Pittsburgh shooting triggers flashback
Drug dealer Steven Tielsch was convicted of murder in the third degree in 2002.
He was a rabbinical student, a husband, father to a month-old baby girl.
Shot and killed because he was a Jew.
Outside a Torah study centre. In Pittsburgh’s leafy Squirrel Hill neighbourhood.
That was more three decades ago, April 17, 1986.
Neal Rosenblum, from Toronto, had been in the city for only seven hours, visiting his in-laws for Passover.
He looked like what he was — an Orthodox Jew, with the hat and the cloth belt, the long dark coat and the beard.
Easy to spot on that overcast day — he’d turned down an offer of a ride to walk home — when two men in a car beckoned him over, pretending to ask for directions.
Rosenblum, 24, was struck by five bullets — in the abdomen, chest, arms and leg.
Sixteen years and three mistrials later, Stephen Tielsch, a drug dealer with a swastika tattoo, was convicted of thirddegree murder.
“I’d … like to remind the community the theory upon which we proceeded in this case was that the motive in this case was hate,” District Attorney Stephen Zappala Jr. said after the trial.
On Thursday, Arthur Rosenblum clicked on a YouTube re-enactment of the crime that took his son’s life. “I just saw the video for the first time,” he told the Star. “I thought I was going to have a heart attack.”
Not a day has gone by that it doesn’t hurt. But the pain was most profound, stirring up every traumatic memory, following Saturday’s mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, same Squirrel Hill district — 11 Jews at prayer on the Sabbath slain by a gunman who shouted: “All Jews must die!”
The alleged gunman, Robert Bowers, had just posted an ominous statement on the fringe social media website Gab, favoured by the alt-right: “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered … Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
In his profile, within a sludge pit of bigotry and anti-Semitism, Bowers wrote: “Jews are the children of Satan.”
Throughout history, it has always been thus for Jews, persecuted and banished, subjected to pogroms and purges. Stripped of their possessions, slaughtered, gassed. Blamed. For everything from a worldwide banking conspiracy to 9/11.
Reviled by the hard right, more latterly by the hard left (proponents of the execrable Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel — but really, Jews), a wide swath of the overseas Muslim world and an amorphous rump of tacit Jew-haters, the ones who claim not to be anti-Semitic at all. They lie. “This has been going on for centuries,” says Mr. Rosenblum, 85, who still lives in North York with his wife, Penina. “It’s hard to be a Jew.’’
Murdered as they pray, as they play, in holiday resorts, on city buses in Jerusalem, at the beach, in school, in nightclubs, in their homes.
Their places of worship and their cemeteries are constantly defaced and desecrated.
More than half of religiously motivated hate crimes in the U.S. since 2010 have targeted Jews, according to FBI figures; higher than that says the U.S. Anti-Defamation League. The most targeted minority in Canada too, according to 2016 Statistics Canada figures. Continuing a trend that dates back to 2008, Jews were the most victimized for hate crimes in Toronto, jumping to 186 incidents — 28 per cent of the total — last year, as per the Toronto Police Service’s annual Hate Crimes Statistical Report, far more than Blacks, Muslims and the LGBTQ communities.
In Pittsburgh, Bowers was quickly taken into custody. The suspect was armed with three Glocks and an AR-15 assault rifle. On Thursday, Bowers pleaded not guilty to 44 charges, including 11 counts of murder and 11 counts of obstructing free exercise of religious beliefs — hate crimes. Six individuals, including four police officers, were wounded in what was the worst anti-Semitic incident in U.S. history. Entering the courtroom in a wheelchair — he was injured in a shootout with cops — Bowers responded with a loud “Yes!” when asked if he understood the charges against him. The man who murdered Rosenblum, for no bloody reason, used a .40 calibre pistol.
Like the events of late Saturday, the shooting trigged apprehension, vulnerability and demonstrations of solidarity. But that shooter had fled the scene in the vehicle. Police had no motive. “We had no evidence to suggest that this was a terrorist hit,” Police Lt. William Mullen told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “But we are not ruling out the fact that his man was killed because he was Jewish.”
As time passed, even Ro- senblum’s family began to think that maybe it had been a hit-job gone wrong, maybe something to do with drugs, mistaken identity; had nothing to do with Jew-hatred.
In 1988, a jailhouse informant told police his cellmate had bragged about shooting Rosenblum yet the homicide remained unsolved until 2000 when cold case detectives found a second, corroborating witness. Tielsch, who was in jail after pleading to drugtrafficking charges, was arrested and charged with murder.
At the first trial, the star witness informant, himself Jewish, testified that Tielsch drew swastikas on his forehead and routinely made anti-Semitic remarks while they shared a cell. Yet three trials over two years ended in a deadlock.
“We went down for all the trials,” Mr. Rosenblum said.. “We wondered, what kind of justice is there for Jews? But I give credit to the detectives. They didn’t want to give up.”
Even at the fourth and final trial, in 2002, the judge ruled jurors could not be told about the defendant’s swastika tattoo on his leg. They found Tielsch guilty anyway. He was sentenced to 10-20 years in prison. Six years later, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal.
The Washington Post reported this week that Tielsch was released from prison on Oct. 23, 2017. “I think he’s living in Florida,” Mr. Rosenblum said.
The baby girl who was left fatherless is now a mother of six children.
At the B’nai Torah synagogue in Toronto where Neal Rosenblum was a congregant, there’s a plaque with his name. With the words, in Hebrew: “May God avenge his blood.”
There’s no end to Jewish blood spilled.