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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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Romania’s secret police trailed a Jewish photographer. Decades later, their files have become a film.
(JTA) — BERLIN — He had wild hair and wore jeans. He was American — and Jewish. He had a camera.
That was enough to trigger surveillance by the notorious secret police of communist Romania, the Securitate.
Now, 41 years after photojournalist Edward Serotta boldly stepped behind the Iron Curtain, we can see just how obsessed the Romanians were with him, thanks to a short documentary by renowned Romanian director Radu Jude and historian Adrian Cioflâncă.
“Plan contraplan/Shot Reverse Shot,” which had its world premiere at the Berlinale international film festival last month, gives equal time to Serotta’s reminiscences about Romania in the 1980s, and to the Securitate’s observations of him.
And of course, to the photos: After his Romania adventure, Serotta put down new roots in Europe, and has spent decades documenting the Jewish life that was nearly obliterated in the Holocaust. He has published several books of photographs documenting Jewish communities. He also documented the fall of the communist regimes in which he’d set foot as a young man.
Twenty-two minutes long, the film was one of several shown at the festival with themes related to Jewish life and history, or to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The obsessive spying of the communist regime, as documented here, appears absurd today. But it was fully serious at the time.
In his narration, Serotta — born in 1949 in Atlanta — recalls how communist authorities in 1985 “had given me the permission to come to Romania under the idea that they would have glowing and fine articles and positive articles about Romania.” His stated intention was to document World War II memorials, of which at the time there were only a handful. Today, there are many more.
“He will be put under surveillance,” declares the spy, narrated in the film’s second half by Romanian political scientist Diana Mărgărit, “in order to prevent contact with parasitic protest elements.”
While Serotta was aiming his lens, the informants were sneaking around, snapping quick shots and jotting down observations. They also slipped into his hotel room one day, and exposed a roll of film.
The things they frantically recorded are “funny right now,” a reminder of a bygone regime that at the time was deadly serious, said Cioflâncă in an interview. Cioflâncă is on the advisory college of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives, a state institution that deals with the history of communism. “I lived for 15 years when I was a child under communism. And it was not fun.”
For 41 years, until the regime’s fall and the execution of president Nikolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, in 1989, the Securitate spied on and terrorized citizens of Romania, suppressing dissent. According to the virtual Cryptomuseum, based in the Netherlands, the Securitate had up to 11,000 agents and 500,000 informants monitoring a population of 22 million.
In 2006, a governmental commission reported that more than 600,000 Romanians — and potentially around 2 million — were incarcerated for political crimes, and more than 100,000 died.
Western journalists, though suspect and surveilled, were to some extent wooed — at least in the 1980s. When Serotta requested to visit in 1985, Ceaușescu had been president for some 11 years (after heading the communist party from 1965). Ceaușescu was seen as more friendly to the west: He had refused to contribute troops to invade former Czechoslovakia in 1968; and he kept up relations with Israel when other communist countries severed their ties.
At the time, the regime wanted to gain “most favored nation” economic status from the United States, which depended on their allowing some freedom of movement to its population.
“There were 855 western journalists coming to Romania during the Ceaușescu period, and 80 of them were American,” said Cioflâncă, who also directs the Bucharest-based Center for the Study of Jewish History, under the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania.
“Many of these visits were organized as a propaganda instrument. In all the cases, they wanted to interfere with the journalist and to influence his work. They tried something similar with Edward when he came,” he added.
“They felt that the Jews are so influential, especially in the relationship with the United States,” Serotta said in an interview.
“In their mind, everything that was Israeli, Jewish, or American Jewish was deemed like an important piece of influence to use for their political PR at that time,” said Serotta, who eventually moved to Europe and in 2000 founded the Centropa nonprofit archive aimed at preserving Jewish memory in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Baltics, and the former Soviet Union.
Centropa was purchased by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2024.
Given Serotta’s obsession with documenting history, Cioflâncă said he was surprised to learn that his friend had never viewed his Securitate files. Several years ago, he asked Serotta if he’d like to see them.
“The funny thing is, I didn’t think I was important enough to have any,” Serotta recalled.
Cioflâncă found some 300 pages of documents. The informants had tried to influence the photojournalist, saying that the World War II killings of Jews in the region were “a marginal moment,” Cioflâncă noted. “They wanted to make sure that their reputation remained clean, that they were not collaborators” with the Nazis.
According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, at least 380,000 Romanian Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
“I was there for a matter of several weeks,” Serotta said. He recalled “a very tense atmosphere. Nothing worked properly. We barely found food in stores. It was awful.”
And he is still astonished that the Securitate spent so much time following him. “It’s funny stuff.”
“Many Securitate officers were pretty stupid,” Serotta said in the interview. “They were so distorted in doing their job that they didn’t have this sense of [the] ridiculous and humor.”
Moreover, “their [photo] equipment, first of all, was not very good. Secondly, they were usually doing it surreptitiously: behind a wall or a door or something or something like that. But as the old expression goes, the pictures are great because I look young. I look like a casting reject from ‘Flashdance.’”
Serotta, for the most part, ignored or was unaware of the surveillance, except for when the only two cars on remote roads, hour after hour, were his and that of a spy on his tail.
And yet the trip to Romania was priceless. On one of his first visits to a Jewish community in Romania, he said to himself, “Wow, this is interesting. This is like the old country.”
“Then I said, ‘It’s not like the old country. It is the old country, and I’m in it,’” he added. “From that moment on, I felt like I had opened a door, and I’ve never come back through it.”
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Avraham Burg, longtime fixture of Israeli left, meets Tucker Carlson on his own turf
(JTA) — Tucker Carlson has set off alarm bells among many Jewish groups and even some conservative allies by hosting conspiracy theorists, grilling the U.S. ambassador to Israel and dabbling in sinister-sounding theories about Benjamin Netanyahu and Chabad.
But on Monday a notable Israeli opted to appear on Carlson’s show: former politician and left-wing figurehead Avraham Burg. And their talk was demonstrably cordial — though not without some gentle ribbing.
“Listen, Tucker, I cannot stand you,” Burg told his interviewer over a video call. “But you’re a nice person, so I talk with you.”
“I’ll take that as a half compliment,” Carlson responded, laughing.
A former speaker of the Knesset, interim Israeli president and onetime chair of the Jewish Agency for Israel and World Zionist Organization, Burg today remains an outspoken member of Israel’s dwindling left. A proponent of positions like post-Zionism and the Palestinian right of return that are deeply unpopular in Israel, he is also a frequent Netanyahu critic and current member of Hadash, an Israeli far-left party with Communist roots.
In his newsletter, Burg explained his decision to appear on Carlson’s show by saying the influential podcast host was “one of the most powerful voices in today’s American Right.”
“This interview was born out of a genuine desire to step outside familiar patterns and meet the person behind the public image that has been built around him, not out of prior agreement and not out of any need to adjudicate, but out of a willingness to seriously engage with the challenges he poses to the political and cultural discourse of our time,” Burg wrote in his Substack.
In a veiled swipe at other Jewish groups and Israeli leaders that have denounced Carlson, he added, “Carlson manages to touch a raw nerve of an American society whose doubts are deepening, and the temptation is to dismiss that with slogans. I chose not to do that.”
Indeed, throughout their 90-minute conversation, Burg did not push Carlson on the more outlandish claims the pundit has made on his shows in the past, even as he noted he watched the show frequently. He did object to Carlson’s past contentions that Israel would consider using nukes against Iran, as well as to Carlson’s rejection of the question of whether Israel “has the right to exist.”
Another area of pushback came when Burg insisted that, contrary to Carlson’s claims, Israel doesn’t have a consistent security policy, let alone a grandiose religious or conspiratorial vision.
“I listened to you very carefully in the last couple of weeks, and the way you try to conceive the Israeli strategy, from Netanyahu’s 40-year life mission to the greater land of Israel,” as biblical, “Messianic” or “eschatological,” said Burg. “I envy you that you really believe that we have something like that.” However, he added, “It doesn’t work that way.”
He instead focused on what he referred to as the Israeli mindset, which he called “a very, very hard, stiff-necked” one. Israelis, Burg said, do not believe in a “win-win” solution to their conflicts with their neighbors: “We live in a zero sum game.”
“‘I want to win alone. I want you to be dead. I want to humiliate you. I want to cancel you,’” Burg said, explaining that mindset. “‘Whomever you are, you are my enemy.’ And when you look at this philosophy, you understand where comes the political rhetoric that every adversary, never mind who [he is], minor or major, but at the end of the day, he is a Hitler.”
Israelis, Burg claimed, are also isolated from much of the English-language media, and reflexively dismiss any media criticism of their actions as antisemitic, creating “a thick filter that enables us to reject any kind of legitimate criticism.”
Carlson, who himself has offered various denunciations of the Israeli mindset on other episodes, took a soft approach to interviewing Burg. He praised Burg as “a pretty brave guy,” citing a recent op-ed in which the Israeli had opposed war with Iran, and ended by stating, “This conversation has really been a blessing for me.”
He avoided testier subjects he had raised with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and other guests in recent episodes, such as suggesting genetics testing for all Israelis to test the Jewish claim to the Holy Land, or musing that the Chabad Hasidic movement orchestrated the war as a means of building the Third Temple.
Whether his audience appreciated the apparent sincerity is an open question. On YouTube, commenters variously described Burg as complicit in Israel’s failings despite his politics or offered backhanded praise for the ways he confirmed their worst suspicions about Israelis. “If what he’s saying is true then what an unbearable group of people,” read one comment.
On X, Carlson’s other main platform, prominent pro-Israel Jews denounced Burg as a Communist and traitor to Israel.
Burg’s willingness to find common cause with Carlson was the latest sign of how some on the Jewish left, finding little appetite among institutional Jewish groups and Israeli society for sustained pushback against Israel’s actions in Gaza and Iran, may be looking instead to fringe voices on the right, where anti-Israel sentiment is also growing.
American Jewish left-wing intellectual Norman Finkelstein has appeared on Candace Owens’ podcast, while Israeli left-wing activist Miko Peled has aligned with Carrie Prejean Boller, a former religious liberties commissioner under Trump who was ousted over her stated Catholic opposition to Zionism.
Also this week Jewish journalist Peter Beinart, a leading progressive critic of Israel, praised former Trump counterterrorism director Joe Kent — another recent Carlson guest — as “a brave man” for resigning from his post while citing his opposition to war with Iran. Kent’s resignation letter accused Israel not only of manipulating Trump into war but also of having started the Iraq War and the Syrian Civil War, raising concern among American Jewish groups and providing further fodder for antisemitic elements on the right. (Beinart criticized aspects of the letter as “faulty” in his Jewish Currents essay, which was publicly assailed by a former magazine board member.)
For Burg and Carlson, the meeting revealed more similarities than differences in their worldviews. Toward the end of their talk, Burg expressed optimism that his grandchildren’s generation “will stand up and say, ‘We are ready to defend the legitimate Israel, but we’re not ready to sacrifice our life or to sacrifice the life of others on the altar of this craziness.’ This day is close.’”
“That’s a very reassuring thing to hear,” Carlson responded, in agreement.
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King Charles named patron of British Jewish security nonprofit following ambulance attack
(JTA) — King Charles has been named the first-ever patron of a British Jewish security nonprofit, a move announced in the wake of an arson attack that targeted four ambulances owned by a Jewish volunteer emergency service in north London.
The Community Security Trust, Britain’s main antisemitism watchdog, announced that King Charles had accepted the role — indicating a royal’s endorsement of a cause — during an annual fundraising dinner Monday night, where British leaders condemned the attack.
“His Majesty’s longstanding commitment to promoting tolerance, inclusion and interfaith understanding align closely with CST’s mission to protect British Jews and CST is honoured by this recognition and looks forward to working under His Majesty’s patronage to further its vital work across the country,” CST wrote in a statement.
While the attack is being investigated as an antisemitic hate crime but not a terrorist incident, counterterror officers have been leading the investigation after an Islamist group claimed responsibility for the attack. (The same group also claimed responsibility for synagogue bombings in Belgium and the Netherlands.)
“It is too early for me to attribute last night’s attack in Golders Green to the Iranian state … but whoever was responsible, the impact is serious,” London police chief Mark Rowley said at the annual dinner on Monday.
Police believe three suspects were involved in the attack, although no arrests have been made yet. Security footage of the scene of the attack in Golders Green, a heavily Jewish neighborhood of London, appeared to show three individuals approaching the ambulances parked outside the Machzike Hadath Synagogue.
In the wake of the attack, Rowley pledged to deploy over 250 additional police officers to protect Jewish communities and the British government announced it would provide four replacement ambulances to Hatzola.
In a speech at the dinner, British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said that antisemitism was on the rise and vowed that those responsible would be “pursued and made to face the consequences of their vile actions.”
“It is so warped it defies words,” Mahmood said of the arson attack. “This was more than an attack on four ambulances; it was more than an attack on one organisation or on one community. It was an attack on this country and on us all.”
In the days following that attack, donations to fundraising campaigns on behalf of Hatzola reached nearly $2 million following a plea from the organization for urgent support.
“We are launching an urgent appeal to rebuild what has been lost — we cannot to afford to let our life-saving work be put on pause,” Hatzola said in a statement. “We need immediate support so we can source: new ambulances, strengthening security, equipping the teams, restocking and ensuring we can continue to respond safely and effectively in every emergency.”
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