Survivors know ‘grief doesn’t work on a deadline’
Pittsburgh tries to bring some solace
PITTSBURGH — A vigil would help. Yael Perlman would go to one Thursday evening. First, she needed to do something immediate and personal for the victims of El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, and Gilroy, California.
Write letters to the families of the murdered. That’s what she could do.
She thought about when her synagogue was attacked about 10 months ago. A Saturday morning, before services, by a shooter spewing anti-Semitic statements, killing 11 and wounding six. In the days immediately after, Yael received a cache of handwritten letters from people who lost loved ones in other attacks, including 9/11, letters she treasures and displayed on the fireplace mantel for months.
So earlier this week, Yael, 18, gathered biographies of the victims and used social media to organize a letter-writing event. She put out a plate of grapes. Volunteers arrived Tuesday night, 46 in all, pens ready. On the first floor of her congregation’s new home, folding cafeteria tables were designated by city. Dayton here. El Paso over there.
“Conversation about the shooting here comes up every day,” Yael says.
“Grief doesn’t work on a deadline,” says her mother, Beth Kissileff.
Pittsburgh belongs to a club it never wanted to join, the sites of carnage caused by semiautomatic military-style weapons and hate. As the mass shootings proliferate, through Aurora, Newtown, Parkland and Orlando, these communities compose a loose network of trauma. After each massacre, survivors across the country offer messages of empathy to the latest community affected, while coping with a new surge of sorrow at home.
Most people in Pittsburgh can cite the date of its shooting, especially in the Jewish community of Squirrel Hill, home to a dozen synagogues in less than three square miles.
“Our parents would say, ‘Where were you when JFK was shot or on 9/11?’ ” says Sigalle Bahary, 20.
“In Pittsburgh, it’s become the same thing. Where were you on October 27?”
After the murders at Tree of Life synagogue, which also housed New Light and Dor Hadash congregations, the residents of Newtown, Connecticut, subsidized coffee for two weeks at Commonplace Coffee. There were conversations with people from Parkland, Florida. A dozen members of the Quebec City Islamic Cultural Center mosque, the site of a 2017 attack, made the 12-hour drive to offer solace.
To observe Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, an interfaith Pittsburgh group traveled to Charleston, South Carolina’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where nine African Americans were murdered in 2015 by a white supremacist. At the end of the service, they were enveloped in a massive group hug from parishioners. People of Pittsburgh, particularly sensitive to carnage related to faith, reached out to residents of Christchurch after 51 people were massacred at two New Zealand mosques in March.
The JCC is the hub of the community, a bright and busy place, home to water aerobics for seniors, a fitness center, lunch programs and a day-care facility teeming with irresistible 3-year-olds. It served as the crisis center after the October shooting. Victims, neighbors and law enforcement officials flooded in. One hundred volunteer therapists counseled 200 people in the first three weeks. The city’s Center for Victims still counsels around 55 people. Trauma specialists here speak of concentric circles of need, spreading from the injured and people who lost family members to witnesses and survivors, then to first responders, members of the congregation, residents of the neighborhood.
“Each shooting that happens is a real trigger. This past weekend was horrid. I know what all those people are going through,” says Ellen Surloff, president of Dor Hadash. “We’re 10 months past the shooting, but in some ways, we’re nowhere.”
They were fortunate in many ways, congregants say. They were already members of a tightknit geographical and spiritual community. It strengthened after the tragedy.
Pittsburgh residents feel a particular kinship with El Paso, where the shooting was fueled by hatred of immigrants. The alleged Pittsburgh shooter posted anti-immigrant sentiments, condemning the Jewish community’s outreach efforts to the city’s large refugee population.
New Light Rabbi Jonathan Perlman, Yael’s father, was in the synagogue on Oct. 27. “I was doing well until the weekend,” he says, referring to Dayton and El Paso. “I take this very hard. I feel a little bit helpless. I feel people are overwhelmed by all the stories on the news.”
He sits in his new office at Congregation Beth Shalom, surrounded by religious tomes. His congregation and the two others attacked haven’t returned to worship at the Tree of Life building. They may never return.
“People want to pay respects. They want to say they’re sorry,” says Stephen Cohen, New Light’s co-president. “We call them trauma tourists. And the people come. And they come. And they come. Over and over again.”
Certainly, they will come on Oct. 27. Later this month, the three congregations will announce plans for the first anniversary that no community wants to hold. After an interview at the JCC, Cohen leaves for a meeting with the local public station to discuss commemorative coverage.
This, perhaps, is what residents of Virginia Beach, Gilroy, El Paso and Dayton can expect. After all, Pittsburgh is several months ahead.