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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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French, German, Jewish leaders call for resignation of UN’s Francesca Albanese over ‘common enemy’ comments
(JTA) — A slew of prominent voices, including the French foreign minister, have called for the resignation of United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese over her latest comments about Israel.
Albanese, the U.N.’s Palestinian rights envoy, is a vocal critic of Israel who has drawn sustained rebuke from multiple U.S. administrations over comments seen as veering sharply into antisemitic territory. Last year, the Trump administration formally sanctioned her, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio accusing her of “virulent antisemitism and support for terrorism.”
This time, speaking at the Al-Jazeera Forum in Doha last weekend, Albanese ignited rebuke from an array of world leaders when she suggested that Israel was “a common enemy” for all.
“Instead of stopping Israel, most of the world has armed, given Israel political excuses, political sheltering, economic and financial support,” he said. She continued, “We who do not control large amounts of financial capital, algorithms and weapons — we now see that we as a humanity have a common enemy.”
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the comments inappropriately targeted all Israelis instead of the Israeli government.
“France unreservedly condemns the outrageous and reprehensible remarks made by Francesca Albanese, which are directed not at the Israeli government, whose policies may be criticized, but at Israel as a people and as a nation, which is absolutely unacceptable,” he told French lawmakers earlier this week.
The German foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, added to the calls for resignation on Thursday. “I respect the system of independent rapporteurs of the UN. However, Ms. Albanese has already repeatedly failed in the past,” he tweeted. “I condemn her recent statements about Israel. She is untenable in her position.”
And Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, called Albanese “a dangerous figure who continues to use her position to promote discredited conspiracy theories, divisive and antisemitic narratives” and said he would use his appearance at the Munich Security Conference, which begins Friday, to petition for her removal.
“As I meet with leaders in Munich and in the weeks ahead, I will advocate for a clear moral line to be drawn,” he said in a statement. “Individuals such as Ms. Albanese must be removed from the UN before more damage can be done to the Jewish people — and the institution’s mission.”
Albanese has rejected the idea that her comments were antisemitic or inappropriate. On X, she said she had taken aim at “THE SYSTEM that has enabled the genocide in Palestine, including the financial capital that funds it, the algorithms that obscure it and the weapons that enable it,” not Israelis.
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Is there life after Lubavitch?
Schneur Zalman Newfield knows as well as anyone what it takes to leave Orthodoxy. In his new memoir, Brooklyn Odyssey, he likens his transformation from Hasidic to secular to a butterfly’s metamorphosis. “At one stage it is clearly a caterpillar; at another it is a butterfly. But when exactly did it shift from one organism to the other?” he asks. When exactly does a Hasidic Jew become someone who prays with egalitarian minyans and protests with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice?
Newfield, a 44-year-old sociology professor at Hunter College, has been asking that very question for years. For his first book, Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, Newfield interviewed 74 ex-Lubavitch and ex-Satmar Hasidic Jews to analyze what it means to leave Orthodoxy. Brooklyn Odyssey brings that sociological scrutiny to Newfield’s own life.
But the memoir is much more readable than the academic book that preceded it. Newfield renders vividly what it’s like to be an 11-year-old boy running amok in Crown Heights, the nerve center of the Lubavitch Hasidic universe, while rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the lionized leader of that community, was still alive. He also captures the feelings of a twentysomething ex-Hasidic virgin at Brooklyn College. After his mom reacts coldly to the news that he has shaved his beard, Newfield writes that he “felt like a Lubavitch mitzvah tank, one of those converted Winnebagos, had just rolled over my chest.”
I spoke with Newfield to see how he views the risk factors for leaving Orthodoxy, and how the Haredi world’s treatment of these people might be changing. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Lauren Hakimi: There are already so many memoirs out there about people’s journeys off the derech [out of Orthodoxy]. What did you think was missing from the OTD genre?
Schneur Zalman Newfield: None of the memoirs that are out there really captured the experience of growing up in the Lubavitch community, especially the Lubavitch boys’ environment.
Also, OTD memoirs tend to describe growing up in a very geographically constrained area. My experience is very different from that. A big part of my experience in Lubavitch was traveling around the world doing outreach work. Being exposed to the world and grappling with an awareness of other people was a big part of my process of leaving the community. There’s whole chapters in the book on my experiences visiting Russia, living in Singapore, living in China, living in Argentina.
Most of the OTD memoirs describe very stark breaks with people’s families once people left the community. In my last book, Degrees of Separation, I found that many people who grew up Lubavitch and Satmar who left the Hasidic community still maintained ties with their family. Sometimes those are very painful ties, but still, they are ties. That’s very much my own experience. A big part of my process of deciding to leave the community was complicated by the fact that I had a very loving and warm relationship with my family.
Lubavitch is as strict as other ultra-Orthodox sects, but its emphasis on kiruv [missionary work to encourage non-Orthodox Jews to become Orthodox] exposes Hasidim to secular Jews at young ages. How did your international travels affect your exit journey?
I was profoundly influenced by the people that I encountered. Especially in my late teens, my early 20s, once I was already reading a lot of secular books secretly on my own, I was very interested to learn more about the outside world. I think that really opened up new vistas for me that had I stayed in Crown Heights would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, for me to access.
In the very beginning of the book, there’s a photo of you and your family at your daughter’s bat mitzvah. Why was it important for you to include that?
A part of what I’m trying to convey is the fact that there is life after people leave the community. The narrative within the ultra-Orthodox community is that ‘we have such a great life, and we know the truth, and if anyone is crazy enough to leave the community, their life is doomed, and they’ll all become drug addicts.’
This is a propaganda message that the community employs in order to scare people and prevent them from even thinking of trying to leave. Many people who leave the community, yes, they face challenges, but many, if not most of the people who decide to leave the community eventually find their way in the broader society and are able to establish healthy and meaningful lives on the outside.
I wanted to highlight that about my own experience. Yes, there were real challenges, and that’s certainly part of what I talk about: the mental health issues I struggled with, the challenges related to maintaining a loving relationship with my family. At the same time, I was able to establish a healthy and meaningful life on the outside.
In Degrees of Separation, you draw a distinction between intellectual and emotional reasons for leaving Orthodoxy, but in your memoir, the intellectual and emotional seem to come together, like when your sadness over your younger brother Shimmy’s death makes you question God. I’m wondering how you view those two factors in the context of your own path.
To be clear, even in Degrees of Separation, I argue that everyone who leaves the community has both intellectual and social-emotional reasons for doing so. It’s simply a question of which of these aspects of their experience they tend to focus on. Most people tended to focus on one versus the other. This is not the full picture. The people who were talking about their intellectual disagreements with the community also experienced some kind of disenchantment or social-emotional issues related to their community. Same thing for people who talked about their social-emotional reasons for leaving.
When I thought about leaving, and then even after I left, when I thought about my experience of leaving, I did tend to describe it in intellectualist terms. In fact, early on when we were dating, my now wife asked me if Shimmy’s death played a role in my experience of leaving. I said, ‘No, I don’t think that that had anything to do with it.’
Only years later, after I was doing my academic work and thinking much more rigorously about all of these issues, did I realize that Shimmy’s death had a profound influence on my religious evolution. That, and the death of the Lubavitcher rebbe, who we were taught to believe was the messiah.
After you shave your beard, your mom sends you and your brother to a rabbi who tries to convince you to become more religious again. As someone who researches journeys out of Orthodoxy, what do you make of that intervention?
It is very common for parents, relatives, neighbors, to try to connect the person who’s thinking of leaving with some rabbi whose mission is to quote-unquote straighten the person out. In a sense, it’s kind of remarkable that there was only one intervention in my case.
Sometimes, these interventions are carried out under the guise of mental health. There’s a therapist, a psychologist, a social worker, or someone who doesn’t have any mental health training but purports to be a mental health professional. They often basically argue that for your own mental health, it would be best if you would come back to Orthodoxy.
The rabbi I was sent to had been my teacher for several years. When I had him as a teacher, I thought that he was this brilliant guy, charming and charismatic. But when it came to this interaction, where he was basically trying to convince me to remain Orthodox, he was very plebeian in terms of the arguments that he was making, and his general attitude of disdain for me, for non-Orthodox forms of Judaism, and for secular knowledge in general.
Do you think that if you were going OTD today, as opposed to 20 years ago, the Orthodox net might have done a better job trying to catch you?
I think the ultra-Orthodox community has become more aware of the fact that large numbers of their members are leaving and that they need to do a better job of trying to respond to it.
Each individual religious community responds in a somewhat different way. So it’s hard to make generalizations, but it definitely seems that the ultra-Orthodox community is trying to respond to this issue in a more sensitive and thoughtful and humane way than they were doing, let’s say, 20 or 30 years ago.
Me and other scholars have also noted a rise of quote-unquote ‘modern’ ultra-Orthodox people.
I sometimes stay in Crown Heights for Shabbos with my family and go to shul with one of my brothers in law. I go to this one particular shul, and there’s a bunch of people who have trim beards, or something’s going on with their beards, not quite the way nature intended. They’re going to shul every Shabbos, they send their children to Lubavitch schools. In a lot of significant ways, they’re enmeshed in the community, and they’re recognized as being full-fledged members of the community, yet they’re living a kind of Lubavitch lite.
So yes, I think if I was leaving today, or if I was living in the community today, it’s hard to say exactly how things would end up. But I didn’t grow up in the community today. I grew up in the community 30 years ago, and my story is my story.
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Homeland Security hires social media manager whose posts raised alarm for promoting ‘white-nationalist rhetoric’
(JTA) — The Department of Homeland Security has hired a new digital communications director whose social media content for the Labor Department reportedly raised alarm bells inside the department and beyond for promoting white supremacist rhetoric.
Peyton Rollins began his new role at Homeland Security this month, The New York Times was the first to report this week. Tricia McLaughlin, the Homeland Security spokeswoman, did not confirm the move to the newspaper, but Rollins’ LinkedIn profile shows that he began working at the department this month.
Rollins, 21, has been identified as the staffer responsible for posts at the Labor Department that have been decried as making veiled antisemitic and racist allusions. He also claimed credit for a large banner of President Donald Trump’s face that was hung from the Labor Department’s headquarters, which its critics said echoed fascist stylings.
During Rollins’ time at the Labor Department, its social media pages have featured a range of slogans including “the globalist status quo is OVER,” “PATRIOTISM, NOT GLOBALISM” and “Patriotism will Prevail. America First. Always,” which featured an image of an American flag with 11 stars, the number that appeared on some Confederate flags.
One post on X in November, which featured the phrase “Americanism Will Prevail,” spurred hundreds of negative comments because it appeared to use the same typeface used on the original cover of “Mein Kampf.”
Staffers at the department were alarmed, according to the New York Times. “We’re used to seeing posts about things like apprenticeships, benefits and unions,” a former employee, Helen Luryi, told the newspaper. “All of a sudden, we get white-nationalist rhetoric.”
In his new role, Rollins will oversee the Homeland Security social media accounts, including its X account which has been accused of tweeting antisemitic dog whistles.
Rollins joins a growing list of hires under the Trump administration who have faced allegations of promoting extremist rhetoric.
In March, DHS hired speechwriter Eric Lendrum, who has previously promoted the “Great Replacement” theory and likened conservatives in the United States to Jews in Nazi Germany. In May, the Pentagon also appointed Kingsley Wilson, who has repeatedly echoed antisemitic rhetoric online, as its press secretary.
Last year, the appointments of Darren Beattie as the acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs in February and Paul Ingrassia in May to a senior legal role drew criticism for the pair’s relationships with white supremacists.
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