5 years after synagogue attack, recovery mixes with fresh grief
It has been five years since a gunman stormed into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 worshippers and wounding six others in the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history.
A lot can happen in half a decade. One of the three congregations that met at Tree of Life hired its first rabbi. New nonprofit organizations sprung up to serve survivors and others affected by antisemitism and violence. Plans to reconfigure and expand the building took shape, with a celebrity architect at the helm. And in August, the gunman was convicted on an array of federal charges and sentenced to death.
For some in the Tree of Life community, however, this year's anniversary is not arriving with the sense of healing they hoped for. Weeks after more than 1,400 people were killed in a Hamas terror attack in southern Israel, many American Jews have felt their sense of safety shattered.
Now Israeli airstrikes are pummeling the Gaza Strip, and the humanitarian crisis in the territory is worsening, with food and water in short supply and civilian deaths mounting.
But as many Jews in the United States are grieving the civilian deaths in Israel and worried for families and friends there, some also feel abandoned by former political allies — including many of the same people and organizations that embraced Tree of Life five years ago.
Muslim organizations raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for victims in the weeks after the attack; Catholic parishes organized special collections. Thousands of people attended vigils, and statements of support poured in from across the world.
“Following the shooting and the trial, we were universally held by our community,” said Michael Bernstein, the chair of the Tree of Life center, a new nonprofit that will be housed at the site of the attack. “There was this true sense, especially as American Jews, that we belong.”
The last few weeks have been profoundly disorienting, Bernstein said. Now, as he watched pro-Palestinian rallies and rhetoric that, to him, seems to celebrate the death of Jewish people, he wonders, “Maybe we don't belong.”
One of his daughters, whom he described fondly as a progressive “social justice warrior,” found herself tuning in to Fox News in the week after the attack. Many of her usual preferred media outlets seemed to her to be blaming Israeli civilians for their own murders because Israel has blockaded the territory for years before the attack this month. Bernstein's wife has talked about getting a gun.
Of the friendships and connections born from the tragedy, “some have disappeared,” said Rabbi Jeffrey Myers of the Tree of Life Congregation, who survived the massacre in 2018. “They were people I would have thought I would have heard from, and I've not heard a word from.”
Myers and others described feeling encouraged by the image of President Joe Biden embracing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a visit to Israel last week.
“It was so reassuring at a time when you wonder, Where are your friends?” he said.
The attacks have inspired a wave of menace on social media, street harassment and scattered violence across the United States that has many on both sides of the conflict feeling wary.
The Anti-Defamation League reported Wednesday that there was a significant rise in antisemitic incidents in the country in the weeks after the attacks by Hamas.
The Jewish advocacy group recorded more than 300 such incidents, including threats and assaults, between Oct. 7 and Oct. 23, compared with 64 incidents during the same period last year.
Palestinians and their supporters, too, have cited a rise in aggression. A 6-yearold Muslim boy in Illinois was fatally stabbed by his landlord, who was angry about the war and wanted his Palestinian American tenants to move out. On college campuses, students who blamed the attack on Israel have been doxxed and had job offers revoked.
“The spiritual danger of these dark times is, we fall into utter despair,” said Rabbi Amy Bardack, who has been in her position since last year at Congregation Dor Hadash, which shared the space at Tree of Life in 2018. “Living joyfully is actually a discipline, a practice that prevents us from falling into that pit of despair.”
Hours after she said that, things grew even darker, as more gun violence raged in the nation, this time in Maine.
In her previous job at the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, Bardack organized an event commemorating the first anniversary of the attack. This year, plans include volunteer opportunities, Torah study and a ceremony Friday afternoon in Pittsburgh's Schenley Park.
Mark Fichman attended an anniversary service Thursday night that was a combination memorial and anti-gun violence event. He was at home when the attack took place in 2018. He belongs to another synagogue nearby, but Squirrel Hill is a tight-knit neighborhood, and he knew several of the victims.
The violence that day was disturbing to him, but it was also galvanizing, Fichman recalled. Days after the shooting, he marched with thousands of people in protest of President Donald Trump's visit to Pittsburgh, a rally organized in part by the progressive Jewish group IfNotNow.
“Everyone understood what happened to us,” Fichman said. The war in Israel and Gaza, by contrast, is “an abstraction” to people without personal ties in the region.
But Fichman's reflections on the anniversary are separate in his mind from his worries about Israel, where he has cousins and many other connections. The antisemitism he fears most in the United States comes from the far-right, which inspired the Tree of Life attacker. The violence from Hamas has a different ideological source.
Beth Kissileff's husband, the rabbi of New Light Congregation, Jonathan Perlman, was in the building during the shooting.