The fellowship of grief
Survivors of mass shootings come together to share love and wisdom
Today through Oct. 27, the Post-Gazette is publishing a series looking back at the year since the Tree of Life shootings.
In mid-August, Jason Kunzman, chief program officer at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh, was surprised to hear from an FBI victim’s specialist he hadn’t been in touch with since the Tree of Life shooting last year.
He was aware, of course, of the Aug. 3 mass shooting targeting immigrants at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. The FBI asked: Could he fly down to teach El Paso first responders how to move forward?
The next day, Mr. Kunzman — a former police officer who oversees security at the JCC — was on a plane, trying to distill nine months of hard lessons into a PowerPoint presentation for first responders in El Paso. When his plane touched down, he went straight to the Walmart to see a makeshift memorial to the 22 people killed.
“That was obviously challenging for me — it brought me back to the days immediately following our event — but it was important for me to do that,” he said. “It was incredibly healing to be able to give back after having received so much in our journey moving forward.”
Those intimately affected by mass shootings call it the club that nobody wants to join. Last Oct. 27, the survivors and loved ones of victims of the mass shooting at Tree of Life / Or L’Simcha synagogue, which killed 11 worshippers from three congregations, became the latest to join that club, one that has grown tragically larger in the year that followed.
Yet within that fellowship has come mutual support, shared wisdom and lasting friendships.
Such bonds were manifested almost immediately after Oct. 27, when a group of
survivors of a 2017 hate-motivated massacre at a Quebec City mosque visited Pittsburgh’s survivors, consoling them and advising them about what lay ahead.
And the fellowship has continued to grow and deepen.
It is manifested in a meeting of Parkland, Fla., school shooting survivors in the Pittsburgh mayor’s office that was supposed to last for one hour — and went on for four.
It is evident in artwork hanging in the hallway of the Community Day School in Squirrel Hill made by the kindergarten class at the Soille San Diego Hebrew Day School, near the site of the Poway synagogue shooting, “from our heart to yours.”
It is evidenced in the texts that Michele Rosenthal, whose brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal died at Tree of Life, exchanges with her new friends in Parkland.
“It’s crazy, when there’s a shooting, we text each other,” she said, “because you only can relate — you can relate to each other — you know what each other is feeling.”
At the physical Tree of Life synagogue building, the connections are clear. An exhibit installed last month on the fencing outside the building displays more than 100 pieces of art by children and teens, submitted from 11 states and New Zealand.
Many of the cities in other states are familiar. “Together we stand,” reads one submission from a 15-year-old at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. Another from an 18year-old at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., shows two intertwined hands.
A road map of responses
After years of American mass shootings, there are now official channels connecting affected cities. The National Mass Violence Victimization Resource Center at the Medical University of South Carolina formed in 2017, with the mission of researching and providing support to victims of such events.
The Office for Victims of Crime within the U.S. Justice Department partners with cities to set up resilience centers to support victims for years after the event. Pittsburgh’s is called the 10.27 Healing Partnership.
Its director, Maggie Feinstein, traveled to resilience centers in Charleston, S.C.; Aurora, Colo.; and Parkland and Orlando, Fla., researching “best practices” to support victims of the Tree of Life shooting and the Pittsburgh community as a whole.
She learned in places years out from their tragedies, such as Aurora and Charleston, the need to set up rituals for grieving — a tradition, such as blood donation, that mourners can do every year to mark the date of the event.
She also learned that demand for therapy and support can be most acute when a mass shooting occurs, even far away.
“That was one of my first lessons from Newtown when I spoke with them, is that you have to be ready on those days, to welcome people,” she said. “The space that we’ve created was really intended with the knowledge that it can be a space where people can gather when there’s triggers that happen.”
In Newtown, advising other cities is now a familiar role for Patricia Llodra, who was the first selectman there when the shooting occurred in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
“We all belong to this fraternity that none of us want to join, but I think there is a collegial aspect to that that you’re not alone — that we can help each other, and we have a responsibility to each other because we have a shared experience,” she said. “Certainly that’s how our town of Newtown feels very much. We had this horrible experience, and we had love and hope from all over the world, and we want to share that kindness right back when something bad happens someplace else.”
‘A ministry of presence’
Pittsburgh’s survivors also have received direct support from those in an even more specific cohort — survivors of hate crimes that violated their sacred spaces.
In January 2017, a gunman invaded the prayer room of the Quebec Islamic Culture Centre in Quebec City, Canada, killing six and injuring five, one of them left paralyzed for life.
The idea to visit the Jewish community in Pittsburgh after the shooting here emerged from survivors of that attack, said one of the survivors, Hakim Chambaz. He, survivors Abdelhak Achouri and Ahmed Cheddadi, and mosque President Boufeldja Benabdallah, drove about 14 hours to visit Pittsburgh.
Survivors from all three of the targeted Jewish congregations sat with the visitors at the Islamic Center of Pittsburgh, located in Oakland, whose leaders helped coordinate the visit.
The visit was also done in coordination with the group One World Strong, itself formed after the Boston Marathon bombing to help victims of terror, and which sent people to Quebec City after the 2017 attack.
Given the similarities of the attacks, done during times of worship, Mr. Chambaz said the most important message was to say, “We felt what you are feeling now. It’s very important to get a person near you and just to support you even with few words, coming from your heart.”
Tree of Life Rabbi Jeffrey Myers recalled later: “That was so overwhelmingly powerful, that people from another country and a different religion would take the time to come down and show support for us. It was just really beautiful.”
Wasi Mohamed, then the executive director of the Islamic Center of Pittsburgh, said that while some
visitors were less proficient in English than in French or Arabic, “they absolutely spoke the same language” of experience as they discussed such issues as security and whether they’d ever feel safe in a house of worship.
Mr. Chambaz said he has since visited survivors of other attacks, including the New Zealand mosque massacre in March and the 2018 Parkland, Fla., school shooting.
Pittsburgh survivors also have developed bonds with survivors of the 2015 massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. A white supremacist is on death row for killing nine at a midweek Bible study there.
A contingent from New Light Congregation visited Charleston in January, where members of the two congregations went to a local synagogue’s Shabbat worship, to Mother Emanuel’s Sunday morning service and to a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade.
Mother Emanuel members visited Tree of Life in Pittsburgh in May.
“It was just a ministry of presence, just being there, letting them know they were not alone,” said the Rev. Eric S.C. Manning of Mother Emanuel. It was an opportunity to give the kind of support that Mother Emanuel itself had received, he said. “So many people have poured into you, and now you have an opportunity to pour into others.”
The dialogue included accounts from the Charleston congregation about what it was like to go to the trial of the killer, with survivors having to testify just feet away from the remorseless gunman. The dialogue helped prompt some of the Pittsburgh survivors, such as Rabbi Jonathan Perlman, of New Light, to ask federal prosecutors to forgo a capital trial in their case, instead seeking a guilty plea that would avert a trial and lead to a life sentence.
“We talked to them personally about it,” Rabbi Perlman said. “It retraumatized the community” to have a trial. (Despite the appeals, prosecutors in the Pittsburgh case are seeking the death penalty.)
The solidarity with targeted worshippers extended throughout the past year as
Pittsburgh hosted vigils to commemorate those slain at Chabad of Poway, Calif., during Shabbat worship; at churches in Sri Lanka on Easter; and at two mosques in New Zealand during Friday prayers. The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh raised more than $650,000 for victims of the New Zealand attack, with more than $60,000 of that raised by the Tree of Life congregation.
From mayor to mayor
In the days after the Tree of Life shooting, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto received a deluge of calls, texts and emails from elected officials around the country. It was so much, he said, that he still hasn’t opened some of the emails.
He remembers sitting in his office talking on the phone to Christine Hunschofsky, the mayor of Parkland, as she recited specific information for half an hour, letting him know which federal agencies to connect with and what to expect moving forward. He also remembers a call with Libby Schaaf, mayor of Oakland, Calif., as she shared with him her strategy in coping with the aftermath of a fire at the concert at the Ghost Ship warehouse, which killed 36 people.
She told him to be completely transparent — to set his priorities and let everyone know what they were.
“Within an hour of that conversation I realized that my priorities were going to be the families of the victims, those that were injured, the Jewish community and the Pittsburgh community at large, in that order, and I made that very clear from the very beginning,” he said. “Any decision that we had to make, over the course of especially the next week with the funerals, I used that as the guide whenever there was a question that would come up over what we should do.”
Since Oct. 27, Mr. Peduto has repeatedly reached out to other mayors in cities where there has been mass violence. When he heard about the shooting in Dayton, Ohio, which killed 10 people in August, he immediately called his friend there, Mayor Nan Whaley, whom he had sat next to on his first day of the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ “Mayor School” in 2013.
“I gave her the advice Libby gave me,” he said. “I told her to be very transparent and make sure everyone knows.” He and Ms. Whaley spoke on the phone daily in the early days after the shooting, he said, discussing topics such as whether to meet with President Donald Trump and what to say on national television.
Mayor Whaley said she received invaluable counsel and support from Mr. Peduto and mayors of other cities struck by mass-casualty attacks, such as Boston, Cincinnati, Virginia Beach, Va., and Parkland, Fla.
“I would not have gotten through that week without my fellow mayors,” she said. She said among the lessons learned were to hold frequent press conferences, even if there are no major breaks in the case, to keep up the communication with news media; and schedule a meaningful vigil soon after the attack.
Parkland’s mayor has “been dealing with it for twoand-a-half years,” said Mayor Whaley. “She has an understanding of how the community will respond at different periods in grief.”
And although the Dayton shooting was recent, Mayor Whaley reached out to the mayors of Odessa and Midland, Texas, which suffered a mass shooting soon afterward.
Since the Pittsburgh attacks, Mayor Peduto has joined a committee through the U.S. Conference of Mayors lobbying for gun reform.
He’s also made connections with nonelected officials, such as the survivors from Parkland and Charleston, who visited Pittsburgh in April and May.
When Mr. Peduto reflects on how he’s changed since the shooting, he finds a real
connection with those affected in other cities.
“I’ve learned to find good within the darkest times,”
he said. “It’s very hard for me to describe it, but when I speak to other mayors or people who have lost loved ones in other cities they say the same thing. I recently had a discussion with a young man who was in the school and barely escaped in Parkland and he said basically what I had felt, that he saw goodness — like physically saw it, in the sense of light — and I saw and felt the same thing in the days that were after.”
What Mr. Peduto and other policymakers have learned — unfortunately — is that their work now involves not just commiserating and memorializing, but also actively responding to the wounds that mass shootings have opened in the community at large.
Mr. Kunzman, of the JCC, remembers a federal consultant telling him that between 8% and 21% of those who reside in the community that experiences mass violence will experience a diagnosable traumatic response. Just counting the 35,000 residents of Squirrel Hill, he said, that would amount to 3,000 people.
Suicides this spring of two Parkland survivors and of the father of a Newtown victim displayed the long, dark shadow of mass-casualty attacks.
“What they’ve learned is that communities are really traumatized,” said Mr. Kunzman. “In times of deep crisis, the trauma is blinding. It’s important that we come together, learn from one another, understand how best to build trust, not only within our respective communities but across other communities. How do we support one another in moving forward?”