A Jewish school in Pittsburgh boasts one of the city’s landmarks: a Holocaust memorial sculpture, created by an artist from 6 million aluminum tabs that the students collected over almost five years. When the Community Day School dedicated the sculpture, called “Keeping Tabs,” the feeling was that such an elaborate effort was necessary to help…
The boy is wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates kippah and glasses, and he’s sheltering in the arm of a Pittsburgh police officer to whom he’s given a Tupperware container full of what looks like homemade cookies. There’s also a handwritten note, from Lily, 6, and Mikey, 9: “Thank you for keeping the Jews in the neighborhood…
Lynnette Lederman, past president of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, knew many of the victims of the Shabbat-morning shooting by Robert Bowers that killed 11 people and wounded others. She’s heard that President Trump is talking about visiting the city and the synagogue and has one word for him: “Don’t.” “He is the purveyor of…
The doctor who runs the hospital that treated the alleged perpetrator of the Sabbath-morning massacre in a Pittsburgh synagogue is also a member of that synagogue — and he introduced himself to the shooter. Dr. Jeff Cohen lives in Tree of Life synagogue’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, and is the president of Allegheny General Hospital, which…
Judah Samet was four minutes late to synagogue. Services at Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh start at 9:45 A.M. Samet, who is 80 years old, pulled into a handicapped spot in front of the building on the morning of October 27 at 9:49. “Somebody knocked on my window,” Samet said the next day. “There…
Jews all over the world unfurled their holy scrolls to chant aloud the exact same section of the Torah yesterday, as they do every Shabbat. On October 27, it was the story of Abraham’s hospitality, and how he rushed to throw open his tent to three visitors who turned out to be angels. So it…
The day that the American Jewish community experienced the most deadly anti-Semitic hate crime directed at it in the history of the United States was also Shabbat, the weekly Jewish day of rest. So when Shabbat ended at sundown in the densely Jewish town of Squirrel Hill, where a gunman killed 11 Jews at prayer,…
Mark Hetfield was in synagogue on Saturday morning, attending a bar mitzvah. He couldn’t figure out why his phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. When he checked his messages, Hetfield, who is the executive director of the Jewish refugee aid group HIAS, learned that the suspect in the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue had posted obsessively about…
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