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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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AUDIO: Scholar Ruth Wisse describes her collaboration with songwriter Leonard Cohen

אין אַ גאָר אינטערעסאַנטן אינטערוויו אויף דער ייִדישער ראַדיאָ־פּראָגראַם „דאָס ייִדישע קול“, גיט די אָנגעזעענע ייִדישע ליטעראָטור־פֿאָרשערין רות ווײַס איבער אירע זכרונות פֿון אַ צאָל באַקאַנטע ייִדישע פֿיגורן.

זי דערציילט ווי אַזוי זי האָט געזאַמלט געלט פֿאַר אַ בוך שריפֿטן פֿונעם קאַנאַדער לידער־שרײַבער און זינגער לענאַרד כּהן, מיט וועמען זי איז געבליבן גוטע פֿרײַנד ביזן סוף פֿון זײַן לעבן, נישט געקוקט אויף די גאָר אַנדערע ריכטונגען פֿון זייערע קאַריערעס.

ווײַס גיט אויך איבער אירע זכרונות פֿון צוויי ייִדישע שרײַבער: איציק מאַנגער, וואָס האָט אָפֿט זיך אויסגעדריקט אַ סך בעסער בײַם רעדן מיט אַ גלעזל משקה אין דער האַנט, און יצחק באַשעוויס, וואָס האָט געדינט ווי דער כּהן בײַ איר זונס פּדיון־הבן.

זי לייענט אויך אויסצוגן פֿון איר בוך (אויף ענגליש), „פֿרײַ ווי אַ ייִד“ וועגן אירע שמועסן מיטן פּאָעט אַבֿרהם סוצקעווער און דעם גרינדער פֿון ייִוואָ, מאַקס ווײַנרײַך, ווען זי איז נאָך געווען אַ סטודענטקע. ביידע האָבן זי געפּרוּווט איבערצײַגן צו ווערן צווישן די ערשטע דאָקטאָראַנטקעס פֿון דער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור אין קאָלאָמביע־אוניווערסיטעט.

צו הערן דעם אינטערוויו, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ. איר קענט עס אויך הערן אויף „ספּאָטיפֿײַ“ אָדער אויף „עפּל פּאָדקאַסט“

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A little‑remembered Gilded Age millionaire helped make milk safe for American kids through his ‘retail giving’

The 1844 edition of the widely used schoolbook written by William H. McGuffey, “Newly Revised Eclectic Fourth Reader,” includes a dialogue about the difference between “true and false philanthropy”:

Mr. Fantom: I despise a narrow field. O for the reign of universal benevolence! I want to make all mankind good and happy.

Mr. Goodman: Dear me! Sure, that must be a wholesale sort of a job: had you not better try your hand at a town or neighborhood first?

As the discussion continues, the lesson becomes clear. Mr. Fantom’s approach is too ambitious to accomplish much, while Mr. Goodman’s, if narrower in scope, was likely to be more useful in practice.

Donor with mundane objectives

Andrew Fisher’s biography of a Gilded Age New York department store magnate, “Nathan Straus: From Macy’s Magnate to International Humanitarian,” suggests that Mr. Goodman would likely have applauded Straus’ approach to philanthropy.

This black and white photo is a portrait of a man in an old-fashioned suit.
Nathan Straus made his mark in philanthropy after a successful career running the Macy’s department store. Library of Congress Image by

Many of Straus’ contemporary philanthropists were setting lofty goals for their giving. In oil magnate John D. Rockefeller’s case, it was promoting “the welfare of humanity throughout the world.” For steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, it was “to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.”

Straus pursued more mundane objectives that included championing milk pasteurization. Although his efforts are not as well known today as those of his more ambitious – and wealthier – counterparts, they accomplished a lot and showed that what might be called “retail giving” can have far-reaching effects.

Successful immigration story

The Straus family came to the United States from Germany in the 1850s during the first big wave of Jewish immigration. Lazarus Straus, Nathan’s father, followed a familiar path for Jewish immigrants at the time, beginning as a peddler and eventually establishing his own store in the small town of Talbotton, Georgia, where the members of his family were the only Jews.

He prospered, became a respected citizen and saw that his children received good educations, including in their religion.

Then the Civil War upended the family’s life, first by reviving antisemitic prejudices and then, eventually, by destroying the family’s business.

Starting anew in New York City, Lazarus and his older sons, Isidor and Nathan, began to sell imported china, glassware and other crockery to retailers in the Northeast and South. One was Rowland H. Macy, who had founded an eponymous store that was on the cutting edge of what Fisher calls a “retailing revolution.”

Macy’s innovations included stocking large inventories of many kinds of merchandise, competitive pricing, extensive advertising and providing a variety of services like public restrooms and a cafeteria to make shoppers’ experiences more pleasurable.

Aided by the rapid urban and economic growth of the late 19th century, the model flourished. Department stores displaced smaller, specialty shops. Other retail powerhouses, such as Bloomingdale’s and Lord & Taylor, soon competed with Macy’s.

The Straus family sold their wares at Macy’s. After Rowland H. Macy died, the Straus family became partners with its new owners. By 1896, the Strauses owned the store outright. And Macy’s was expanding: It bought another department store in Brooklyn and created a flagship building on Manhattan’s Herald Square, which Macy’s still occupies.

The big Macy's store in Manhattan is seen in a black-and-white photo.
The landmark Macy’s department store in New York’s Herald Square opened in 1902 while Nathan and Isidor Straus ran the retailer. Library of Congress Image by

His philanthropy journey begins

While Isidor Straus oversaw the store’s internal operations, Nathan focused on the company’s external activities, such as purchasing, marketing and dealing with government and business leaders.

A third brother, Oscar, pursued a career as a politician and diplomat, eventually becoming secretary of commerce and labor under President Theodore Roosevelt and the first Jewish member of a presidential cabinet. Perhaps inevitably, this led to a series of public appointments for Nathan Straus.

However, as they became wealthier, Nathan and his wife, Lina, increasingly devoted their attention to a series of philanthropic projects.

In 1893, the U.S. entered a four-year economic depression, its worst until the 1930s. As unemployment in New York City rose, Nathan Straus used his merchandising skills to address the needs of the jobless and poor.

He created a number of “depots” near tenements and boarding houses that sold coal, food and fuel at discount prices. Fisher, Straus’ biographer, rightly calls these early examples of what is now known as “social entrepreneurship”: the application of business principles to solving social problems.

Making milk less deadly

As these efforts were getting away, Straus also launched what would become his major preoccupation: promoting pasteurized milk.

In New York City in the early 1890s, Fisher writes, “the annual mortality rate among children under five was about 15 percent,” or 18,000 infants and toddlers per year. A main cause was consuming raw milk, which, unless certified by inspectors, was likely not only to contain a variety of pathogens, such as tuberculosis bacteria, but spoil easily going from farm to table.

Although scientists had long known that heating could make milk safer, doctors and public health officials worried that sterilizing milk might also destroy its valuable nutrients.

Straus, who had lost one of his own children to what he believed was a milk-borne infection, built on his projects for the unemployed by working with New York social service agencies to develop pasteurization plants and infant-milk stations near low-income neighborhoods.

They sold sterilized and refrigerated milk at below-wholesale prices, or donated it to those who could not afford to pay. Businesslike efficiency kept costs low, as did donations. Multilingual ads publicized the product’s availability, doctors and nurses advised parents on child-rearing, and careful recordkeeping aimed at assessing the program’s health benefits.

Straus and his wife devoted much of their time and money to this work. In addition to establishing 297 milk stations in 36 cities, they also spoke and wrote widely about the merits of pasteurization.

By 1908, their efforts paid off when the U.S. Public Health Service endorsed pasteurization and state and local governments began requiring that milk sold in their jurisdictions be pasteurized. Raw milk remained available in many states, and debates over its safety continue to this day.

As a result of this and other Progressive Era measures, New York City’s health commissioner estimated that infant deaths dropped by two-thirds
during the first two decades of the 20th century, with similar declines elsewhere in the country.

A beachfront city has some tall buildings.
The coastal Israeli city of Netanya was named after philanthropist Nathan Straus. Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images Image by

Other causes

While most of Nathan Straus’ efforts occurred in the U.S., he used his trips to Europe for Macy’s to promote pasteurization on the continent.

During a 1904 visit, he toured the Mediterranean and stopped in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Impressed by the early Jewish settlements and holy sites he saw, Straus became an ardent advocate for creating a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, an unusual position for a Jewish businessman of that era, according to Fisher.

On a subsequent trip, a broken leg kept Straus from returning to New York on the maiden voyage of the Titanic; his brother Isidor and sister-in-law Ida were not so fortunate.

In the U.S., Nathan Straus led Zionist organizations, while in Palestine, his chief contributions involved supporting a variety of health care and economic development activities, including Hadassah, the women’s health and community development organization founded by Henrietta Szold.

The Israeli city of Netanya is named in his honor.

No foundation to be remembered by

Nathan Straus’ achievements as a philanthropist are not widely known today because he did not create a grantmaking foundation that outlasted him, as Rockefeller and Carnegie did.

Instead, by the time of his death in 1931, Straus had donated much of his fortune. Fisher writes that Straus used to invoke an old Hebrew proverb: “Money given in health is gold. Money given in sickness is silver. Money given after death is lead.”

He also didn’t donate heavily to the burgeoning network of communal organizations set up to assist the growing population of Jewish immigrants, as did the financiers Jacob Schiff and Felix Warburg, who were also affluent Jewish immigrants from Germany.

As Fisher notes, this pattern of philanthropy resembles that of Straus’ friend – and pallbearer – Julius Rosenwald, the longtime head of Sears, Roebuck and Co. Both supported Jewish causes as well as major initiatives aimed at helping others: In Rosenwald’s case, it was schools for African American children in the South, while for Straus, it was milk pasteurization in New York City and beyond.

During and after World War I, they worked together to assist Jewish refugees in Europe. Fisher might have added that neither Straus nor Rosenwald sought much recognition for their work.

His thorough account should help give Straus the credit he deserves for his philanthropy. It should also show that donors do not have to aspire to “make all mankind good and happy” to make an important difference.

In many ways, Nathan Straus was an old-fashioned do-gooder, responding to the needs he saw with innovative solutions. As a result, he wound up accomplishing a lot of good.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Conversation

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Many Americans are moving away from congregations, but not necessarily from religion

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

“Emma,” a young Jewish woman who we met in 2019, didn’t belong to a synagogue. She didn’t have a Jewish partner. She didn’t observe Jewish rituals regularly. On most surveys about religion, she would not seem very engaged with Judaism.

But as Emma talked about what she did in her free time, a very different picture began to emerge. She visited Jewish websites and enjoyed listening to Jewish music. She read books about Jewish topics and had recently attended a retreat for young Jewish adults to learn Torah while also doing yoga.

She was highly invested in learning about Judaism, but she explored her identity without joining traditional institutions.

Most major surveys about religion ask whether someone belongs to a congregation, how often they attend services, whether they pray regularly and whether belief is important in their lives. Those measures help identify broad shifts, like the growing percentage of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated: the “nones.”

But many Americans’ religious lives, like Emma’s, are not disappearing; they are moving away from membership of traditional institutions. To understand what religion looks like in 21st-century America, researchers may need to ask different questions.

Learning through art

As scholars of Judaism and education, we have been exploring how people learn about religion beyond traditional places like synagogues, Jewish schools and summer camps. Between 2019 and early 2023, we spoke with hundreds of people and explored different leisure time activities to discover what people learn about Judaism and Jewishness through cultural arts.

We interviewed dozens of audience members at Jewish-themed shows on Broadway, such as “Leopoldstadt” and “Parade.” We attended Jewish concerts and asked attendees what they learned. We explored how social media communities offer spaces to talk about different Jewish topics, like what fans learned about ultra-Orthodox Judaism from watching the television show “Shtisel.”

‘Shtisel,’ an Israeli series about an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem, ran for three seasons.

Our research revealed that there is a vibrant ecosystem of people learning about religion in their leisure time. Through the arts, both Jews and non-Jews encounter Jewish history, Jewish religious practices and representations of Jewish communities.

Screen and stage

Most people we spoke with told us that they felt meaningful connections to Judaism during activities that would rarely appear on a standard religion survey.

“Joan,” an unmarried woman in her 50s from Connecticut, told us that she was deeply invested in Judaism, but felt that synagogues and Jewish community centers were not welcoming to single people without families. Instead of joining a Jewish institution, she watched Jewish-themed TV shows and movies on Netflix, and joined social media communities to chat with other fans.

“Luis,” who lived in Boston but was born in Argentina, was a Sephardic Jew, a group that traces their ancestry and traditions to Jewish communities who once lived in Spain and Portugal. His wife was Ashkenazi, meaning her ancestors came from Central and Eastern Europe. She considered herself secular, and so the couple joined the Worker’s Circle, a nonreligious Ashkenazi institution rather than a synagogue.

Yet Luis loved deepening his knowledge of Sephardic culture, and he often attended concerts of music in Ladino, a Sephardic language related to Spanish, with other Sephardic immigrants.

American singer Sarah Aroeste writes and performs in Ladino.

For Joan and Luis, these activities were not peripheral to their Jewish lives. Rather, they were central avenues for learning and community. We interviewed hundreds of Jews who told us that cultural experiences were opportunities to reflect on Jewish practices, explore questions of belonging, connect with family histories and find friends with common interests.

New questions

Some aspects of these patterns were distinctive to Judaism. Historically, many Jews have understood Judaism to be a cultural world, and not only a theological tradition. Learning about cultural dimensions of Judaism has long been part of Jewish education.

The broader phenomenon of informal learning, though, extended far beyond a single tradition. Across America, increasing numbers of people learn about religion through media, cultural productions and digital networks. Christians may study biblical themes through podcasts, online discussion groups or religious influencers. Muslims may participate in online learning communities that connect believers across the world.

The challenge for religion researchers, then, is not simply to determine whether engagement with religion is rising or falling. Rather, it is to develop more nuanced ways of understanding how people explore religious themes and practices, beyond traditional institutions. Only then can we more fully understand how contemporary Americans actually live their religious lives.The Conversation

 

 

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