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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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Far-right win in German regional race sends shockwaves through Europe
(JTA) —
A victory for Germany’s far-right party in an eastern federal state has reverberated across the globe, exposing the widening rifts between alarmed centrist leaders and insurgent nationalist movements in Europe.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party won 43.8% of the vote in an election in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, crushing the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party, which held 17.2% support, according to preliminary figures.
The AfD is now heading toward 39 seats in Saxony-Anhalt’s 83-seat state parliament. It’s expected to fall 3 seats short of an outright majority, leaving open the question of whether it can form Germany’s first far-right state government since World War II. The party has proposed a sweeping nationalist agenda that includes deporting immigrants, defunding “anti-German art” and teaching children less about the country’s Nazi past.
Merz told reporters in Berlin on Monday he was “deeply shocked” and “unsettled” by the results, which he said rippled through the rest of the country and the world. He added that it was impossible for Germany to “go back to business as usual” after so many voters in Saxony-Anhalt chose a party that “questions the democratic institutions in our country.”
The results dealt the CDU its “most severe defeat” in decades, conceded Merz, who leads the party once headed by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Merz said that he was searching for answers to “why far-right populism and far-right extremism was able to rise in such a rapid manner,” suggesting that his party may have underestimated the “fears of our population” amid economic crises and rapid technological change. He said that minorities in Saxony-Anhalt would be particularly vulnerable under an AfD government, but noted that the state would still have obligations to follow federal law, including regarding immigration policy.
Merz also directed his message to the rest of Europe, saying that Germany had a “special responsibility because of its history” to keep its political order “deeply anchored in Europe.”
Despite the scale of the CDU’s defeat in Saxony-Anhalt, Merz ruled out stepping down, saying, “Giving up is not an option.”
Though Saxony-Anhalt is one of Germany’s smallest regions, home to some 1.7 million voters, its election results quickly sent shockwaves through other European countries whose leaders, like Merz, are fighting to fend off far-right, anti-immigrant parties in national elections next year.
French Europe Minister Benjamin Haddad called the AfD’s regional win a “grave moment in Europe” and said that “nationalism and xenophobia will never be a solution.”
“We cannot forget our history,” said Haddad, an ally of centrist President Emmanuel Macron. “That is the meaning of the choices made by France and Germany.”
France’s government faces its own fears of a right-wing populist wave. Marine Le Pen, the head of the far-right National Rally, has dwarfed all other candidates in polls heading into France’s presidential election in 2027, when term limits force Macron to step down.
Across the Channel, British Chief Secretary to the Treasury Emma Reynolds said in an interview on Times Radio that the U.K.’s Labour government “will not be reaching out to a right-wing populist party.” She added that she put the AfD in “the same political bracket” as Reform UK, the far-right party that surged in local elections earlier this year.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk also condemned the AfD’s victory. The far-right party has alarmed Poland, Ukraine’s neighbor, with its pro-Russia stance, as it seeks to halt Germany’s military aid to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia.
“In Poland, only idiots or traitors can rejoice at the triumph of the AfD in Germany,” said Tusk.
Meanwhile, the AfD was cheered by nationalist, anti-immigration party leaders in Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, all of whom have sought to capitalize on economic and social grievances similar to those that contributed to the AfD’s victory Sunday.
Santiago Abascal, the head of Spain’s far-right Vox party, called the result “a great hope for Germany and for Europe.”
André Ventura, the founder of Portugal’s far-right Chega party, said that “the Germans too are opening their eyes against illegal and uncontrolled immigration, corruption, and the capture of our freedom and identity.”
And in the Netherlands, the AfD received a “Congratulations” from the far-right Party for Freedom’s leader, Geert Wilders.
While President Donald Trump has yet to officially respond to the Saxony-Anhalt election, he posted a screenshot of the results without comment on his Truth Social account Sunday night.
Trump’s post was shared by Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian presidential envoy and businessman, who said the AfD scored a “historic win” that would “put migration under control.”
Elon Musk, the billionaire and former Trump adviser who campaigned for the AfD last year, gave his support to the national party leader Alice Weidel on X, which he owns, writing “Well done” in German.
Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s candidate in Saxony-Anhalt who hopes to become the state premier, responded by praising Musk.
“Thank you, @elonmusk, for your support and for your clear and highly important perspective on the political developments of our time — including here in Germany,” he wrote.
The post Far-right win in German regional race sends shockwaves through Europe appeared first on The Forward.
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In new ‘Fauda’ season, the aftershocks of Oct. 7, without a thought for Gaza
When Fauda Season 4 ended an eternity and a devastating war ago, our hero was at death’s door, reciting both the central prayer of Judaism, the Shema, and the Muslim Fatiha.
It was a cliffhanger with monumental implications for Doron Kavillio (Lior Raz), an Israeli Jew who spent his days undercover as a Muslim Arab — an identity crisis long in coming. Zoom out and you can see the doomed duality of Israel and Palestine, Jew and Muslim, connected in a cycle of death and more alike than they may seem.
Season 5 begins bilingually, with Hebrew and Arab definitions of the Arabic word Tha’r, blood revenge, “restoring violated honor or avenging injustice.” This concept is now the point of commonality — not how men pray, but how they seek revenge.
Welcome to a post-Oct. 7 Israel. Doron is in therapy, struggling to recall eight missing hours of his life on the day of Hamas’ attack on the Gaza envelope.
Comrades have left the country — Steve (Doron Ben-David) is protecting oligarchs in London, Sagi and Nurit are in Australia. Eli (Yaakov Zada-Daniel) is now Orthodox, living in a settlement and reeling from the murder of his wife and stepchildren at his now-torched kibbutz. When a Bedouin friend, Salem (Bian Anteer) who lost his son in the raid on Eli’s home, approaches him with a tip on the Nukhba fighter responsible, they depart for Marseille to answer the call of Tha’r.
It would hardly be Fauda if this act of vengeance didn’t give way to a much larger plot. Marseille is the staging ground for Saeed el Hatib (French-Algerian actor Hakim Djaziri), “the Sinwar of Europe,” who is recruiting sympathetic, white continentals for a fresh massacre in Israel.
Fauda has always made some viewers uncomfortable. Massively entertaining, bingeable to those of us who stream it in the Netflix aftermarket, its existence was premised on ongoing injustices in the West Bank and Gaza and the violence that bursts through their borders. (The BDS movement labelled it a “war-crimes glorifying” series;” Haaretz called it “morally dubious.”)
And yet as late as the last season it contained very real criticism of Israel’s conduct, including its costly campaigns to recover captured soldiers and the torture used to extract information on their whereabouts. The show always alluded to real operations — Cast Lead, Brother’s Keeper — in dialogue. But because it can’t merely mention an attack as raw and monumental as Oct. 7, and because it has no desire to question the response to it, it chooses to recreate its savagery.
Episodes 7 and 8, flashbacks to that day, are front-loaded with a trigger warning and a disclaimer that you can skip them and still be able to follow the main plot.
It’s hard for me to recommend those episodes. If not exactly atrocity porn, their central, race-against-time set piece is too anchored in recent events and constructed too much like an action movie. It feels in a sense exploitative, even if intended as a tribute. (To give them credit, both Lior Raz and his co-creator Avi Issacharoff, who said they “wrote from their trauma,” were on the ground helping the south of the country evacuate in the aftermath.)
The new season starts with the promise of complexity. It opens on a grieving Muslim father and shifts to a milksop accountant who worked for Hamas, seemingly tortured by Eli in a blind rage for a crime he didn’t commit. Could an excessive devotion to Tha’r, a tribal code of retribution, be the diagnosis of the show’s creators of Israeli society at this moment?
If it is, it’s not a critical one. The villains are the villains, and, most revealingly, they now number people with no connection to the conflict.
Hatib’s enlistment of white Europeans for a mass-casualty terror attack services a trite narrative of postcolonial guilt finding an outlet in the pro-Palestinian cause. It works on another level too: This fighting force is squaring off against Doron’s corps of Mizrahi Jews, whose mere presence dismantles the lie that Israelis are themselves all white colonizers, and that Israel and the European empire of yore are in any way analogous.
When, back at mission control, the counterterrorists speak of “suspicious-looking Europeans” who are “in their 30s,” the derision for this type of fellow traveller is palpable. Their standard bearer, Mélanie Laurent, formerly Tarantino’s “face of Jewish vengeance,” plays Anne, a blonde, “high middle-class Catholic French woman” who straps up with C-4, a keffiyeh ever-draped around her neck. Through her, and in a quite literal way, the show suggests the Western love affair with Palestinians — which in this season’s logic means Hamas — is misguided.
All the while, we never see Gaza, where much of Season 3 was set, with some among its population humanized. We never reckon with the destruction there. We hear about it, and a kind of lip service is paid to the crime of collective punishment — the sort that we hear at the end of almost every season — but it’s secondary to storytelling as elegy and justification. One could just have easily placed the Hebrew word Zachor before that first cold open: Remember what they did to us.
At one point, after a shootout with more blood spatter than I ever recall seeing on the show, Doron empties his clip into an enemy with the words “this is for October 7.” Seconds later, in a Shin Bet command room his handler Gabi (Itzik Cohen, whose between-seasons weight gain is a running joke) quips, a la Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, “I’m too old for this.”
He’s not the only one.
In the past week I’ve chatted with some folks older than me — they don’t know each other and are largely to my right on Israel — who don’t relish the thought of another season. Not just because they don’t want to watch Oct. 7 reenacted, but because following the exploits of Israeli security agents has vastly different optics after the Hamas-Israel war, unprecedented settler violence and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s recently-stated ideal scenario of killing “30 or 40” Palestinians in Gaza each night.
This may well be the privilege of the diaspora, but the fatigue points to a shift in attitude that’s worth paying attention to. If these horrors are out of sight, out of mind this season, they’re top of mind to many who are watching — and many others who might have once tuned in.
The post In new ‘Fauda’ season, the aftershocks of Oct. 7, without a thought for Gaza appeared first on The Forward.
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Armed attacker arrested after lunging at Ohio Jewish gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton
(JTA) — Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, a Jewish Democrat, was unharmed following an attack by an armed individual at the sprawling Canfield Fair on Sunday.
Police arrested 38-year-old Patrick Havas, who had pushed his way through a crowd in a Democratic Party fairgrounds tent where she was speaking, the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office announced on Sunday evening.
“While attending the Canfield Fair, an armed individual lunged at Dr. Acton, injuring multiple people,” Addie Bullock, communications director for the Acton campaign, said in a statement.
“This kind of violence has no place in Ohio,” Bullock added. “Dr. Acton will always stand up to the chaos, hate and vitriol that pits us against one another.”
Acton, who would be Ohio’s first Jewish governor if elected, is a former director of the Ohio Department of Health and completed residencies in both pediatrics and preventative medicine.
Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, Acton’s opponent in the upcoming election, released a statement condemning the attack on Sunday. His communications director, Connie Luck, stressed that “candidates should be able to meet with voters without having to worry about threats or violence.”
“What happened today is completely unacceptable and has no place in politics, and we hope that no one was hurt,” she added.
Havas had at first entered the fairgrounds tent and began recording Acton’s speech on his cell phone, but when he began pushing, Ohio State Highway Patrol troopers confronted him, according to the sheriff’s office. During the confrontation, two people were knocked to the ground and Havas was taken into custody by Canfield Fair police.
Following Havas’s arrest, police said they found two handguns and a set of brass knuckles in his possession, although no weapons were ever brandished or removed from their holsters.
Detectives on Sunday night added that they’d be continuing the investigation and would be filing charges after consulting with the Mahoning County Prosecutor.
The Canfield Fair, established in 1846, describes itself as the third-largest county fair nationwide. The fairgrounds, located about 75 miles southeast of Cleveland, sits on 353 acres of land and houses more than 60 buildings.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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