'It seems like yesterday': Pittsburgh marks 2 years since Tree of Life massacre
Joyce Fienberg. Richard Gottfriend. Rose Mallinger. Jerry Rabinowitz. David and Cecil Rosenthal. Bernice and Sylvan Simon. Daniel Stein. Melvin Wax. Irving Younger.
Some days, two years feels like two days. Others, it feels like two lifetimes.
“Sometimes, it feels like it was just yesterday,” said Carol Sikov Gross, president of the congregation Tree of Life —Or L’Simcha in Squirrel Hill. “Sometimes, it feels like a lot longer.”
Tuesday marked two years since a gunman walked into the synagogue on Wilkins Avenue and opened fire. He killed 11 worshippers across three congregations: Tree of Life, New Light and Dor Hadash.
People began trickling past the synagogue early, leaving flowers and trinkets, notes and memorials.
Brad and Maddie Lewis stopped by with their golden retriever, Barry. The couple, who are Jewish, described how the shooting affected them deeply.
“Driving through this area over the last two years, we always take a moment to look at the pictures and the building and remember,” Brad Lewis said. “Today, we felt like we needed to do more and be here and walk around and spend some time remembering.”
To the victims’ families and the survivors, Maddie Lewis said, it’s important they know the city is behind them.
“That’s the beauty of this city,” she said.
City officials called for a moment of silence at 9:54 a.m., the time the gunman began his spree amid Shabbat services. City officials and congregation leaders, including Mayor Bill Peduto, Peduto’s chief of staff, Dan Gilman, and Tree of Life Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, marked the moment outside the synagogue.
“It seems like yesterday,” Peduto said after the moment of silence.
He said being there, with the same people he was with the day of the shooting, brings everything back. He said he thinks of Myers, who was leading the congregation that morning and survived the shooting, and the families and the Squirrel Hill community who had to — and continue to — face that trauma.
“There’s a reality to this massacre in that it is the single worst act of anti-Semitism in American history,” he said. “There’s also another story to it, and that is how an entire city and a region and a country and a world pulled around the Jewish community in a time of great need.”
He said that same spirit of using light to drive out dark and love to drive out hate is a spirit that can move the world past the upheaval it’s in.
“On this spot that we stand, we saw it happen,” Peduto said. “We lived it. We know it’s real. We just have to remember that and remind ourselves that there is a path toward making this a better city, a better country and a better world — and it begins with how we treat one another.”
‘Definitely going back’
What becomes of that spot remains to be seen, though congregants are steadfast that they will return to that site.
“We will rebuild on this site, and we will be strong,” said Carol Levine, a lifelong congregant. “As the rabbi tells us, the answer to anti-Semitism is to do more Jewish things.”
She said the community support has been instrumental for healing, and she found particular strength in what a rabbi told her son in the aftermath.
“The rabbis told him that as Jews, we should not feel survivors’ guilt,” she said. “We should survive and we should make our survival meaningful.”
For two years, the building has remained quiet and empty, an unintended memorial to those killed. Life will return to it, though, said Gross, president of the congregation.
“That’s been our home for a long time,” she said. “I’m a lifetime member of Tree of Life. That’s where we’ve held services, family events, whether bar mitzvahs or weddings or other memorable things that occur in our lives. It’s a place that we all feel a very strong connection to.”
The process has been slowed, she said, first by grief and then by a pandemic that has forced a close-knit group apart.
Myers told the Tribune-Review many of his congregants feel traumatized all over again.
“I think, for many of my congregation, the hardest piece right now is the fact that we are displaced twice: once after 10/27, and then a second time because of the pandemic, where we now self-quarantine,” he said. “It has retraumatized many people.”
The congregation has hired consultants to look at what can and should be done with the interior of the building and to help with raising the funds to complete the work. The steering committee is still in talks with Chatham University and Pittsburgh’s Holocaust Center about having space in the building, and there are plans for artistic and display space, rooms for worship, spaces for remembrance and a memorial.
“For at least a year we were grieving and mourning,” Gross said. “It’s a slow process, and everyone goes about it in their own way in their own time. Then we were starting to move on things and we were hit by covid-19.”
The pandemic forced the congregation of their second, temporary home at Rodef Shalom, where they’d been holding services since the 2018 shooting. They’ve been worshipping together via Facebook Live since March.
Gross said plans are in forward motion again, but there is no definite timeline.
“We are not starting from the ground up,” she said. “We haven’t yet decided more specifics about what, if anything, may come down, what might be built up, but we are definitely going back. It’s not a question of is Tree of Life going back or not going back.”
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