Funerals for synagogue victims continue
Members of Pittsburgh’s grief-stricken Jewish community endured another round of funerals Wednesday for victims of the synagogue massacre, a day after President Donald Trump encountered hundreds of protesters when he came to town to pay his respects.
Melvin Wax, 87, Irving Younger, 69, and Joyce Fienberg, 75, were to be laid to rest as part of a weeklong series of services for the 11 people killed in a shooting rampage at the Tree of Life synagogue Saturday. It was the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history.
“It can’t be fixed,” Robert Libman said at the funeral of Fienberg, his sister, clutching his chest as he described the pain of losing her. “My sister is dead. My sister was murdered. There was no one I know like her. Pure goodness. ... She was the most tolerant and gentle person that I’ve ever known.”
Her sons, Anthony, of Paris, and Howard, of Vienna, Virginia, said she spent five years caring for their father as he battled cancer, then after his death a few years ago, devoted more of her time and energy to Tree of Life.
“My mom would be very angry that her funeral wasn’t able to be at Tree of Life, and that her friends lost Saturday couldn’t be here,” Howard Fienberg said.
Six people were wounded in the attack, including four police officers, two of whom remained hospitalized with gunshot wounds. Two congregants were still in the hospital, one in critical condition.
In a bit of good news, hospital officials said the two most seriously injured shooting victims are improving.
A police officer and a congregant remain in intensive care but “are doing much better now,” Dr. Donald Yealy, chairman of emergency medicine at UPMC, said Wednesday.
“I think overall the prognoses are good now. But each of them, in a varying way, will have a different trajectory and likely will require a series of ongoing care.”
With Tree of Life still cordoned off as a crime scene, the man arrested in the attack, 46-year-old truck driver Robert Gregory Bowers, remains behind bars, awaiting a hearing Thursday on federal hate-crime charges that could bring the death penalty.
Authorities said he raged against Jews during the attack.