VIDEO: Pittsburgh Synagogue Rabbi Tells What Happened
Jeffrey Myers, of Pittsburgh synagogue Tree of Life. Image by getty images
Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, who was presiding over the service at the Pittsburgh synagogue Tree of Life on Saturday morning when the gunman murdered 11 praying congregants, told the Today show the story of the tragedy. The footage is moving. “I heard him execute my congregants,” he said.
“This is my home and it’s been desecrated,” Myers said. “We will rebuild because we are the Tree Of Life. We’ve been here 154 years. You can cut off some branches but the tree will continue to grow and we will be back.”
Myers recounted the tragic events of what began like a normal Shabbat service. “Within a few minutes I heard what I thought was crashing metal.” He reportedly assumed one of the senior citizen congregants had lost their balance and fell into a coat rack.
The next set of bullets rang out within the next 10-15 seconds, Myers reported. “Something inside told me this is gunfire.” He quickly took action, telling his congregants to drop to the floor. After helping congregants escape the building, Myers said he went back in. “I tried to see if I could go back to get the eight remaining people in the back of the congregation.” He didn’t make it in time.
Myers was reportedly the first to call 911.
“There is hate and it isn’t going away. It just seems to be getting worse,” he said.
Myers added that if President Trump visits the Squirrel Hill community he would tell the POTUS “these were good, decent people. They didn’t have an ounce of hate in any of them. We turn to the leaders of our country. We can’t just say we need to stop hate, we need to do, we need to act. Hate is not welcome here in Pittsburgh.”
Contact Haley Cohen at [email protected]
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
