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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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‘I’m fragmented, and a surviving remnant’: The story of Westerbork prisoner 8331
As prisoner 8331 at the Nazis’ Westerbork transit camp in Holland, Jacob Boas must have witnessed the sorrow and fear of hundreds if not thousands of fellow inmates before they were loaded onto cattle cars and sent to die at Auschwitz.
But he has no memory of it. Jacob Boas, a Dutch Jew, was born in the camp on Nov. 1, 1943, and was captive there until he, his parents and older brother along with 876 other prisoners were liberated by Canadian troops 18 months after Jacob was born.
There’s nothing that Jacob, or Jack, as he calls himself now, remembers of those 18 months.
“My earliest conscious memory is in postwar Amsterdam. I must’ve been around 2 or so because I was stuck in a high chair, the coal stove started smoking, and my mother came rushing in from the kitchen for the rescue,” Jack told me.
Each week during the war, a train of cattle cars delivered Westerbork prisoners, including Jack’s grandparents and other relatives, to die at Auschwitz or Sobibor. A total of 102,000 Dutch Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and many of them came through Westerbork, including Anne Frank.
Jack, his brother and their parents beat the odds through sheer luck: a camp commandant at Westerbork who had a policy of not immediately deporting mothers in late pregnancy, and a father with tailoring skills.
“The fact of being born in the transit camp has struck deep, impenetrable roots within me, coupled with a seemingly unslakable need to know,” Jack wrote in a book published two years ago, Until Further Notice … Theresienstadt On My Mind.
As a historian and author of six books, four of which deal with the Holocaust, Jack has spent his adult life trying to satisfy that need. He has also taught university courses on the Holocaust and writes magazine pieces.
I met Jack at a second-hand bookstore in Portland, Ore., where we both live. He works there every Monday as a volunteer. Jack is a self-effacing man, the kind who listens more than he talks. He’s not apt to come right out and tell you that he is a victim of the Holocaust. Jack’s story has come to me in segments, as we discovered we had a common obsession — German history. And the more we talk, the more intriguing his story becomes.
A false sense of security
Jack and I were having coffee at a Portland cafe when he showed me a photograph of a 1944 registration card from Camp Westerbork. It bears the names of his family: parents Barend and Anna, Jacob and his brother Marcus.
“Wife’s pregnancy exemption canceled because the child was born on Nov. 1, 1943,” states the typewritten card.
The camp commandant, Jack explained, had a policy regarding pregnant women that might seem merciful, but was not. Women in their third trimester were exempted from deportation until six weeks after giving birth, along with their husbands and children. This was part of a larger camp charade. Living conditions at Westerbork were not as bad as other camps. There were soccer matches, chess tournaments and concerts, and inmates wore their civilian clothes instead of concentration camp pajamas, so that prisoners would have a false sense of security before they were sent east.
The trimester “exemption” was one of two cards that had been protecting the Boas family. The other was Barend’s skills as a tailor. After their arrival at Westerbork, Barend was put to work in the camp’s tailor workshop, and later at the Nazis’ headquarters in The Hague.
In 1944, the family learned they were going to be sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia, which — although the Nazis presented it as a model camp — served as a feeder camp to Auschwitz. But they never got to Theresienstadt. Canadian troops liberated Camp Westerbork on April 12, 1945.
The family began putting their lives back together in Amsterdam. Barend started a tailor shop. Anna was a seamstress. They moved to Montreal in 1957 because they had no living relatives left in the Netherlands and because of two events portending war: the Suez Canal crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
Jack got a BA in history and political science at McGill University in Montreal, married a McGill student and followed her to the University of California, Riverside, where he earned his PhD in European history. His dissertation was about German Jews living under Hitler from 1933–39. Research for his dissertation led to his first book: Boulevard des Misères: The Story of Transit Camp Westerbork.
Jack’s parents didn’t talk much about Westerbork. This was not unusual for Holocaust survivors. They just wanted to get on with their lives. But Jack loved tracing the lives of people in the past, including his relatives. It became the mission that shaped his life.
Survivor syndrome
As I was having coffee with Jack, he talked about his eight-year struggle to get financial compensation as a Holocaust survivor from Dutch authorities. Jack filled out the application in February 1979, and later sent a separate document pertaining to his physical and mental health.
Compensation requests were processed by Dutch authorities under a victims’ benefit act known by its Dutch initials, WUV. A WUV representative went to Jack’s San Francisco apartment to question him, which was followed by interviews by a psychiatrist hired by WUV administrators.
Reports written from these conversations said Jack suffered from “major identity issues,” struggled with depression, implied he was lazy and irresponsible, and noted that his marriage had failed. But the WUV psychiatrist said he was unable to “relate his (Jack’s) symptoms or his cognitive or identity issues directly with his family experience or with his wartime experience.” One report made the ludicrous assertion that approving Jack’s application for compensation would place “a heavy burden on the Dutch budget.”
So Jack’s application was rejected.
The WUV-hired psychiatrist was not a specialist in the problems of Holocaust survivors. Jack hired one who was, who concluded that Jack showed symptoms of “survivor syndrome,” which he listed as “repeated feelings of persecution, long-term depression, problems with authority, intense anxiety, displaced rage and aggression and obsession with the Holocaust.” Another psychiatrist engaged by Jack said Jack was suffering from “significant repercussions the camp experience had on him and his family.”
Jack’s application for compensation was finally approved in 1984.
It is important to note here that many thousands of Nazi survivors had to wait decades for compensation, partly due to racist or antisemitic attitudes as well as Cold War politics — including forced laborers, German military deserters, Sinti and Roma, and relatives of people murdered because they had disabilities. Even many Jewish survivors encountered long delays, especially those who fled early, lived in hiding, or lacked the documents postwar officials insisted on.
I went to a talk Jack gave on his latest book, Burden of Proof: Fragments of a Surviving Remnant. “Burden of proof” refers to the ordeal he went through for compensation. The second part of the title refers to himself. “I’m fragmented, and a surviving remnant,” he told his listeners.
Jack’s audience was mesmerized as he told of his lifelong pursuit to understand his identity in the context of the Holocaust — his research trips to Holland, an invitation by the German government to attend the commemoration of a victims’ memorial, his adventures as an extra in a Dutch docudrama about Bergen-Belsen. He is neither maudlin nor angry when he tells these stories. And he frequently jokes about his experiences.
So this is who prisoner 8331 has become: a surviving remnant who is piecing together a life from fragments, and who reminds us that even fractured memory can be an act of defiance.
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Kanye West concerts scrapped in Poland, Switzerland as backlash over antisemitic remarks continues
(JTA) — Concerts by Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, have now been called off in Poland and Switzerland amid growing backlash over his past antisemitic comments, further disrupting plans for his upcoming international tour.
Ye also said he had postponed a June concert in Marseille as French media reported that Interior Minister Laurent Nunez was seeking to have the event banned.
“After much thought and consideration, it is my sole decision to postpone my show in Marseille, France until further notice,” Ye wrote in a post on X. In a subsequent post, Ye appeared to allude further to the situation, writing, “I know it takes time to understand the sincerity of my commitment to make amends.”
The cancellations follow the scrapping of a London music festival earlier this month where Ye had been slated to headline, after the British government denied him entry into the country amid mounting pressure from Jewish groups over his history of antisemitic remarks.
While Ye has apologized multiple times for his antisemitic tirades, including his previous vows to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” and the release of a song titled “Heil Hitler” last year, the rapper’s upcoming tour this summer has faced mounting cancellations. But his comeback tour — which launched with two sold-out shows in Los Angeles — is prompting renewed scrutiny over the sincerity of his apologies, and debate over how much time should pass before figures who have erred are allowed back into public life.
On Saturday, the Swiss football club FC Basel, which coordinates concerts at the St Jakob-Park ground where Ye had requested to perform in June, told Reuters that it had denied the rapper’s request to use the venue.
“FCB received an enquiry and considered it. However, after thorough review, we have decided not to proceed with the project, as we cannot, in accordance with our values, provide a platform for the artist in question within this context,” a spokesperson told Reuters.
And after the Polish culture ministry announced it was seeking to block Ye from performing in the country, the Silesian Stadium in Chorzów cited “formal and legal reasons” for canceling West’s upcoming June concert.
“The decision to organize a Kanye West concert in Poland is unacceptable,” Poland’s culture minister, Marta Cienkowska, wrote in a post on X, adding, “In a country scarred by the history of the Holocaust, we cannot pretend that this is just entertainment.”
Ye still has concerts slated in New Delhi, Istanbul, the Netherlands, Italy, Madrid and Portugal later this year.
The Centraal Joods Overleg, a Dutch Jewish watchdog group, called on Dutch Justice Minister David van Weel to cancel Ye’s planned concerts in the country earlier this month, writing that it must “apply the same standards” as the U.K. and Australia, which barred Ye from entering the country in July. The mayor of the city where the concert is to take place, Ahmed Marcouch, said last week that he saw no legal basis for canceling the concert, even as he said he thought Ye’s comments about Jews were “disgusting.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Kanye West concerts scrapped in Poland, Switzerland as backlash over antisemitic remarks continues appeared first on The Forward.
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The Jewish Bund Was Popular — But It Couldn’t Save Lives Like a Jewish State Could
Participants with Israeli flags look at the landmark Birkenau extermination camp gate in Auschwitz Museum – former Nazi German Concentration Camp during the International March of the Living (MOTL) in Oswiencim, Poland on April 14, 2026. Photo by Dominika Zarzycka/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
If you are a fan of klezmer music, you may be familiar with a catchy up-tempo Yiddish song “Barikadn” (barricades), recorded by the popular band The Klezmatics. The song is about a strike by workers in the Polish city of Łόdź, in which men, women, and children join together to erect barricades in the streets of the city.
Barikadn was popular with the Bund (General Jewish Labour Bund), a secular Marxist Jewish political movement established in 1897 in Vilna (then in the Russian Empire), just two months after the First Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Switzerland.
The Bund was one of the first socialist political movements in Russia. It played an important role during the lead up to the Russian revolution, but disbanded in the early 1920s, in response to pressure from the Communist Party. However, it continued to be an influential Jewish voice in Poland and Lithuania until the outbreak of World War II.
The Bund promoted the use of Yiddish, rather than Hebrew as a Jewish national language. The concept of “doikayt” (Yiddish for “hereness”) was a central feature of Bundist ideology. It discouraged Jewish nationhood (Zionism), advocating instead for Jewish communities to remain dispersed but culturally autonomous and politically engaged within their host countries.
Before the outbreak of World War II, the Bund was the most popular Jewish political force in Poland, with a party membership of close to 100,000. Its members were central to the vibrant secular Yiddish cultural life of pre-war Poland. However, as recorded by Yad Vashem, the Bund suffered the same fate as all the Jews of Poland. Only 1,000 members survived the war.
Today, in the aftermath of October 7, and now the Iran war, the Bund is enjoying something of a revival, as exemplified by Molly Crabapple’s new book Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. The book highlights the universalist hope of Bund ideology, versus the perils associated with following the Zionist plan, including eternal war with Israel’s Arab neighbors and an increasingly chauvinist agenda.
Crabapple’s book has received a number of positive reviews, including one in The Forward and another in The Guardian (“For Leftist Jews the Bund is a Model”). However, one reviewer in Commentary Magazine has pointed out the fatal flaw in the Bundist program. He writes “We’ll never know if the Holocaust would have happened as it happened had there been a State of Israel at the time. Instead, the Holocaust happened during the time of the Bundists. That isn’t to blame them, obviously, for what happened. It is merely to say that Bundism wasn’t a plan for Jewish survival.”
As noted earlier, very few of the Bundists survived the Holocaust, so we don’t really know their views in the aftermath. However, Isaac Deutscher was a prominent Polish-Jewish socialist, writer, and journalist, a biographer of Trotsky.
Before World War II, Deutscher opposed Zionism as economically retrograde and harmful to the cause of international socialism. But after the Holocaust he regretted his pre-war views, saying, “If, instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s, I had urged European Jews to go to Palestine, I might have helped to save some of the lives that were to be extinguished in Hitler’s gas chambers.”
The Bund wasn’t a plan for Jewish survival. Zionism was, and still is. Unlike other nationalisms, modern Zionism is a survivalist imperative, a rescue mission. In this, it has been remarkably successful; a refuge for Jews from the DP camps of Europe, from the Arab/Muslim world, and from the Former Soviet Union.
Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.