world. It is a vile betrayal of the Jewish values upon which the State of Israel was founded. And it is a wound inflicted upon the fragile Jewish-Christian friendship that is more important than ever.”
The announcement of the punishment comes as the IDF said it was probing an incident in the West Bank in which a reservist soldier reportedly killed two Palestinians, aged 14 and 32.
The post Israel jails soldiers who smashed Jesus statue in Lebanon, installs a new one appeared first on The Forward.