Pittsburgh grieves
Funerals for victims of synagogue shooting continue as suspect indicted on 44 counts
TPITTSBURGH he public rituals of grief in Pittsburgh kept accumulating Wednesday with more funerals, more burials and more communal gatherings for the 11 killed in the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue.
At Beth Shalom Synagogue, people gathered early Wednesday to mourn Joyce Fienberg, 75, a well-loved researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. A little over an hour later, visitation had begun for Irving Younger, 69, at Rodef Shalom Temple, the second service there in two days.
“He wasn’t the tallest guy, but he had the biggest heart,” said Marsha Mintz, 74, a longtime friend who was waiting in the visitation line. She was a guest at the wedding of Younger and his late wife, Sherry, and remembered how he had doted on her.
“She was ill for a very long time and he took care of her with such devotion,” Mintz said, choking back tears.
Emily Harris, 69, was in Younger’s graduating class in high school when they were growing up in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood. “He was a good guy, a solid guy: what we call a mensch,” she said. “He was a friend you could always count on.”
Meanwhile, a federal grand jury on Wednesday indicted the man accused of carrying out the attack on 44 counts, including hate crimes, prosecutors said. The indictment says that Robert Bowers, 46, drove to the synagogue Saturday and went in with multiple firearms, including Glock .357 handguns and a Colt AR-15 rifle. It accuses him of opening fire, killing and wounding members of all three congregations that worshipped there — Tree of Life, Dor Hadash and New Light — and then injuring multiple police officers who responded.
“While inside the Tree of Life synagogue,” the indictment reads, Bowers “made statements indicating his desire to ‘kill Jews.’ ”
The charges include 11 counts of obstruction of free exercise of religious beliefs and 11 counts of using a firearm to commit murder during a crime of violence. He faces the possibility of the death penalty.
“Hatred and violence on the basis of religion can have no place in our society,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement announcing the indictment. “Every American has the right to attend their house of worship in safety.”
Most of the mourners tried to keep the focus on the people being remembered, but sometimes the horrific circumstances behind it all crept into mind. “You see all that’s going on in the world,” Harris said, “and every time I’m out in a crowd, I get visions of something like this happening.” At the same time, friends and family gathered in a funeral home chapel not a mile away, for the service for Melvin Wax, 87, who was killed Saturday as he came out of a dark storage room into the chapel where the New Light congregation met on the Sabbath.
“It is a week of mourning for the whole community; there are funerals that are scheduled every day,” said Rabbi Jonathan Perlman, who leads the New Light congregation and was preparing to lead services for Wax. “It’s very all-consuming, everybody is talking about whose funeral they have gone to and when the next funeral is going to be and where will it be held.”
The deaths have been on front pages globally; it is not just the family and friends who mourn them, said Rabbi Jeffrey Myers of Tree of Life, at the funeral for the Rosenthal brothers, Cecil and David, which took place the day before. But, “the entire world is sharing this grief.”
That has presented the families with another burden in an already taxing week: how to balance the intimate rituals of grief with the worldwide attention.
Many of the funerals are private and closed to people outside of friends and family.
The shivas, the seven-day periods in which mourners and community members come together to comfort the bereaved, began on Tuesday with the first burials; by the end of the week, there will be several proceeding around the city. Families have tried to keep most of these closed, as well.
Given the outpouring of support, they are big enough as it is.
“The house could just not hold capacity,” said Steven Halle, a nephew of one of the victims, Daniel Stein. “It’s overwhelming support. We expect the same for the next two nights.”
Plainclothes officers from the police department and the FBI were scattered throughout the gathering, there to both ensure safety and, at the family’s request, keep the news media out.