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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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Rabbi Mayer Moskowitz z”l, on Hasidic life in pre-war Czernowitz
[The following is an English version of the original Yiddish article, which you can read here.]
Rabbi Mayer Moskowitz, a beloved longtime educator at the Ramaz School in New York and the Hebrew-immersive Camp Massad, and author of the book A Memoir of Sanctity, has passed away.
In 2010, I interviewed Rabbi Moskowitz to learn what the Hasidic community was like in the city where he was born and raised — Czernowitz (Chernivtsi), then part of Romania, and today Ukraine.
Most contemporary scholars of East European Jewish history focus on prewar Czernowitz as a hub of intellectual and cultural Jewish life; as the location of the first Yiddish conference in 1908; as the milieu where the poet Itsik Manger and fabulist Eliezer Shteynbarg produced their greatest work.
But as the oldest child of the Shotzer Rebbe — Avrohom Chaim Moskowitz, Mayer Moskowitz had a very different perspective of the city, describing it as a center of five Hasidic dynasties and a vibrant Orthodox Jewish community.
I met Rabbi Moskowitz through my son, Gedaliah Ejdelman, who was a student in his class on halacha (Jewish law) at Ramaz Upper School. The following anecdote gives you an idea of the kind of person Rabbi Moskowitz was:
On the day before the final exam, one student asked if he could write his answers in English rather than Hebrew. Half-jokingly, the rabbi told the students that they could respond in any language they wished.
Gedaliah raised his hand and asked if he could write in Yiddish. “Sure,” Rabbi Moskowitz said. So Gedaliah did, citing Rashi and other commentators in mame-loshen. Moskowitz was so delighted by the Yiddish responses that he shared them with his colleagues.
When I met with Rabbi Moskowitz in his Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan, I asked him what life was like in Czernowitz. He told me he was born in 1927, a son — in fact, the only son — of the Shotzer Rebbe, Avrohom Chaim Moskowitz. He explained that Czernowitz had no less than five Hasidic dynasties. Besides his father, there was the Boyaner Rebbe; the Nadvorner Rebbe; the Zalischiker Rebbe and the Kitover Rebbe.
“All the Rebbes were related because the marriages of their children were arranged solely with other rabbinical families in Czernowitz,” he said.
Every Rebbe had his own court of Hasidim but there were marked differences between the Rebbe and his worshippers. The former wore beards and peyes (Yiddish for sidelocks) and donned a shtreimel for the Sabbath and holidays, while their worshippers, seeing themselves as “modern Jews,” were clean-shaven and came to services wearing a tsilinder (top hat) and tailcoat.
“I myself had little peyes,” Rabbi Moskowitz said.
His family lived in the same building as his father’s shul. His mother, Alte Sheyndl, was a daughter of the Pidayetser Rebbe, so she wore a sheitel. But, like the other rebishe kinder (Rebbe’s children), she was apparently influenced by the cosmopolitan character of the city. In contrast to her husband who spoke Yiddish with their children, the Rebbetzin spoke German. She went to the theater, read secular Yiddish poetry and shook men’s hands. On Mother’s Day, little Mayer would bring her a bouquet of flowers and on New Year’s Eve the Rebbetzin and the other daughters of rabbinical families threw a party.
“On New Year’s Eve they came to our apartment on the second floor, elegantly dressed, ate and spent many hours together,” Rabbi Moskowitz said. “Although they didn’t drink any alcohol, the daughters-in-law of the Bayoner Rebbe smoked thin cigarettes.”
Rabbi Moskowitz recalled his first day in cheder at the age of three: “My parents never walked together in public but on that day they dressed me in completely new shorts, shoes and a talis-kotn.” The latter is the traditional four-cornered fringed garment that Orthodox men and boys wear under their shirt.
His parents walked him, hand-in-hand, to the cheder. When they arrived, his father wrapped him in a tallis and carried him inside. On the table, little Mayer saw the diminutive of his name, ‘Mayerl,’ written with large golden letters.
The teacher asked him to repeat each Hebrew letter and its corresponding sound. Every time little Mayer correctly repeated it — “Komets alef ‘o’ … komets beyz ‘bo’ — a honey cookie dropped onto the table in front of him.
“I really thought it was falling from the heavens,” Rabbi Moskowitz said. “As it says in Proverbs: ‘Pleasant words are as a honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones.’”
When he was five, Mayer began learning khumesh, the Bible. “It was shabbos afternoon. My relatives, family friends and all five Rebbes came. They lifted me onto the table. I was wearing a brown velvet suit. Each grandfather gave me a golden watch with a little chain and attached it to my suit. Then they asked me: ‘What are you learning in khumesh now?’”
After the quiz was over, the guests began dancing and singing, eating cake and fruit. All the Rebbes wore shtreimels as they sat at tables surrounded by their Hasidim and handed out shirayim — remnants of the blessed food that a Rebbe would give his followers, who believed they would receive a spiritual blessing by eating it. Mayer sat between his grandfathers.
Every morning Mayer went to cheder and three afternoons a week he attended a Zionist Hebrew-language school. In 1936, at the age of ten, he was sent to the city of Vizhnitz (today — Vyzhnytsia, Ukraine) to learn in the yeshiva of the Vizhnitzer Rebbe. He came home only four times a year: on the shabbos of Hanukkah, Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot.
Rabbi Moskowitz remembers Sukkot in Czernowitz: “All year, men and women ate together but not on Sukkot. My mother blessed the holiday candles, came into the sukkah for kiddush and hamotzi but then went back into the house where she ate in the company of the other women in the family.”
The sukkah was large. His father’s Hasidim would gather around their Rebbe’s tish (table) on the second night of Sukkot for the all-night celebration called simkhas-beis-hashoeivah. About 150 men would squeeze into the sukkah. But contrary to tradition, no one slept in it. “It was cold and a bit dangerous,” Rabbi Moskowitz said.
The Shotzer Rebbe’s house also served as an inn for rebbes from surrounding towns, when they needed to come to Chernovitz to see a doctor. Simple Jews, who leased land from non-Jewish noblemen would also come to the inn to see their rebbes. “They were common people, wore workboots and would bring fruit from their fields as a gift for the Rebbe,” he explained.
Many times, impoverished Jews would come to his father’s door asking for money. “One of them, called Fishele, used to say ‘I love you’ to my mother. She was indeed a beautiful woman. So my family would invite him in and feed him the same food we were eating.”
In describing these simple everyday events of his childhood in Czernowitz, Rabbi Moskowitz did a true mitzvah: He enabled us to see the city not only as a magnet for Yiddish writers and cultural activists, but also as a large, thriving Hasidic community.
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On final visit to Israel as mayor, Adams makes a closing argument against Mamdani
JERUSALEM — Outgoing New York City Mayor Eric Adams embarked on a multi-day swing through Israel, billed as both a show of solidarity amid rising antisemitism and a farewell visit. But it was also something else: likely the last international trip a New York City mayor will take for years, a point Adams wanted to underscore.
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a strident critic of Israel, has pledged not to visit the country, breaking with a tradition upheld by every mayor since 1951 to demonstrate solidarity with Jewish constituents at home. He has also vowed to end the city’s decades-long practice of investing millions in Israeli government debt securities and has said he would order the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he lands in New York.
“I think he has to have the level of political maturity to understand that government is not protesting,” Adams said in a fireside chat at an event hosted in his honor by the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) in Tel Aviv on Sunday evening. “And all those who are in his midst, like the Democratic Socialists of America, he needs to explain to them that he’s now the mayor. He’s no longer someone that is just protesting in the city of New York. He has to protect the city of New York.”
In the 30-minute conversation, moderated by Sacha Roytman, chief executive of CAM, Adams repeatedly alluded to the impact of Mamdani’s political rise and victory in the mayoral election earlier this month. The outgoing mayor said he told his team a year ago that Mamdani was on track to win the Democratic primary and that he expected to face him in a general election showdown, believing he could beat him.
Adams made combating antisemitism central to his reelection effort. Elected as a Democrat in 2021, he later lost key support after striking a deal with the Trump administration to drop his corruption case, prompting him to run for a second term on an independent line dubbed “End Antisemitism.” He became popular in Israel after delivering a forceful speech at a New York City rally in the days following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, in which he declared, “We are not alright.” He also resisted progressive pressure to distance himself from Israel and faced backlash for his crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests at colleges and across the city. Adams recently signed an executive order adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which labels most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic.
Mamdani, who attended some of the pro-Palestinian protests, faced the most scrutiny for refusing to outright condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada” and for saying he doesn’t recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
At the Sunday event, Adams took several shots at Mamdani, calling his election “abnormal” and questioning whether outside actors had influenced the race by shaping social-media algorithms. He suggested that the seeds of Mamdani’s campaign, powered by youthful energy and a promise of unconventional change, were planted during the protests against Israel.
“He had a ready-made army,” Adams said. “He had the Free Palestine movement that was heavily in place. He had the war that was going on, and then he had a group of angry youth on our college campuses. So when he emerged and said he was going to run on one issue, the Free Palestine movement, he already had the army that responded to him.” (Mamdani also ran on issues of affordability, universal childcare, and free buses.)
Adams said the Jewish community in New York “must prepare itself” to respond to any antisemitic attacks that might come. “I think this is a period where they need to be very conscious that there’s a level of global hostility towards the Jewish community,” he said, adding, “If I was a Jewish New Yorker with children, I would be concerned right now.”
Speaking with the Forward on Monday, Adams said he is being truthful about the situation. “I’m not going to lie to New Yorkers, I know what I’m seeing,” he said. “Other people will sugarcoat this moment, and I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to pretend as though everything is fine.” To his critics, Adams said, “Those who want to interpret my candid view of what’s playing out now in our city and across the globe, they can do so. That is not up to me to try to convince them of what I am seeing and what I am hearing and what is playing out.”
The outgoing mayor is expected to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his office on Tuesday. Netanyahu said in an interview last week, commenting on Mamdani’s win, “If that’s the future of New York, I think New York has a very dim future.” Adams said he’ll assure Netanyahu and other leaders he is meeting with the “49% of New Yorkers did not buy into the rhetoric of the hatred towards Israel.” Madani won with 50.4% of the more than two million votes cast.
Other highlights of Adams’ Israel trip
Earlier in the day, Adams held an emotional 30-minute meeting with three former Israeli hostages — Yarden Bibas, whose wife Shiri and young sons Kfir and Ariel were murdered in captivity; Sagi Dekel-Chen, an American-Israeli released in a ceasefire deal in January; and Bar Kuperstein, who was among the last 20 living hostages freed last month.
Held at the World Jewish Sports Museum at Kfar Maccabiah, Dekel-Chen described his time in captivity and the slow and painful process of healing. Bibas described his life in grief, adding that his only purpose is “to stay alive and remember my wife and kids.”
Adams, visibly shaken, told the former hostages that he admired their resilience and that New Yorkers needed to hear these stories firsthand. He offered to host them for the ball drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
At the museum, Roy Hessing, deputy CEO of the Maccabiah movement, invited Adams to serve as an honorary guest at the next Maccabiah Games, now scheduled to resume in June, after delays due to the war. The event is expected to draw 30,000 participants, including 15,000 from abroad.
Adams also paid a visit to the Western Wall on Sunday night, where he placed a note in the wall and prayed. In the guestbook, Adams wrote that “God is real and life has shown us this.”
Shortly after landing on Saturday, Adams walked through the Nachalat Binyamin neighborhood with Tel Aviv’s deputy mayor, Asaf Zamir, who was Israel’s consul general in New York from 2021 to 2023. Zamir was outspoken against Mamdani throughout the mayoral campaign. Adams has long referred to New York as the “Tel Aviv of America.”
In tours closed to the press, Adams visited the IMI Academy, where Israeli instructors provide tactical and emergency-response training, and the Aerial Systems facility, where he was shown the latest drone and surveillance technologies. He also addressed the annual mayors’ conference hosted by the American Jewish Congress at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel.
At many of his stops, Adams said about his farewell: “I’m not just the mayor that’s leaving office, I’m your brother.”
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Graffiti during Mexican protests against Claudia Sheinbaum’s government calls out ‘Jewish whore’
(JTA) — Mexico’s Jewish community has condemned antisemitic graffiti apparently directed toward the country’s Jewish president during an anti-government protest on Saturday.
The graffiti painted on the door of the Supreme Court building said “puta judia” or “Jewish whore,” in what has been widely interpreted as a reference to Claudia Sheinbaum. It also included a crossed-out Star of David.
The graffiti was painted during a youth-led protest that responds to rising violence, crime and corruption, particularly by drug cartels. Dozens of people were reportedly arrested and injured in Saturday’s protests.
“The Jewish Community of Mexico strongly condemns the antisemitic remarks and expressions” during the march, the community said in a statement on Sunday. “Antisemitism is a form of discrimination according to our constitution and must be rejected clearly and unequivocally.”
Sheinbaum, elected last year, is Mexico’s first Jewish president. She has not made her Jewish identity a part of her public persona and is not a regular participant in the country’s tight-knit Jewish communities.
Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar, also condemned the graffiti. “Israel strongly condemns the antisemitic and sexist slurs directed at Mexico’s President @Claudiashein,” he tweeted while sharing a picture from the protests. “There is no place for such attacks in political discourse. All forms of antisemitism, in any context, must be rejected unequivocally.”
Israel strongly condemns the antisemitic and sexist slurs directed at Mexico’s President @Claudiashein. There is no place for such attacks in political discourse.
All forms of antisemitism, in any context, must be rejected unequivocally. pic.twitter.com/HEDKzq34e8— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) November 16, 2025
Some of Sheinbaum’s detractors have previously invoked her Jewish background, including former President Vicente Fox, who called her a “Bulgarian Jew” in an apparent attempt to minimize her candidacy. He apologized, but made a similar comment after Sheinbaum briefly donned a rosary with a crucifix after being given one during a campaign stop. “JEWISH AND FOREIGN AT THE SAME TIME,” Fox tweeted. Sheinbaum produced her birth certificate multiple times to dispel rumors that she was born in Bulgaria.
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