USA TODAY International Edition
Pittsburgh inevitable after Charlottesville
After swastikas on our street, I’m not shocked
I was sitting at Shabbat services at my synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel in Charlottesville, Virginia, when a fellow congregant whispered in my ear that there had been a shooting at a temple in Pittsburgh.
My heart sank.
As the day unfolded, and the scope of the tragedy at Tree of Life synagogue came into focus, like all Jews and most Americans, I felt a flood of emotions — sadness, worry, frustration and anger.
Mostly frustration and anger. How could this keep happening?
I am the president of the only synagogue in Charlottesville, where just more than a year ago neo-Nazis marched through the University of Virginia chanting “Jews will not replace us,” and where the next day they rioted in our streets a block from our temple, killing one person and wounding dozens more. Since then, we have had no choice but to be vigilant and prepared.
The co-chair of our Security Committee immediately stepped out Saturday to speak with the armed security guard — a fixture for the past 15 months — to let him know what had happened and ask him to be on high alert.
At the end of services, which included a bar mitzvah, our two rabbis and other senior staff and congregation leaders planned our response: extra armed security for our religious school Sunday morning, asking the Charlottesville Police Department for more patrols around the temple, drafting a letter to tell our congregants what we were doing to ensure their and their children's safety and, perhaps most important, scheduling a prayer service for us to comfort one another and express solidarity with our Jewish brothers and sisters in Pittsburgh.
When I stood on the steps of my synagogue just over a year ago on another Shabbat morning and watched as neoNazis marched by, many of them armed, some with pistols, some with rifles, some of them carrying swastika flags, and some of them shouting “heil Hitler” and other anti-Semitic slogans, it was surreal. I was not surprised by the knowledge that there is anti-Semitism in America — I'm not naive — but that it could be displayed so brazenly and even proudly in the streets of an American city was frankly shocking.
I'd like to say that I am, again, shocked at the violence now perpetrated against Jews in Pittsburgh, but I am not. Given what I saw here, it now seems that it was an inevitable tragedy, a straight line from the events in our small city in August 2017; to President Donald Trump's assertion of “very fine people on both sides”; to the demonization of George Soros and other unnamed “globalists” with the use of time-worn anti-Semitic conspiratorial tropes that they are secretly pulling strings to undermine the standing of white culture; to Saturday's horror.
Despite all that, based on our experience in Charlottesville, there will be another side to this story, one that will unfold over months and years as Pittsburgh's Jewish community struggles to cope with its profound grief and find its way toward a semblance of healing.
Given the magnitude of Saturday's loss, empty spaces will always remain in the hearts of the Jewish community. But if their experience is anything like ours, they will also see that millions of Jews around the world are standing with them, ready to help them with anything they might need, and they will feel the warmth and strength of what it means to be a part of that worldwide community and the unbreakable bonds that connect us to one another.
If their experience is anything like ours, they will see their local neighbors, people of all religions, races and nationalities, hold them close to protect them, because as Americans and human beings they share the grief and pain of the Jewish community.
And if their experience is anything like ours, they will, ultimately, find their way to a future based on the knowledge that our people and our religion have endured for more than 3,000 years, grounded not in fear and anger, but in the living expression and practice of our eternal and immutable values of compassion, decency, tolerance, humility, lovingkindness and justice.
Alan Zimmerman, an attorney, is president of Congregation Beth Israel in Charlottesville, Virginia.