Tears for the fallen
Dozens in Chattanooga gather to mourn slain Pittsburgh synagogue congregants
Dozens of people crowded into Chattanooga’s Jewish Cultural Center Monday night for a prayer vigil for the victims of Saturday’s mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.
City officials, elected leaders and people from a variety of faiths were in attendance, many of whom had to stand in the lobby after seats were filled up. Quiet sobs echoed through the rooms as different faith leaders took to the podium.
“We’ve had enough. We’ve had enough of saying enough is enough,” Rabbi Susan Tendler said. “… This crime was not a crime only against the Jewish people. It was a ghastly act against humanity.”
Ruth Longway, who is Jewish, and her two sisters were there to show their support.
“I want to give honor to those who have passed, and I want our city and all of the cities across the country to work toward peace and a positive resolution of the issues that are plaguing our world,” Longway said.
“We need to remember that it starts with each one of us, building those bridges and treating each other with kindness and
“AND IT JUST SLOWLY UNFOLDED. IT WAS JUST AWFUL. ‘CAUSE THAT’S WHERE I WENT. THAT WAS MY SYNAGOGUE.” – RANDI WEISS
love,” Longway’s sister Lucia Meeks said.
Twelve candles were lighted, one for each of the 11 victims and the last for the four police officers injured in the shooting.
Randi Weiss and Isaac Fisher lit the first candle for Cecil Rosenthal, who was always with his brother, David. Both were killed in the shooting.
“As Randi shared with me, Cecil’s laugh was infectious,” Tendler said.
Weiss grew up in Pittsburgh and attended Tree of Life Synagogue. She’d moved to Chattanooga about three years ago but was visiting family in her hometown over the weekend.
Weiss was having breakfast with Fisher’s mother when someone texted her alerting her to an active shooter at Tree of Life.
“Immediately, everybody is on their phone checking CNN, whatever,” she said. “And it just slowly unfolded. It was just awful. ‘Cause that’s where I went. That was my synagogue.”
As the news started trickling in, Weiss said her main concern was for the people she knew.
“It was really scary because we just didn’t know,” she said. “You can listen to the news, but you don’t know what’s going on in that building. And that’s what we wanted to know. We wanted to know, ‘Are they OK?’”
When the names of the victims started coming out, she was devastated.
“You know, you cry,” she said. “Because you know these people. It’s very hard.”
Fisher wasn’t in Pittsburgh when the shooting took place, but he was just as affected, especially by the death of his baseball coach, Irving Younger.
“He played a huge role [in my life] as a high schooler,” he said. “I was just in Pittsburgh this summer and ran into him … this was one person who was there for me.”
Fisher grew up learning about the Holocaust and thought that the country was a safe place to build a path toward peace. But the Pittsburgh shooting has changed his view completely.
“We learned last weekend that, you know, the specter of hate still lives here,” he said. “And the same fears that our grandparents had growing up — the world hasn’t changed so much.”
Chattanooga had its own run-in with antiSemetic crime July 29, 1977. An explosion almost completely leveled the Beth Shalom Synagogue at 20 Pisgah Ave. a little over an hour after services ended that Friday night.
The explosion left a four-by-six-foot crater near the center of the building, according to Times Free Press archives.
No one was injured, but the blast knocked two holes in the rear wall of the Airport Inn on Brainerd Road and several homes sustained cracked windows in a block-wide area. Only a small portion of the synagogue was left standing.
Firefighters reported not seeing any flames, but said the “building was blown out.”
Investigators later found several extension cords running from under the center portion of the building to an electrical outlet in a hallway at the Airport Inn, more than 200 feet away.
Joseph Paul Franklin, then 33, was indicted in 1984 for the bombing. He told police he went to Chattanooga “to kill Jews,” according to news accounts.
Franklin, originally from Mobile, Alabama, and a former klansman, also was a suspect in at least 13 homicides in seven states, as well as an attack in 1978 that left Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, paralyzed from the waist down.
He had been serving a life sentence at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, since 1982, when he was convicted in the August 1980 sniper slayings of two black youths who were jogging with two white females in Salt Lake City.