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Long-delayed Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial to begin Monday, igniting pain, fear and hopes for closure
(JTA) — Every Thursday, Brad Orsini gets on a conference call with dozens of other security specialists who, like him, focus on preventing threats to American Jews. But in a few days, and for the coming months, the conference call won’t just address the dangers of the present and future. It will also deal with events that occurred more than four years ago.
That’s because next week marks the beginning of the trial of the gunman who is accused of killing 11 worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018.
Orsini, who oversaw the city’s Jewish communal security on the day of the attack in the neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, hopes to find a sense of closure in the alleged shooter’s prosecution. But he also knows that the trial threatens to broadcast the white supremacist ideas that lay behind the attack, and continue to pose risks for Jewish communities. And he worries that, in addition to providing a possible pathway for survivors and victims’ families to move into the future, it could also thrust them back into a painful past.
“It’s long overdue,” Orsini said. “This has been looming large over the Pittsburgh community and, quite honestly, the Jewish community in the nation. We’re all looking toward finishing this trial and prosecuting this actor for what he did.”
At the same time, he added, “This trial is going to reopen wounds that this community has suffered for almost five years now, and it’s going to have the ability to retraumatize many people in the community. And we have to be concerned about that.”
Beginning on Monday, those countervailing emotions and expectations will come to bear as the deadliest antisemitic attack in American Jewish history is litigated in court. The trial, which will begin with jury selection, is expected to last about three months. Few doubt the guilt of the accused shooter, Robert Bowers, whose name is hardly uttered by Jewish residents of Squirrel Hill. But what remains unclear is what the trial will mean for American Jews — and for the families most directly affected by the attack.
Some hope for the defendant to get the death penalty — even though that will mean prolonging the legal ordeal — while others have advocated against it. Some hope for the trial to shed light on the threat of white supremacy, even as renewed attention on the attack could inspire other violent extremists. And some hope the trial will help them move past the tragedy, even as they know it will be difficult to hear the details of the shooting laid out in court.
“The country is going to have to undergo this unprecedented trial of the country’s worst mass killer of Jews,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. “It’s going to be really hard, so I think our community is really going to have to buckle down and brace ourselves.”
The attack on Saturday morning, Oct. 27, 2018, killed 11 people from three congregations, all of which met at the same building, and injured six others, including four police officers. The defendant faces 63 criminal charges, including hate crimes and murder charges. He has pleaded not guilty. The prosecution is seeking the death penalty — a choice some relatives of victims are vocally supporting. Previously, leaders of two of the three congregations that suffered the attack had opposed the death penalty in this case.
“This massacre was not just a mass murder of innocent citizens during a service in a house of worship,” Diane Rosenthal, sister of David and Cecil Rosethal, who died in the attack, told local journalists, according to reporting by the Pittsburgh Union Progress. “The death penalty must apply to vindicate justice and to offer some measure of deterrence from horrific hate crimes happening again and again.”
For the survivors and families of victims, the trial will likely be especially painful. Some told the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle that they intend to take time off work, delay a vacation or be away from family for an extended period of time to be present at the proceedings.
“I want to see justice happen, but at the same time, I hate to think about the families having to potentially see images of what happened and things of that sort,” Steve Weiss, who survived the attack, told the weekly Jewish newspaper. “I’m sure they have mental images, but to have to actually see photos of victims and things of that sort I think can really be difficult for them.”
One thing few people question is the shooter’s guilt, despite his plea of not guilty. He offered to plead guilty in 2019 in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table, but prosecutors, determined to pursue capital punishment for the crime, rejected the plea.
It was the same thing that had happened in the case of the man charged with killing nine Black worshippers in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015. But there, despite the rejected guilty plea, the trial took place a year and a half after the attack, and the shooter was sentenced to death. (In an illustration of the length of death penalty cases, his latest court proceeding happened in October, and he has not yet been executed.)
In contrast, the Pittsburgh trial is not starting until four and a half years after the shooting there. Part of the reason for the delay stems from the work of the defense team, which has pushed back the trial through various court filings. The alleged shooter’s lead attorney, Judy Clarke, has defended a series of high-profile attackers: the Unabomber, the attacker in the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics bombing and the Boston Marathon bomber, among others. According to Pittsburgh’s local CBS affiliate, her singular goal is to avoid the death penalty for her client.
But in many other ways, the parallels between the Charleston trial and this one are clear. Both concern shootings by alleged white supremacists in houses of worship, tragedies that have become gruesome symbols of a national rise in bigotry. In both, the culpability of the defendant was assumed before the trial began. Like the Pittsburgh defendant, the Charleston shooter has been lionized by white supremacists, including some who cited him as an inspiration for their own violent acts.
And in both cases, there is an understanding that a conviction does not heal the wounds opened by the shooter.
“This trial has produced no winners, only losers,” said the judge in the Charleston shooter’s trial, Richard Gergel, according to the New Yorker. “This proceeding cannot give the families what they truly want, the return of their loved ones.”
Still, some who are watching the Pittsburgh trial closely hope that it will bring new facts and connections to light. Amy Spitalnick, the executive director of Integrity First for America, a nonprofit that spearheaded a multimillion-dollar victory in a civil trial against the organizers of the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, hopes that the Pittsburgh trial illustrates the links among different white supremacist shootings — such as the attacks in El Paso, Texas; Christchurch, New Zealand; and at a synagogue in Poway, California.
Those attackers spouted similar conspiracy theories and referenced other recent violent attacks in their manifestos. Spitalnick said that the accused Pittsburgh shooter allegedly communicated with the organizers of the Charlottesville rally on the social network Gab, which is known as a haven for right-wing extremists.
“Trials like this can really be illustrative of how deep the poison of white supremacy and antisemitism goes,” she said. In the Charlottesville trial, she said, “The reams and reams of evidence… really helped pull back the curtain on what motivated the defendants, how they operated, the tools and the tactics of the movement, the conspiracy theories at its core.”
There’s also the possibility that, with the attack resurfacing the shooter’s motivations, and putting him back in the spotlight, it will act as an inspiration for other white supremacists. In the years following the synagogue shooting, Pittsburgh became a kind of pilgrimage site for the defendant’s admirers — leading to continued harassment of local Jews.
“We’re giving a platform to an individual who is a Jew hater, who wanted to kill all Jews,” Orsini said. “What does that spark in other like-minded people? We need to be very cognizant throughout this trial on what kind of chatter is going to be out there on the deep dark web, or even in open portals.”
In the face of concerns about retraumatization, Greenblatt said the ADL is preparing resources on how to discuss the trial with students and amid the Jewish community.
“To relive the horrors of, the grief of, the event — this thing being constantly in the news — it’s going to be hard to avoid, it’s going to be difficult and it could be grisly and upsetting,” Greenblatt said. “I would much prefer this trial didn’t happen — I would much prefer this crime never happened, I would much prefer that those people were all still with us today — but this is where we are.”
He added, “If there might be some ability to raise awareness among the non-Jewish population of what we’re facing, [that] would be of value.”
One potential challenge for American Jews as a whole, Spitalnick said, is that federal prosecutors don’t necessarily share the needs of Jews who will be following the proceedings. While the trial will conjure a mix of emotions for Jews locally and beyond, she said, prosecutors will be more focused on the nuts and bolts of what happened that day and the details of the accused attacker’s actions and motives.
“We’re going to probably spend a lot of time hearing from the prosecution about what motivated him, but it’s not through the lens of what we as Jews think about when we think about Jewish safety,” she said. “It’s through the lens of making the case that this guy did what he did motivated by this extremism and hate… It’s going to be very deliberate and tactical and precise, versus where we as American Jews have been thinking about this from a deeply personal, communal safety perspective.”
The deliberate and detailed work of prosecutors, however, may not be at cross purposes with the emotional needs of Jews, Orsini said. When the trial ends, he said, the establishment of Bowers’ guilt may itself prove to be transformative for how Jews relate to the tragedy, in Pittsburgh and beyond.
“The fact that this individual has not been fully brought to justice… and is not convicted yet of this mass shooting — in some way, yes, that closure and finality will be done at the end of this trial,” he said. “The community can kind of regroup and truly become resilient once this phase is over with.”
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FBI charges 8 tied to U of Michigan pro-Palestinian movement with threatening officials, Jewish federation
(JTA) — The FBI arrested eight pro-Palestinian demonstrators connected to the University of Michigan Wednesday, charging them with conspiracy to threaten university leaders and their families as part of a pressure campaign to get the school to divest from Israel.
The charges were filed May 20 and unsealed Wednesday following arrests in multiple states. According to the charging documents, the defendants “used encrypted messages, social media platforms, and overseas collaboration platforms to research, target, and attack their victims.” The Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit was included in the indictment as one target of the demonstrators.
The charging documents allege that the eight defendants hunted down information about multiple targets; described to each other how they would “kill,” “torment,” and “terrorize” their targets; and carried out some of their plans.
In one message, Ahmet Korkaya, who was at the time a medical student, allegedly wrote to another defendant about a member of the university’s Board of Regents that he would “poison her ass slowly.” His co-defendant allegedly replied that the group needed to “get into that house then burn it down.”
“In America, we rule by law not by fear. These alleged threats and attempts to terrorize government officials, businesses, and the Jewish Federation are anti-American,” U.S. Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon Jr., of the FBI’s Detroit office said in a statement.
The eight people charged include three men and five women all between the ages of 21 and 28. They were arrested in multiple locations in Michigan as well as in Chicago and Milwaukee.
The indictment alleges that the defendants were responsible for vandalism of the Jewish federation building on Oct. 7, 2024, the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel.
In addition to the federation, the targets named in the indictment include the university’s former president, Santa Ono; its chief investment officer and provost; members of its Board of Regents and their businesses; a campus police officer; and multiple companies.
The TAHRIR Coalition, a pro-Palestinian collective at the University of Michigan that has coordinated much of the campus’s protest activity, rallied supporters Wednesday to protest outside courthouses in Detroit and Milwaukee where the suspects had been detained.
Jordan Acker, a Jewish university regent, is not named in the indictment. But one of the incidents described is the vandalism of his law office in June 2024. (Acker’s car was also vandalized with pro-Palestinian grafitti while he and his children were home, just a few months later.)
Acker did not return a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment. A spokesperson for the Jewish federation declined to comment.
Federal and state authorities raided three homes belonging to campus protesters in April 2025 as part of a federal probe into acts of vandalism cited in the indictment.
The unsealed indictment represents the second major set of charges made against a group of pro-Palestinian protesters at the university. In May 2025, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel dropped state charges she had filed against seven pro-Palestinian student protesters — a different group from those arrested Wednesday. Nessel’s charges, brought the previous September, were related to the protesters’ participation in university encampments in May 2024. The attorney who defended the protesters, Amir Makled, bested Acker for the state Democratic Party’s nomination for a university oversight position this spring.
Nessel’s office was listed by the FBI as having provided “assistance” on the investigation. Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the state attorney general told JTA the office “was not involved in today’s warrant operations.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post FBI charges 8 tied to U of Michigan pro-Palestinian movement with threatening officials, Jewish federation appeared first on The Forward.
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This Israeli filmmaker harshly criticizes his country. Pro-Palestinian activists boycotted him anyway
(JTA) — Earlier this year Nadav Lapid, the award-winning Israeli dissident filmmaker, traveled with his son to Marseille for a screening of his latest film. He fell in love.
“This city reminded me of Tel Aviv, in a way, with the beach and everything,” he recounted Wednesday to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — referring to the city he no longer lives in, having built a career with movies that take sharp aim at what he calls the “moral abyss” of Israeli society. When a Marseille film festival then invited him to serve on its jury for its upcoming installment in July, he readily accepted.
Then the boycotts started. Last month around a dozen pro-Palestinian filmmakers threatened to pull out of the upcoming Marseille International Film Festival over Lapid’s planned participation because, they said, he had accepted funding from the Israeli government to support his work. (Lapid’s movies, including his latest, have received funding from Israel’s film fund.) Following this, according to the accounts of both Lapid and the festival’s director, the festival had second thoughts about him serving on the jury.
While the festival offered him the opportunity to participate in a public master class instead, Lapid said, the protesters hadn’t relented: “It’s not enough for these people.”
Frustrated, the director earlier this week decided to pull out of the festival altogether. He’s not happy about it.
“To make people like myself the enemy when the actual state of things is so terrible, it’s insanity. It’s stupidity,” he told JTA. “For them, the highest triumph of the Palestinian cause is if they will cancel my master class in Marseille? I think it’s pathetic.”
Lapid has received a groundswell of support this week: Natalie Portman and hundreds of other film-industry figures have signed open letters criticizing the boycotts against him. While he’s uncomfortable with being in the spotlight for reasons unrelated to his films, Lapid said he’s pleased with this outcome.
“You could have composed an unbelievable cinematic program from only the filmmakers that texted me during the last hour,” he said.
Even so, the filmmaker says, he’s now unsure if he is still welcome in France as a dissident Israeli.
“I asked myself whether they would like me to stop doing movies, or to leave France,” he told JTA. Elsewhere, he’s described himself as “homeless.”
It’s the latest unspooling of painful dynamics around artistic boycotts of artists and institutions seen by the left as normalizing Israel. Last month another French cultural figure, the Jewish comics artist Joann Sfar (“The Rabbi’s Cat”), faced calls to boycott his presence at a literary festival, also in Marseille. In its justification, a pro-Palestinian artist collective, pushing an Instagram post reading “Zionists out of our city,” cited Sfar’s signing of an open letter last year that argued a Palestinian state should not be recognized unless Hamas could be disarmed and Gaza’s Israeli hostages freed.
In recent months, in addition to broader boycotts of the Israeli film and TV industry, several leading cultural critics of Israel — both Jewish and not — have been targeted as well. Those include bestselling author Sally Rooney for publishing a Hebrew-language translation of her novel with a left-wing Israeli publisher (some prominent activists accused her of exploiting a “loophole” in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel); Jewish Currents editor Peter Beinart for speaking at Tel Aviv University; and Jewish author Joshua Leifer for associating with a “Zionist” rabbi at a book event.
In Lapid’s case, the group organizing against him, La Palestine Sauvera Le Cinéma, argued that “Nadav Lapid is not being targeted because of his Israeli nationality.”
Instead, the collective asserted, their objection was due to Lapid having accepted funding from Israel to complete his latest film, “Yes!”; the fact that the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival as an Israeli co-production and competed for Israel’s highest film awards; and Lapid’s past participation in an Israeli film festival in Paris.
“The cultural boycott does not target artists because of their nationality or personal opinions,” the filmmakers wrote, in French, in a blog post. “What is at issue here is the reality of their integration into the institutional and political structures of the Israeli state.”
For Lapid, whose new movie follows Israeli musicians hired to write an openly genocidal post-Oct. 7 anthem for their nation, this argument doesn’t hold water. Lapid has long been critical of cultural boycotts, including BDS. Such measures, he told JTA, are a form of “dogmatic Stalinism” and don’t “move one piece of sand” in Israel.
“I became a test case of purity,” he mused.
Others agree. More than 350 entertainment industry figures signed the first of two open letters in the French newspaper Le Monde backing him, which was published Sunday.
“Inviting an artist to a festival does not make them a cultural ambassador,” the letter reads, in French, decrying a “campaign of intimidation” against Lapid while also noting what the signatories said was the “genocidal logic” of Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
Among this letter’s signatories were Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, the Oscar-winning team behind “Anatomy of a Fall”; Harari is Jewish and a critic of Israel himself. Arnaud Desplechin, a French filmmaker who often features Jewish characters in his work, also signed. Other signers include acclaimed directors Claire Denis, Mati Diop, and Kleber Mendonça Filho; Romanian director Radu Jude, whose films have explored his country’s complicity in the Holocaust; and Palestinian historian Elias Sanbar.
A second open letter, published on Monday, calls the campaign against Lapid an “intellectual failure” and states, “No matter what crimes a state may commit, no one should be reduced to a passport.” It was signed by a smaller cohort of 10 names, including Portman; French-Jewish director Rebecca Zlotowski; and Oscar-winning filmmakers Jacques Audiard and Michel Hazanavicius.
Like Lapid, Portman — an Israeli-American actress who is one of the most prominent Jews in Hollywood — is a longtime critic of the Israeli government and opponent of the BDS movement.
Creative Community For Peace, a pro-Israel entertainment group, said Wednesday its members also oppose the boycott of Lapid, adding that Israel “funds, screens, and honors films that challenge its leaders, criticize its society, and engage openly with its most difficult debates.”
Unusually, the Marseille festival’s own director, Tsveta Dobreva, also signed one of the open letters in support of Lapid after she appeared to acquiesce to the earlier demands to pull him from the jury.
In an email, Dobreva told JTA her festival “fully supports Nadav Lapid,” saying that she had removed him from the jury out of concern he would be targeted at the event. She did not believe she had “agreed to the boycotters’ demands,” she said.
“Few festivals or cultural institutions in our days have the courage to extend invitations that may provoke controversy, and we stand with Nadav in believing that this form of self-censorship must be resisted, as it only contributes to the problem,” Dobreva wrote.
Lapid intends his next movie to be a follow-up to “Synonyms,” his 2019 film about an Israeli expat in Paris that won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. The Marseille festival is scheduled for July, but he says now he has no intention of going: “I’ll find other beaches.”
The post This Israeli filmmaker harshly criticizes his country. Pro-Palestinian activists boycotted him anyway appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump is imagining an Israel after Netanyahu. So are many Israelis. Netanyahu isn’t biting.
(JTA) — The party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected speculation that he might not run in Israel’s election this fall, following an offhand comment by U.S. President Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl tweeted that Trump had told him he was unsure if Netanyahu wanted to press forward in the elections.
“He’s had an amazing career,” Trump said, according to Karl. “Does he want to continue? Because, you know, he’s a wartime prime minister. We will very shortly win the war one way or the other, and you know he’s a wartime prime minister.”
Netanyahu has been prime minister for more than 15 of the last 17 years, losing power only briefly in 2021 and 2022. Israel’s current wars began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, triggering regional conflict that has grown to include a joint U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
Trump’s reported comments left some wondering whether he knew something they did not, amid polling suggesting that Netanyahu will struggle to secure enough votes to put together a governing coalition after elections this fall. Could Trump know that Netanyahu is considering suspending his already-active campaign? Or could Trump, who this week told the BBC that Netanyahu does anything the U.S. president tells him to, be planning to order his Israeli counterpart to stand down amid growing anti-Israel sentiment in the United States?
Netanyahu’s Likud party soon demolished the idea. “Prime Minister Netanyahu will run in the upcoming elections — and with God’s help, he will win,” the party posted Wednesday on X.
Only a minority of Israelis were primed to appreciate the declaration, according to a poll released this week by the Israel Democracy Institute. It found that 61% of Israelis, including 27% of Likud members, do not want to see Netanyahu run again this fall. The same proportion said they want to see Israel adopt a two-term limit for prime ministers in the future.
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