Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle 7-21-23

Verdict: Synagogue shooter eligible for the death penalty

Community reacts to eligibility phase verdict

By David Rullo | Sta Writer and Adam Reinherz | Sta Writer

Jurors unanimously decided on July 13 that the man who killed 11 worshippers in the Tree of Life building on Oct. 27, 2018, is eligible to receive the death penalty. The decision, which was reached after less than two hours of deliberation, closed a three-week process during which the defense tried to prove the shooter was not eligible for the death penalty because of various purported mental illnesses and that his antisemitism resulted from delusions.

In rejecting the defense’s claims, jurors found the defendant intentionally and specifically engaged in violence, knowingly created great risk of death and planned and promoted the killings.

After Judge Robert J. Colville read the unanimous decision, lead defense attorney Judy Clarke asked him to poll the jury. Each of the 12 jurors stood and affirmed that the defendant was eligible for capital punishment.

Last month, the jurors found the defendant guilty on all 63 federal counts he faced, including 22 capital offenses.

The trial moved into its final sentencing

phase on Monday. During this phase, which Colville said he expects to last seven to 10 days, the prosecution is presenting testimony from family members of those killed — Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger. Others who were injured or otherwise affected will offer statements as well.

The defense will offer mitigating evidence about the defendant. Jurors will then determine whether he should receive the death penalty or life in prison.

Judge’s instructions

U.S. District Judge Robert Colville spent the first 45 minutes Monday morning instructing the jury on what they would hear during this phase of the trial and how they should determine whether the shooter should be sentenced to death.

A federal life sentence, he explained, offered no opportunity for parole. He said it was up to each juror to decide individually if the convicted murderer deserved the death penalty.

By Harrison Hamm | Contributing Writer and Delaney Parks | Contributing Writer

Members of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community responded after the jury for the synagogue massacre trial unanimously found the shooter eligible for the death penalty, moving the trial to the third and final phase.

The trial is now in its sentencing phase, where family members of the victims will deliver impact statements about the lives lost and the defense will offer mitigating evidence about the defendant’s life.

On Oct. 27, 2018, Robert Bowers killed 11 worshippers from three congregations in the Tree of Life building — Dor Hadash, New Light and Tree of Life. Those killed were Joyce Fienberg, 75; Richard Gottfried, 65; Rose Mallinger, 97; Jerry Rabinowitz, 66; David Rosenthal, 54; Cecil Rosenthal, 59; Bernice Simon, 84; Sylvan Simon, 86; Dan Stein, 71; Irving Younger, 69; and

Please see Reaction, page 11

 Jeffrey Finkelstein, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, gives a statement after the jury’s eligibility decision in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial on Thursday, July 13 outside Joseph F. Weis Jr. U.S. Courthouse, Downtown. The jury found the gunman eligible for the death penalty.

Photo by Emily Matthews/Pittsburgh Union Progress

a procession from New Light Congregation’s old building toward its new space in the Tree of Life building, in 2017.

Photo by Barry Werber

Headlines

More than music: Cantor Kalix Jacobson begins tenure at Temple Emanuel

By Abigail Hakas | Staff Writer

Temple Emanuel of South Hills hired its first full-time cantor in more than 50 years.

Cantor Kalix Jacobson (who uses they/ them pronouns) joined Temple Emanuel at the start of July after being ordained in May at the Hebrew Union College in New York, but their path to being a cantor started with a bachelor’s in business and a friend’s tragic loss.

Jacobson was often told they would make a great cantor, and while they were earning their bachelor’s degree, a close friend suddenly lost her family. Jacobson, then 19, traveled to Chicago to help her figure out the next steps.

“She basically said to me, ‘You are very good at this. Have you considered ministry?’ And it was the first time I understood what people were saying when they told me I should be a cantor,” Jacobson said. “When this happened, from my vantage point, a cantor was a Jewish singer in the congregation, right? But obviously, cantors are much, much more than just music facilitators in communities.”

For Jacobson, being a cantor goes beyond a desire to help people — it springs from their genetics. Their grandfather was a singer and pianist who bought a ring for Jacobson’s grandmother by selling a song to a recording company. When you grow up with a grandfather who sings like Sinatra, Jacobson said, it’s only a matter of time before you pick up an instrument or two.

“I can’t imagine myself without music. I hear music in everything. There are things

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“There’s a lot of innovation going on and a lot of the focus in the Jewish world is about writing new and invigorating pieces,” they said. “I think we are fixing to see a real shift in what music is being sung in

Jacobson said that their class at Hebrew Union College’s Debbie Friedman School of nary or transgender cantors in any Jewish denomination, something they referred to

“I think the biggest problem I run into as a professional who is trans is that people are afraid of doing something wrong,” they said. “As long as you are holding no maliciousness to me, I hold no maliciousness to you. I want to get to know people, I want to be your cantor, I want to be a confidant or a support or anything that you might need.”

A legacy gift from congregant Betty Diskin in memory of her husband, Arthur, and their sons William and Robert, allowed Temple Emanuel to expand its musical program by hiring Jacobson, who also will lead Torah studies, provide counseling and officiate at weddings and funerals.

“There’s a misconception about what cantors do,” Jacobson said. “When we’re in school, we learn basically everything that the rabbis do plus an entire canon of music. So, we’re not just musicians — in fact, the opposite. We’ve been trained to be full clergy partners with rabbis or, in some instances, spiritual leaders.”

Along with cantorial training, Jacobson has a master’s in nonprofit management from Hebrew Union College. Jacobson hopes to use that background in nonprofit management and fundraising to help Temple Emanuel in the future — but how that will happen remains to be seen, they said.

“What excited us about Cantor Kalix in particular was not just their amazing musical talent and voice,” Temple Emanuel’s President Michelle Markowitz said, “but also their passion for the Jewish future and community-building in that Jewish future.”

Rabbi Aaron Meyer echoed Markowitz’s praise of Jacobson’s passion for the Jewish future.

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What to expect in the final phase of the synagogue shooter trial

By David Rullo | Staff Writer

The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter is eligible for the death penalty.

Found guilty on 63 counts, including 22 capital offenses, the convicted killer’s sentence now rests in the hands of the same jury that delivered verdicts for the first two phases of the trial.

In Phase 3 — the sentencing phase — the defense will try to convince that jury that the defendant should receive a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole rather than death.

“They will basically track what they have already previewed in both the guilt and eligibility phase,” said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who teaches criminal law and procedure. “They will put in front of the jury evidence about the defendant’s mental health, the health of his brain, diagnoses of mental illness, any evidence about his childhood traumas, difficulties with his parents — basically anything conceivable that might push the jury away from the imposition of the death penalty.”

Much of the defense’s evidence will be familiar to the jurors, as they have already heard expert witnesses testifying that the defendant has schizophrenia and epilepsy. Those conditions, defense lawyers argued, should have prevented him from qualifying for the death penalty.

While those issues have already been examined and rejected by the jury, Harris said, this time jurors have to look at them differently.

“[The defense] gets to present it again in a different and perhaps deeper level, with more evidence for the specific purpose of trying to persuade the jury not to render a death verdict,” he said. “There may not be a big difference to most folks, but we have to keep in mind that this is a very technical, legally mandated process, and we have to step through using the evidence in different ways at different times.”

The prosecution will present aggravating evidence in support of the death penalty, including statements from those most

affected by the massacre.

These witnesses, Harris said, will explain how their lives have been impacted by the crimes. The Supreme Court, he explained, has said that in capital cases, the victims’ families can testify about the deceased and provide “slice of life” testimony.

“In other words,” he said, “what were their lives like? What did they mean to their family and to their community? Those things can

be testified to, concerning the victims of these crimes in the next phase.”

What the prosecution witnesses can’t do, Harris said, is share their opinion of an appropriate penalty.

After the jury has rendered its verdict and has been dismissed by the judge, a sentencing hearing will be held, most likely several months later, Harris explained. At this hearing, the victims and family members will have another opportunity to speak.

The idea of holding a sentencing hearing after a jury delivers its verdict on capital punishment might seem odd, but Harris said it’s an important part of the procedure.

“Remember, he’s also been convicted of 41 other crimes, and the judge will have to give the sentence for those crimes,” he said.

The judge, Harris said, is also responsible for officially pronouncing the sentence.

In the previous two phases of the trial, the jury delivered its verdicts of guilt and eligibility relatively quickly. Harris said the speed of those verdicts indicates the jury easily understood the evidence that supported the contentions of the government.

“I think that is a strong signal about what they are likely to think about the evidence for and against the death penalty that we’re about to see,” he said. “What we know from the eligibility phase is that they had no difficulty at all. A verdict that quickly shows there was really no dispute in that room.”

As in the previous two phases, Harris doesn’t believe the killer will testify. To do so, he said, would open up a crossexamination that would include all of the damaging statements he made to the defense experts who examined him in preparation for the trial.

If the shooter is sentenced to death, Harris said, there most likely will be a protracted period of appeals.

“If he decides he wants to continue his appeals, for whatever purpose, he will have lawyers willing to represent him because there are attorneys who simply believe the death penalty is not right, and regardless of who the defendant is, they will continue to fight,” he said.

The sentencing phase of the trial began Monday. It is expected to last about two weeks. PJC

David Rullo can be reached at drullo@ pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial by the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle and the Pittsburgh Union Progress in a collaboration supported by funding from the Pittsburgh Media Partnership.

p Scales of justice

Photo by Sora Shimazaki via Pexels

In Phase 3 — the sentencing phase — the defense will try to convince that jury that the defendant should receive a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole rather than death.

Incoming Federation board chair, Jan Levinson, looks to the future

— LOCAL —

By Adam Reinherz | Staff Writer

Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh’s incoming board chair was given a gift.

It’s not a watch or a plaque; the gift, Jan Levinson said, is Federation’s strategic plan.

“It’s a fabulous plan,” he said. “It has every good idea that anybody could ever think of for either the Jewish community or the general community.”

When Levinson is installed as board chair at Federation’s Sept. 6 annual meeting, his goal will be “actualizing” a strategy started in 2020.

Complete with Federation’s mission (cultivate resources, connect people and collaborate across the community to live and fulfill Jewish values) and vision (a flourishing Jewish community where everyone feels included, supported and inspired), the plan reflects the dedication of current board chair David Sufrin and consultants who helped the umbrella organization identify necessary goals and objectives, Levinson said.

Speaking by phone from his office downtown, Levinson noted several aspects of the plan.

The first goal, he said, is to “establish that the Federation is the leading convener and driver of initiatives that inspire every member of our diverse Jewish community to feel included, engaged, safe and supported.”

Doing so won’t be easy, but Levinson is up to the task, he said.

Since becoming active in Jewish communal life decades ago, there have been several sizable changes, he said: “The Jewish community is not really what it was like 20 to 30 years ago. It’s not just Squirrel Hill — it’s so much more.”

The strategic plan will meet these new “geographic positions and interests,” he continued. “We’re sort of branching into the way the world is today.”

For instance, Federation is positioning itself to address the rising costs of formal Jewish engagement, he explained.

Whether it’s sending a child to a Jewish day school or summer camp, or belonging to a synagogue, “it’s very expensive to lead a Jewish life,” he said.

Levinson’s understanding stems from years of communal involvement. Well before heading Federation’s board, he was active at Community Day School, the former Jewish Educational Institute of Greater Pittsburgh and the former Agency for Jewish Learning.

Levinson said he’s sensitive to the realities of increasing educational expenses at Pittsburgh’s three Jewish day schools: “The [Federation’s annual] campaign only raises so much, and the campaign does so much for so many different things, so, the EITC (Educational Improvement Tax Credits) is really the big place to get the money for the schools.”

Operated by the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, EITC enables eligible businesses to receive state tax credits for contributions to qualified organizations, including the Pittsburgh Jewish Educational Improvement Foundation — a foundation whose aim, according to Charity Navigator, is to support Federation’s “educational mission.” Decades of communal involvement have evidenced the primacy of Jewish education, Levinson said: “A lot of the leaders in the

community — and there are a lot of them — are coming from either the influence of Jewish education in the schools, or the camps or the synagogue.”

EITC’s role in supporting Jewish education is clear, Levinson continued: “We know where money is. And we know how to get the money. We just have to get people who are willing to participate in the program, and businesses that are willing to participate in the program.”

Federation’s investment in youth is critical, but it’s also necessary to recognize young people’s interests, he explained.

In recent years there’s been a generational shift in attitude regarding Israel. Among U.S. adults ages 18-29, 56% have an unfavorable opinion of the Jewish state, according to Pew Research Center. Additionally, nearly the same number of U.S. adults under age 30 “rate the Palestinian government as favorably (35%) as the Israeli government (34%).” Grappling with those numbers is “part of recognizing that it’s a completely different world right now,” Levinson said. “Federation can only do its part. It can’t do everything, but we’re trying to bring more people into working with the Federation. We’re trying to let people know what we’re doing. And we’re trying to get more people to get involved. I don’t know that the Federation’s strategic plan is going to change the whole world, but we’re going to try to do our part.”

Please see Levinson, page 11

From Pennsylvania’s diamonds to Italian fields, Izzy Zober represents Israel one pitch at a time

— LOCAL —

By Adam Reinherz | Staff Writer

O’Hara Township’s Izzy Zober is using her arm to pull Israel closer. The 12-year-old softball phenom will again represent the Jewish state at this summer’s European Massimo Romeo Youth Tournament.

Held in Collecchio, Italy, EMRYT is part of the World Baseball Softball Confederation Europe and features squads from Austria, Czechia, Croatia, Spain and other countries.

Representing Team Israel is “awesome,” Izzy told the Chronicle. She said she feels a lot of pride knowing “the people of Israel get to watch me play on this team and represent them on an international stage.”

Izzy, who plans on pitching, hitting and playing first base, isn’t a stranger to donning blue, white and an emblazoned Star of David across her jersey. Last summer, she also participated in the Italianbased competition.

Returning this year will be “twice as fun,” she said. “I’ll get to see new teams and new kids on our Israeli team.”

Izzy is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Israel.

Her father, Yarone Zober, was born in the Jewish state and spent his early years there.

Izzy’s inclusion on the team has “brought us much closer to Israel,” he said. During one of her recent trips there, she invited her cousins from Pittsburgh to join. It was their

first trip to Israel.

Representing Israel athletically or helping others experience the country are critical ways to share Israel’s story, Yarone Zober said: “It’s a tough time for so many Jews with the way Israel is portrayed.”

Zober is confident his daughter will

represent the country well but said a softball diamond is far different from a diplomatic venue.

“Once you’re on a softball field, everyone tends to respect one another,” he said. Suiting up against athletes from other countries bridges divides, he continued: “It personalizes it and makes it harder to dislike the group that individual represents.”

Anti-Defamation League statistics show that about 1.09 billion people worldwide harbor antisemitic attitudes.

The number represents findings from interviews conducted between 2013-2014 of 53,100 people from across 101 countries about loyalty, power, the Holocaust and globalization.

ADL data also indicates that while 15% of U.S. residents polled believe “Jews have too much power in international financial markets,” the number rose to 32% among Italian respondents. Similarly, when asked whether Jews have “too much power in the business world,” 23% of Canadians surveyed said “yes.” The number jumped to 69% among Hungarians.

Izzy said that representing Israel is a chance to show the world that softball is a

Please see Zober, page 11

p From left; Izzy Zober and Yarone Zober

Photo courtesy of Yarone Zober

p Jan Levinson

Photo courtesy of Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh

Headlines

Tisha B’Av is a Jewish history lesson. Why don’t more Jews observe the holiday?

— RELIGION —

By Jarrad Saffren | Contributing Writer

In 587 BCE, King Solomon’s Temple was destroyed by King Nebuchadnezzar II and the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Almost 600 years later, the Second Temple was demolished by the Roman Empire.

Tisha B’Av, the annual fast day that falls in the summer of the Gregorian calendar (the evening of July 26 this year), commemorates both tragic events. Its five prohibitions (including a 25-hour fast), its reading of the Book of Lamentations and its recitation of elegiac poems (known as kinnot) are designed to help Jews remember their saddest days.

As post-temple Jewish history continued, such days became more frequent. The holiday now recalls the slaughter of Jews during the medieval Crusades, the Edict of Expulsion from England in 1290 and the Alhambra Decree that expelled Jews from Spain in 1492, among other calamities.

From Tisha B’Av, it is possible to gain an understanding of Jewish history after Jerusalem and during the rabbinic era. So, why don’t more modern communities observe this most historical of Jewish holidays? The answer is complicated, according to historians. For starters, the holiday falls in the summer, and that’s vacation season. It’s also about the destruction of the temples, and only Orthodox Jews pray for the rebuilding of the temple, according to Rabbi Lance Sussman, a historian of American Jewish history who has taught at Princeton University.

Additionally, the day was reinterpreted by the Reform movement in the 19th century, according to Zev Eleff, the president of Gratz College. Rabbi David Einhorn, the father of the Reform movement in the United States, argued that the destruction of the temple was a blessing because it allowed Jews to become “a light unto the nations,” Eleff said. But perhaps the biggest reason has to do

with a modern Jewish tragedy: the Holocaust. There was a moment after World War II when the Shoah could have joined the expulsions and Crusades as a part of Tisha B’Av. And in many Orthodox communities, it did. But to less traditional Jewish groups, the Holocaust needed its own days. Today, we call them Yom HaShoah, Israel’s day of remembrance, and International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the United Nations’ version.

Both have overshadowed Tisha B’Av, according to Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University.

“Now that we have Yom HaShoah and Holocaust Remembrance Day, it’s harder to use Tisha B’Av for that,” Sarna said. “Some summer camps do. But it kind of lost its contemporary relevance for some Jews.”

The message of Holocaust days, memorials, lessons in school, archival stories and artistic works is “never forget.” Yet in remembering the Shoah, modern Jews may have forgotten the holiday that gave us that message in the first place.

Should Holocaust remembrance take precedence over the destruction of the temples, the expulsions and the massacres just because the Holocaust happened more recently? On the one hand, it was an attempt to annihilate the Jews. On the other, the Jews’ survival sends the same message of perseverance that the Reform movement likes to emphasize with the post-temple period of Jewish history.

It’s a question with no clear answer. Only one thing is clear: The history lesson of Tisha B’Av is valuable.

“You don’t understand what can happen to Jews when there’s nowhere for them to go,” Sarna said.

“The desire to fold the totality of Jewish historical suffering into Tisha B’Av was part of our historical memory,” Eleff added.

“Tisha B’Av is a historical reminder that the Jewish people have suffered terrible catastrophes throughout their past and that they survived. And that we are in a period of relative strength today,” Sussman concluded.

Rabbi Roni Handler, who leads the Conservative Beth Tikvah-B’nai Jeshurun

Violins of Hope collecting used instruments

— LOCAL —

An instrument collection drive hosted by Violins of Hope Greater Pittsburgh and The Farina Foundation will be held on Saturday, July 22 (9:30 a.m. until noon) and Sunday, July 30 (9:30 a.m. until 1 p.m.) at Calvary Episcopal Church in East Liberty. Community members are invited to donate string, brass or woodwind instruments that they are no longer using.

The instruments will be restored, then presented to area youth in honor of World Kindness Day at a concert with the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra and the Junior Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh at Heinz Hall on Nov. 19.

Violins of Hope Greater Pittsburgh functions under the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. Its mission “is to promote our communal values of acceptance, inclusion, and diversity through musical, educational, and cultural events,” according to Violins of Hope officials. The Farina Foundation is a nonprofit

in Glenside, Pennsylvania, acknowledged that her synagogue does not do much for Tisha B’Av since it falls in the summer. But she agreed with the historians on the importance of it.

“The history is important so we can understand where we came from and who we are,” she said.

Rabbi Gregory Marx, who guides Reform Congregation Beth Or in Philadelphia, also admitted that his shul does not do much for the summer holiday. But like Handler, he agrees with the historians that it may deserve more.

“If you ask Jews today who we are as a community, they are going to be talking about prayer and good deeds. It made us stronger,” Marx said. “If the destruction had not happened, I’m not sure we would have survived another 2,000 years. Our focus became clear.” PJC

Jarrad Saffren writes for the Jewish Exponent, an affiliated publication where this first appeared.

established to continue the legacy of Frank J. Farina, Jr., former chairman of the North Allegheny Music Department. Throughout Farina’s 38-year career, “he believed every child should have the opportunity to fulfill their musical aspirations,” according to a news release.

“Just as the instruments from the Violins of Hope collection come with their own unique story of resilience and hope, these once cherished instruments can lift the spirits of one young person and enhance the trajectory of their life,” said Sandy Rosen, co-chair of Violins of Hope Greater Pittsburgh.

Future collection dates and locations will be announced.

Anyone who wishes to donate an instrument but can’t make it on the collection dates can contact Violins of Hope Greater Pittsburgh at info@violinsofhopepittsburgh.org for information. PJC

Toby Tabachnick

p Zev Eleff Photo courtesy of Gratz College p Jonathan Sarna

Photo courtesy of Jonathan Sarna

p Lance Sussman

Photo courtesy of Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel

p The Violins of Hope, a rare collection of restored violins from the Holocaust, will be displayed and played at venues throughout Greater Pittsburgh this fall. Photo courtesy of Violins of Hope Greater Pittsburgh

Submit calendar items on the Chronicle’s website, pittsburghjewishchronicle.org. Submissions also will be included in print. Events will run in the print edition beginning one month prior to the date as space allows. The deadline for submissions is Friday, noon.

q SUNDAYS, JULY 23 – DEC. 3

Join Chabad of Squirrel Hill for its Men’s Tefillin Club. Enjoy bagels, lox and tefillin on the first Sunday of the month. 8:30 a.m. chabadpgh.com.

q SUNDAYS, JULY 23– DEC. 17

Join a lay-led online Parshah study group to discuss the week’s Torah portion. No Hebrew knowledge needed. The goal is to build community while deepening understanding of the text. 8:30 p.m. For more information, visit bethshalompgh.org.

q MONDAYS AND WEDNESDAYS, JULY 24 – AUG. 2

There has never been an age in Jewish history without internal Jewish controversies. In the sixpart series Contemporary Jewish Controversies Rabbi Danny Schiff will lead robust discussions about significant Jewish controversies that echo across the contemporary Jewish landscape, including Zoom prayer, intermarried rabbis, the death penalty for acts of terror against Israelis and much more. $85. Mondays and Wednesdays. 9:30 a.m. jewishpgh.org/event/contemporaryjewish-controversies/2023-07-17.

q MONDAYS, JULY 24 – DEC. 18

Join Congregation Beth Shalom for a weekly Talmud study. 9:15 a.m. For more information, visit bethshalompgh.org.

q TUESDAY, JULY 25

Women are invited to explore the teachings of “Tanya” in a monthly women’s growth group Chabad of Squirrel Hill, 7 p.m. chabadpgh.com.

Join Chabad of the South Hills for a ladies’ night out. Design your own board using wood-burning techniques (no experience necessary) and enjoy a delicious fruit smoothie bar. 7:30 p.m. $20. 1701 McFarland Road. chabadsh.com.

q WEDNESDAYS, JULY 26 – DEC. 20

Join AgeWell for an intergenerational family dynamics discussion group. Whether you have family harmony or strife, these discussions are going to be thought-provoking and helpful. Led by intergenerational specialist/presenter and educator Audree Schall. Third Wednesday of each month. Free. 12:30 p.m. South Hills JCC.

q WEDNESDAYS, JULY 26– DEC. 27

Bring the parashah alive and make it personally relevant and meaningful with Rabbi Mark Goodman in this weekly Parashah Discussion: Life & Text. 12:15 p.m. For more information, visit bethshalompgh.org/life-text.

Temple Sinai’s Rabbi Daniel Fellman presents a weekly Parshat/Torah portion class on site and online. Call 412-421-9715 for more information and the Zoom link.

q THURDAYS, JULY 27-AUG. 17

Be the best bridge player you can be at any level with lessons from the Pittsburgh Bridge Association. 9 a.m. Rodef Shalom,

Chronicle wins 4 national Jewish press awards for outstanding work

— LOCAL —

The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle was recognized for its excellence in journalism by the American Jewish Press Association, winning four Rockower Awards in the weekly and biweekly newspaper division. The awards were presented at the Rockower Awards Banquet in conjunction with AJPA’s annual conference on July 11 in New Orleans.

The Chronicle won first place in the category Award for Excellence in Personal Essay for “This is Israel calling ...” by Chronicle Staff Writer David Rullo. The judge commented: “Appreciated both the visual and emotional commentary. Very insightful and well done.”

In the category Award for Excellence in News Reporting, the Chronicle received second place for “Pittsburgh synagogue shooting survivors have mixed emotions about trial date,” by David Rullo. The judge commented: “Great work taking a “court process story” and bringing home the

very powerful and important emotions of those affected.”

Rullo also received honorable mention in the Award for Excellence in Interfaith Relations for his story “Non-Jewish members contribute heartily to synagogue life.” The judge commented: “There are so many ways that we all connect. This story was a good illustration of that.”

In the Award for Excellence in News Obituaries category, Justin Vellucci earned an honorable mention for his story “Judah Samet, survivor of Holocaust and Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, has died at 84.” The judge commented: “A well-written obituary makes the reader wish he’d known the individual who has passed. This piece succeeds in doing so by representing Mr. Samet’s warmth, good nature and love of life and learning.”

The awards were for work published in 2022. PJC

David Rullo

4905 Fifth Ave. Advance registration is requested at pittsburghbridge.org/classreg.htm.

q FRIDAY, JULY 28

Eberle Studios presents two films by Sheila Chamovitz. In “Skokie: Rights or Wrong,” Sheila examines free speech via the controversial events of the ACLU defending a Nazi march in a Jewish neighborhood. “Murray Avenue: A Community in Transition” is an elegy for the changing culture of the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, told through a look inside now-vanished Jewish-owned business. These moving films will both be presented on 16mm, and Chamovitz will discuss her work following their screening. 7:30 p.m. Free. 229 E. 9th Ave. pghsoundandimage.com.

q SUNDAY, JULY 30

Join Congregation Beth Shalom for an afternoon at the movies in the Samuel & Minnie Hyman Ballroom. Watch “iMordecai” and stay for a virtual question-and-answer with writer-director Marvin Samel. $10/per person, in advance. Walk-ins, $15/per person. To purchase tickets, visit bethshalompgh.org/imordecai-movie.

Join Chabad of South Hills for its annual summer BBQ. Enjoy life-size lawn games, crafts, bubbles and toddler fun, music, food, drink and more. RSVP before Tuesday, July 25. $15/adult, $40/family. 5 p.m. Scott Park – Walnut Pavilion. chabadsh.com/summerbbq.

Rendezvous in Rodef Shalom’s Biblical Botanical Garden for a free live jazz performance from the Craig Davis Quartet with drinks and hors d’oeuvres. 7 p.m. 4905 Fifth Ave. rodefshalom.org/garden.

Join

The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle invites you to join the Chronicle Book Club for its Aug. 27 discussion of “The Secret Chord,” by Geraldine Brooks.

From Amazon.com: “With more than two million copies of her novels sold, New York Times bestselling author Geraldine Brooks has achieved both popular and critical acclaim. Now, Brooks takes on one of literature’s richest and most enigmatic figures: a man who shimmers between history and legend. Peeling away the myth to bring [King] David to life in Second Iron Age Israel, Brooks traces the arc of his journey from obscurity to fame, from shepherd to soldier, from hero to traitor, from beloved king to murderous despot and into his remorseful and diminished dotage.”

Your Hosts:

Toby Tabachnick, editor of the Chronicle

David Rullo, Chronicle staff writer

How and When:

We will meet on Zoom on Sunday, August 27, at noon.

What To Do Buy: “The Secret Chord.” It is available from online retailers, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and through the Carnegie Library system.

q WEDNESDAY, AUG. 2 –THURSDAY, AUG. 3

Join the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh for a Teachers Workshop presented by Echoes & Reflections. This training is free, and Act 48 credit hours will be available. It will be held in person, with courses led by Echoes & Reflections facilitators. 8:30 a.m. Chatham University. eventbrite.com/o/holocaust-center -of-pittsburgh-10903531159.

q THURSDAY, AUG. 3

Facilitated by local clergy from Jewish and Christian backgrounds, the Jewish/Christian Dialogue is a monthly discussion exploring topics of similarities and differences. 12 p.m. Free. 4905 Fifth Ave. rodefshalom.org.

q SUNDAY, AUG. 6

Rendezvous in Rodef Shalom’s Garden for a free live performance with The Boilermaker Jazz Band. Join for drinks and hors d’oeuvres, as they bring the swinging sounds of the jazz age back to life. 6 p.m. Free. 4905 Fifth Ave. rodefshalom.org/garden.

q WEDNESDAY, AUG. 9

Join members of the community for the annual Jewish Heritage Night as the Pittsburgh Pirates battle the Atlanta Braves. This year, an optional pre-game meal is available in the Picnic Park from 5:30-7 p.m. from Elegant Edge Catering. Each game ticket purchased will also include a limited edition Pittsburgh Pirates Hebrew T-shirt. 7:05 p.m. $16-44. PNC Park. jewishpgh.org/event/jewishheritage-night. PJC

Email: Contact us at drullo@ pittsburghjewishchronicle.org, and write “Chronicle Book Club” in the subject line. We will send you a Zoom link for the discussion meeting.

Happy reading! PJC Toby Tabachnick

Headlines

After 7-month wait, in ‘warm’ call, Biden invites Netanyahu to meet in US

— WORLD —

By Jacob Magid | The Times of Israel

President Joe Biden invited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to meet him in the U.S. during a Monday phone call, after seven months of refraining from making such an offer due to Washington’s ongoing displeasure with the judicial overhaul and Jerusalem’s policies in the West Bank.

But the Prime Minister’s Office notably did not state that the meeting would take place at the White House, as Netanyahu likely had hoped. Speculation has grown in recent weeks that the two could sit down on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly high-level week in September, when both leaders are expected to be in New York. U.S. officials also did not immediately specify where the meeting would be held.

The invitation was extended during a “warm and long” phone call, Netanyahu’s office said. It was the first time the two had spoken in four months. The prime minister accepted the invitation and the leaders agreed that their staffs would work to coordinate a date.

White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby later confirmed that there would be a meeting between Biden and Netanyahu sometime in the fall. “This doesn’t mean we have less concerns about the judicial reform or about the extremists in the Israeli government. We remain concerned,” he said.

During the phone call, the Israeli readout said, Netanyahu updated Biden on the legislation his coalition is looking to pass next week — a bill, fiercely opposed by the opposition, that will remove judicial oversight over the reasonableness of governmental decisions. Netanyahu told Biden he aims to use the summer parliamentary recess to whip up more support for remaining parts of the coalition’s judicial overhaul.

He made similar assurances to the White House after he agreed to pause the overhaul legislation in late March to engage in negotiations with the opposition, brokered by President Isaac Herzog, that sought to reach compromises on judicial reform.

But those talks fell apart last month and the Netanyahu government decided to move ahead with the overhaul unilaterally, starting with the “reasonableness” legislation. The decision has revamped widespread protests across Israel that have begun to spread into the military, where hundreds and possibly thousands, of active reservists in some of the IDF’s most elite units are threatening to stop volunteering if the overhaul continues to advance.

According to the White House readout, Biden “underscored the need for the broadest

possible compromise and [re-emphasized] that shared democratic values have always been and must remain a hallmark of the US-Israel relationship.”

more settlement construction in six months than any government has in a calendar year, while failing to clamp down on settler violence and wildcat Israeli construction

curbing the High Court of Justice’s powers, saying such fundamental reforms should only be passed with broad support and must maintain the strength of Israel’s democratic institutions.

The overhaul is what led Biden to announce in late March that Netanyahu would not receive an invite to the White House in the “near term.” But during a CNN interview last week the president appeared to focus his concern on the hardline nature of the government as well as its policies in the West Bank.

The call came a day before Herzog landed in Washington and to meet with Biden at the White House for the second time in less than nine months. That visit is an apparent signal that the administration believes the U.S. relationship with Israel transcends the government of the day.

Earlier Monday, Opposition leader Yair Lapid declared that “the United States is no longer our closest ally” due to the Netanyahu government’s “disastrous” policies.

And on Sunday, Israel’s Channel 13 reported that Netanyahu lashed out at Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael Herzog, during a Jerusalem meeting last week, over the government’s strained ties with the Biden administration.

The report cited diplomatic sources saying Netanyahu is displeased by Herzog’s trip and told the ambassador — the president’s brother — that he believed it would offer the White House legitimacy to avoid inviting the premier in the near future.

During the Monday call, Netanyahu and Biden also discussed advancing measures to restore calm in the West Bank via the regional meetings that Israel and the Palestinian Authority have held this year in Aqaba, Jordan and Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, according to the Israeli readout. A third meeting was supposed to take place in the spring but never materialized amid further deteriorations in Jerusalem’s ties with Ramallah. The White House said it looked forward to another meeting being held soon, though.

Biden also stressed the need for Israel “to take measures to maintain the viability of a two-state solution and improve the security situation in the West Bank,” the White House said, re-emphasizing its support for a paradigm that Netanyahu and his government do not back.

Biden welcomed the recent Israeli cabinet decision principally backing strengthening the Palestinian Authority as well as recent steps by the PA to reassert security control in Jenin and other areas, the White House said.

Biden “expressed concern about continued settlement growth and call[ed] on all parties to refrain from further unilateral measures.”

The Netanyahu government has advanced

that the U.S. views as inhibiting prospects for a two-state solution.

The two leaders also discussed efforts to expand Israel’s integration in the region and to combat the Iranian nuclear threat, both offices said.

The White House said Biden wished Netanyahu good health after the latter’s hospitalization over the weekend, underscored his commitment to Israel’s security and condemned recent acts of terror against Israeli civilians.

While the president’s direct engagement with Netanyahu ostensibly indicates a desire by Washington to calm the waters, after Biden last week called members of the Israeli government some of “the most extreme” he has ever seen, the Axios news site said Biden was planning to use the call in order to raise concerns regarding Jerusalem’s renewed advancement of its judicial overhaul.

Monday’s conversation was the third between the two leaders since Netanyahu returned to power on Dec. 29. The last time they spoke was in March when Biden also raised alarm regarding the overhaul.

The U.S. has spoken out against the legislative package aimed at radically

www.pittsburghjewishchronicle.org

Netanyahu’s office has sought to downplay the divide, saying last week that “it is no secret that we have disagreements with the U.S. government around establishing a Palestinian state, returning to the dangerous nuclear agreement with Iran, and PM Netanyahu’s stance against the ‘no surprises’ policy around Israeli actions against Iran. However, the ties between Israel and the U.S. have grown close over the course of decades, and security cooperation has reached an all-time high under Prime Minister Netanyahu’s leadership.”

But after New York Times columnist Tom Friedman penned an op-ed saying that the administration has begun “reassessing” its ties to the Netanyahu government, the White House sufficed by issuing a response that it was not engaged in a “formal” reset, leaving open the possibility that it has started reviewing the relationship in an unofficial manner.

In a move that may further irk the Biden administration, Foreign Minister Eli Cohen is considering appointing Joe Zevuloni, an Israeli-American supporter of former President Donald Trump, as a special envoy to the United States, the Walla news site reported Sunday. PJC

Lazar Berman contributed to this report.

p Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to President Joe Biden on Feb. 17, 2021.

Photo courtesy of Prime Minister’s Office

According to the White House readout, Biden “underscored the need for the broadest possible compromise and [re-emphasized] that shared democratic values have always been and must remain a hallmark of the US-Israel relationship.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims COVID was ‘ethnically targeted’ to avoid Ashkenazi Jews, Chinese people

By Ben Sales | JTA

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the vaccine conspiracy theorist and Democratic presidential candidate, is drawing criticism after arguing that COVID-19 had been “ethnically targeted” to have less of an effect on Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.

“COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” Kennedy said at an appearance last week at Tony’s Di Napoli, a restaurant on Manhattan’s East Side. “The people who are most immune are Ashkenazic Jews and Chinese. We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential of impact.”

“There’s an argument that it is ethnically targeted,” he said immediately beforehand, according to the New York Post, which published video of the remarks.

Kennedy, who is running a long-shot campaign for the Democratic nomination against President Joe Biden, is a flag-bearer for an anti-vaccination movement that has frequently invoked antisemitic rhetoric in arguing, against evidence, that vaccines are dangerous. He has questioned the established link between HIV and AIDS and

also has been a leading proponent of the debunked claim that there is a link between vaccines and autism.

Since at least medieval times, conspiracy theories have falsely claimed that Jews have shielded themselves from plagues or been the cause of them. Similar antisemitic conspiracy theories flared during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly as vaccines became available and their critics began comparing their use, and mandates

requiring vaccination, to the Holocaust.

Last year, Kennedy apologized after invoking Anne Frank at an anti-vaccination rally in Washington, D.C., in a move that his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, publicly denounced. But his anti-vaccination comparisons have drawn criticism for years. In 2015, he used the word “holocaust” to describe proposed legislation mandating vaccines for children and apologized after facing criticism from the Anti-Defamation League.

His latest comments, too, have drawn widespread criticism, including from Jewish leaders. American Jewish Committee CEO Ted Deutch said in a statement that Kennedy’s remarks were “deeply offensive and incredibly dangerous.”

“Every aspect of his comments reflects some of the most abhorrent antisemitic conspiracy theories throughout history and contributes to today’s dangerous rise of antisemitism,” Deutch said.

There is no evidence that any ethnic groups are less susceptible to COVID-19, which has killed nearly 7 million people worldwide. Public health experts say disparities in death rates in the United States reflect unequal access to health care and uptake of vaccines; meanwhile, Jews in the United States were hard-hit, particularly early in the pandemic, and some estimates suggest that 1 million Chinese people died of the disease in recent months. (China’s official data is not considered reliable.)

Kennedy did not detail which papers he was citing during his comments at the dinner, according to the New York Post report.

On Saturday, Kennedy wrote on Twitter that the Post story was “mistaken” and claimed that he “never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews.”

But later in the same post, he wrote that “COVID-19 appears to disproportionately affect certain races” and that it “serves as a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons. I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered.” He provided a link to a study that he said backed up his claims.

In a subsequent post, Kennedy said the New York Post’s reporting, which he

called a “disgusting fabrication,” reflected antisemitism — something he said he is dedicated to combating.

“I understand the emotional pain that these inaccurate distortions and fabrications have caused to many Jews who recall the blood libels of poison wells and the deliberate spread of disease as the pretext for genocidal programs against their ancestors,” he wrote.

“My father and my uncles, John F. Kennedy and Senator Edward Kennedy, devoted enormous political energies during their careers to supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism. I intend to spend my political career making those family causes my priority.”

Kennedy has Jewish defenders — including Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the author and Republican political activist, as well as sports reporter and pro-Israel advocate Emily Austin. But his comments drew criticism from across the political spectrum. The New York Post reported that Morton Klein, the president of the right-wing Zionist Organization of America who is advising Kennedy on Israel policy and calls him a “good friend,” said the candidate’s claims were “crazy.”

“This is crazy,” Klein told the newspaper. “It makes no sense that they would do that. I read everything. I was totally against the vaccine. . . I wanted to convince myself it was correct not to take it. I have never seen anything like this.”

Meanwhile, Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the left-leaning Jewish Council on Public Affairs, said in a statement that Kennedy was “using support for Israel to deflect criticism” and said that she was unsurprised but distressed by Kennedy’s rhetoric.

“Antisemitism is at the core of countless conspiracy theories — including COVID and vaccine-related conspiracy theories — so it’s no surprise that RFK Jr.’s presidential campaign has quickly descended into overt antisemitism,” Spitalnick said. “His comments also illustrate the deep interconnection of antisemitism and anti-Asian hate at this moment. ... At a moment of increasingly normalized antisemitism, hate, and extremism, it’s crucial that we call out these conspiracy theories and bigotry for what they are.” PJC

p Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 2017

Photo by Maxlovestoswim, creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

“Every aspect of his comments reflects some of the most abhorrent antisemitic conspiracy theories throughout history and contributes to today’s dangerous rise of antisemitism.”

–TED DEUTCH

Headlines

Congressional committee OKs funding hike for antisemitism monitor

A congressional committee approved an increase in funding for the office of Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department’s antisemitism monitor, from $1.5 million to $2.5 million, JTA.org reported.

The U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee approved the bill, which pays for State Department and foreign operations, on June 12. It now goes to the full House and must be reconciled with parallel Senate legislation. Senators who focus on antisemitism hope to get similar language into the corresponding Senate bill.

“The dangerous and distributing rise in antisemitism requires unprecedented investments in the Office of the Special Envoy so that the Special Envoy has the staffing and resources it requires to accomplish its work,” said a release from Rep. Grace Meng, the New York Democrat who is a co-chair of the task force. Lipstadt’s title is special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism.

The amount is $500,000 more than the $2 million sought earlier this year by lawmakers who focus on antisemitism, who sent letters to the State Department and to appropriators asking for the funds. It also comes after the Biden administration rolled out a comprehensive strategy for combating antisemitism in May.

Ilhan Omar: ‘No way in hell I am attending’ Israeli president’s speech to Congress

Rep. Ilhan Omar declared in a series of tweets that she would not be present when Israeli President Isaac Herzog addresses a joint session of Congress on July 19, JTA.org reported.

“There is no way in hell I am attending the joint session address from a President whose country has banned me and denied @RashidaTlaib the ability to see her grandma,” Omar, the Minnesota Democrat, tweeted on July 13.

Omar’s tweet referenced Israel’s decision in 2019 to bar her and Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib from visiting Israel and the West Bank because both congresswomen support the movement to boycott Israel. Israel later said Tlaib, who is Palestinian-American, could visit her grandmother in the West Bank on humanitarian grounds, but she declined the offer, citing “oppressive” conditions Israel was placing on the visit. (Tlaib does not appear to have commented publicly on Herzog’s address.)

Omar is not the first U.S. lawmaker to sit out an address by an Israeli leader. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu controversially addressed Congress in 2015 to rally opposition to then-President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran, eight senators and 50 members of Congress, all Democrats or allied with them, did not attend.

Today in Israeli History

July 24, 1920 — Congresswoman

Bella Abzug is born

Items are provided by the Center for Israel Education (israeled.org), where you can find more details.

July 21, 1973 — Mossad kills wrong man in Norway

In Lillehammer, Norway, a Mossad team targeting the terrorists behind the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre kills a Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchiki, mistaking him for PLO official Ali Hassan Salameh.

July 22, 1939

— Actress Gila Almagor is born

Gila Almagor, the “queen of the Israeli cinema and theater,” is born in Haifa. She makes her debut for Habima at 17 and establishes herself as a leading lady at Tel Aviv’s Cameri Theatre beginning in 1958.

July 23, 1984 — Israel elects 11th Knesset

Israel holds the 11th Knesset election. Shimon Peres, whose Labor-led Alignment wins 44 of the 120 seats, and Yitzhak Shamir, whose ruling Likud receives 41, agree to create a national unity government.

Bella Abzug, the first Jewish woman elected to Congress, is born in the Bronx to Orthodox Jews from Russia. She gains experience for politics by lecturing about Zionism at subway stops as a teen.

July 25, 1992 — Nightclub owner

Aris San dies

Aris San, who helped popularize the Greek sound in Israeli music, dies in Budapest at age 52. The Greek native’s hybrid music, known as laika, set the stage for the rise of Mizrahi music in the 1970s.

July 26, 1967 — Allon presents West Bank plan

Yigal Allon, a member of the government and a retired general, presents a strategic proposal for Israel’s retention of the Jordan Valley with settlements and military bases as part of an Arab-Israeli peace.

July 27, 1656 — Philosopher

Spinoza is excommunicated

Heat wave scorches Israel

Soaring temperatures sent Israelis to seek the comfort of air conditioning or shade while children played in water, JNS.org reported.

The highest temperatures of 38°-43°C (100°-109°F) were recorded in southern Israel and the Jordan Valley.

The heat wave, which is affecting the eastern Mediterranean region as well as the Balkans and much of Europe, continued into the middle of the week.

The hot front, nicknamed “Cleon,” peaked on July 13, meteorologists said.

In a statement, the Israel Meteorological Service announced that lighting fires in parks and reserves would be prohibited due to the danger of sparking wildfires. The Judean Desert was closed to visitors altogether, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority said.

Israel police arrest suspect in 2003 murder

Police announced an arrest on July 13 in the 2003 murder of Ashdod resident Margarita Levy and said an indictment would be filed against the unnamed suspect in the days ahead, The Jerusalem Post reported.

On June 19, 2003, Levy, 21, was found dead in a park in Eilat. There were severe signs of violence on her body, which was wrapped in blankets.

For years, investigators tried to extract a DNA profile from evidence found at the scene but were unsuccessful until advances in DNA extraction technology allowed them

to re-examine evidence.

The evidence led them to a 51-year-old suspect in Jaffa who lived in Eilat at the time of the murder.

Police spent 10 months investigating the suspect, who was arrested in May, but did not release details until July 13.

Operation Tzur Israel reunites 5,000 Ethiopian olim

With the arrival of 130 new immigrants from Ethiopia, Operation Tzur Israel completed its second phase by locating 3,000 olim, The Jerusalem Post reported.

The second phase, which began in June 2022, follows a first phase from December 2020 that brought over 2,000 immigrants in the government-led initiative.

About 70% of the newcomers are 35 or under and half are children and teenagers.

The Jewish Agency for Israel has worked in collaboration with the Aliyah and Integration Ministry, the Interior Ministry, the Population Authority and other organizations to coordinate 18 flights for the mission.

The immigrants are settled into one of 18 absorption centers that the Aliyah and Integration Ministry and The Jewish Agency operations. These centers are transitional hubs; the olim receive financial support, Hebrew language education, and resources enabling them to integrate into Israeli employment and educational systems. PJC

— Compiled by Andy Gotlieb

p Baruch Spinoza survived excommunication to be remembered as one of the most important philosophers of the Enlightenment.

The Amsterdam Jewish community excommunicates Baruch Spinoza, who becomes one of the leading Enlightenment philosophers, after he refuses to take a payment to be silent about his views on Judaism. PJC

p Gila Almagor, shown in 1969, starred on stage, in film and on television.

Headlines

Trial:

Continued from page 1

The government already proved four aggravating factors in the death penalty eligibility phase. It will seek to prove additional aggravating factors in the sentencing phase, including that the killing was motivated by religious animus and that the killer had a lack of remorse.

The defense, the judge said, will be arguing 112 mitigating factors they believe should prevent a death sentence, including evidence of the shooter’s traumatic childhood, suicide attempts and several stays in mental hospitals as a youth.

Government’s case

In her opening statement, Assistant United States Attorney Nicole Vasquez Schmitt noted that the defendant had decided to kill “again and again and again,” 11 times in total.

“He wanted to kill Jews,” she said. “He hated Jews. He wanted to kill as many as he could.”

She said that the jury had found him guilty, found him eligible for the death penalty, and now, it was time to hold him accountable for his crimes.

As for the defense’s mitigating factors, she said, the jury should not be persuaded by the large number the defense was setting out to prove.

“A single boulder outweighs a hundred grains of sand,” she said.

The prosecution, she said, will be asking the jury to “return a verdict of death, a verdict of justice.”

Defense’s case

Defense attorney Elisa Long said the jurors had a moral decision to make — if “a fellow human being, a citizen, should live or die.”

Her opening statement attempted to present the convicted killer as a victim of an abusive and neglectful family, poor genes and mental health issues.

And, while he still holds the same repugnant and unrepented views he had on Oct. 27, 2018, she acknowledged, executing him would deny him the opportunity of rehabilitation.

Long told the jurors the defense would “ask each of you to look deep in your heart and conclude enough is enough. There has already been enough death, and another won’t make things right.’”

The victims

Richard Gottfried, 65

Carol Black was the first government witness. She recounted the life of her brother, Richard Gottfried, saying that he was a man of deep faith and someone who enjoyed physical activity.

A member of New Light Congregation, Gottfried became more religious after the death of their father, Black said. It was following an injury she suffered while running that Gottfried convinced her to become more involved with the congregation as well.

“He was warm and loving, a good friend, very generous and kind. Everyone who knew him loved him,” she said.

Gottfried’s widow, Margaret “Peg”

Durachko, testified that they were married 38 years and that they began dating in dental school.

“He caught my eye,” she said.

The two started a dental practice together in 1984. It remained open until his murder.

She said they volunteered with Catholic Charities, providing dental services to those who couldn’t afford it, and worked at the Squirrel Hill Health Center.

The interfaith couple also served as mentors to other couples through a Catholic marriage support group, she said.

“We expected to live to an old age,” Durachko said, “but we did a lot while we could. At least I have those memories.”

Pausing as she became emotional, she then said, “He was my whole family. We never had children. It was wiped out in a second.”

Cecil Rosenthal, 59, and David Rosenthal, 54

Cecil and David Rosenthal were born with a genetic disorder called Fragile X, their

sister Diane Rosenthal testified. The family was urged to institutionalize her brothers because of the difficult journey ahead, but her parents refused.

That journey, she said, was often challenging and sometimes embarrassing, but “it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me and my family.”

Cecil, she said, was very sociable and always smiling. He had a strong connection to their father and enjoyed learning about the family.

David was more shy but very friendly once you got to know him, she said. He loved spending time at the fire station near the group home where he lived with his brother and was extremely close to his mother.

Both of her brothers, she said, were wonderful uncles to her two daughters. Their deaths, she said, changed her life — “the “boys” were the glue that held the family together.

“I cry a couple of times a week,” she said. “My parents cry every day.”

Diane said that her parents were unable to emotionally or physically come to the courthouse to testify. Instead, their mother, Joy Rosenthal, recorded a statement. After recounting their lives, and the happiness the brothers found at Tree of Life, through tears she concluded: “My only hope is that they are in peace. May their memories be a blessing.”

Mel Wax, 88

Jodi Kart, Mel Wax’s daughter, said she spoke to her father at least once a day. The calls, she said, become more frequent after the death of her mother.

Her father was a veteran who had served in Korea and spent time in Germany. He was uncomfortable in Germany, she said, because of the Holocaust, and he often asked her not to tell people she was Jewish or to show outward symbols of their faith and heritage.

Deeply religious, her father was a former officer and president at New Light. When she thinks of her father, she said, the first words that come to her mind are “unconditional love.”

“I have no memories of him raising his voice in anger. I knew to my core how much he loved me,” she said.

She called her loss “devastating.”

“He never got to see our son graduate from college,” she said. “He never got to see his first job out of college or the work he does. I’ll never know how long he might have lived. I’ll never know what he might have died from.”

SWAT Officer Anthony Burke

Anthony Burke was shot in the hand by the defendant during the attack at the synagogue.

He testified about his many operations and failed attempts at rehabilitation before finally having tendons from his leg put in his hand. That helped, he said, but he still experiences numbness and loss of strength. He struggles with fine motor skills.

“Buttoning my top button is now permanently my wife’s job,” he said.

Fighting back tears, he told of the depression he felt after the attack and his fear of letting his other SWAT members down.

“The injury to my hand,” he said, “is something I’m going to have to live with and try to explain to my kids.”

FBI Special Agent Samantha Bell also testified. She discussed the defendant’s emails to his mother and the antisemitic content of those messages.

The trial continues Tuesday.

To read about the final days of thet trial’s second phase, and for up-to-date coverage, go to pittsburghjewishchronicle.org. PJC

David Rullo can be reached at drullo@ pittsburghjewishchronicle.org. Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@ pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial by the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle and the Pittsburgh Union Progress in a collaboration supported by the Pittsburgh Media Partnership.

p Brothers Cecil Rosenthal (front row, far left) and David Rosenthal (back row, second from left) in a family photo

Photo courtesy of the Rosenthal family

p Mel Wax

Photo by Barry Werber

“My only hope is that they are in peace. May their memories be a blessing.”

–JOY ROSENTHAL, MOTHER OF CECIL AND DAVID ROSENTHAL

Headlines

Reaction:

Continued from page 1

Melvin Wax, 88. Last month, the jury determined that he was guilty on all 63 federal counts, including 22 capital crimes.

After the jury delivered the verdict, Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh President and CEO Jeffrey Finkelstein gave a statement outside the federal courthouse. He said that he’d just spoken with a few of the victims’ family members.

“I got the sense that they were — not happy or elated, those would be the wrong words — but eager to be able to share their feelings during this next phase,” Finkelstein said.

Maggie Feinstein, 10.27 Healing Partnership director, issued a statement emphasizing support for the victims’ family members as they prepare to speak on behalf of their loved ones.

“They cannot speak for themselves, and so their family members will speak for them. In the next phase of the trial, our justice system will perform its duty to listen to their voices.

Jacobson:

Continued from page 2

“Cantor Kalix combines an amazing musicianship with pastoral caregiving skills and an understanding of the future of Jewish communities,” Meyer said. “They also harbor a work ethic that breaks stereotypes about their generation, all of which is going to make them an amazing part of the Temple community.”

Sierra Fox, Jacobson’s friend and Temple Emanuel’s former student cantor, suggested the role to Jacobson. After speaking with Meyer, Jacobson was impressed with the relationships Temple Emanuel has with other Jewish and non-Jewish communities. ECDC, Temple’s Emanuel’s preschool, for example, is open to families of all faiths and backgrounds. Jacobson, 27, has more than a decade of experience teaching kids.

Zober:

Continued from page 4

fun, accessible game and, though the rules slightly differ depending on locale, “anyone can play if they want to.”

Her father agreed and said he’s eager to watch Izzy compete in Italy, as well as join Team Israel in the Czech Republic at the beginning of August for an 18U biennial tournament.

Whether she makes it onto the field in Prague is questionable, he said, but being there and learning from older athletes with similar aims should prove beneficial.

It’s very easy today for people to “shrink away” from their Jewish heritage, but there’s a way to “combine Judaism and Israel during this really important time,” he said. Whether it’s through “sports, arts or something people really love to do, that’s something folks can be inspired by.”

We support them, and we stand with them,” Feinstein said.

After less than two hours of deliberation, the decision was announced last Thursday morning. The jury determined that the defendant qualified for capital punishment because he was older than 18 at the time of the shooting; that he killed his victims intentionally; and that there were four “aggravating factors” present, including the fact that the victims were particularly vulnerable due to old age or infirmity.

Over the past several weeks, the defense tried to prove that mental health issues

“[Meyer] mentioned that there were several Palestinian families who sent their children to the ECDC, and I was like, ‘OK, where do I sign?’” Jacobson said. “The fact that we were able to have the relationship we do with Israel and also the relationship we do with these Palestinian families meant a lot to me.”

And for Jacobson, being a cantor doesn’t stop at Temple Emanuel’s doors.

“I’m here to be a community member, not just a Temple Emanuel staff member,” Jacobson said. “I moved to Pittsburgh because I care about Pittsburgh, and I want to be here. I want to be here for the community and I want to get to know you. I want to get to know anyone who is interested in getting to know me, for whatever reason, congregant or not.” PJC

Abigail Hakas can be reached at ahakas@ pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.

inhibited the defendant from forming the intent to kill. The prosecution argued that he carefully planned the attack, carrying through on his intention to kill as many Jewish worshippers as possible by firing more than 70 shots.

Clinical psychiatrist Siddhartha Nadkarni and forensic psychologist Richard Rogers, witnesses for the defense, both diagnosed the defendant with schizophrenia. Key prosecution witness and forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz disagreed, testifying that the shooter did not meet the criteria for schizophrenia. His antisemitic beliefs stemmed from ideology, rather

Levinson:

Continued from page 4

Challenges will always exist, but Levinson is optimistic about the future: “We’re doing everything we can to make it a much better, both Jewish community and general community.”

Levinson said his hopefulness stems from not only observing Federation’s efforts but from his work as an attorney and real estate broker.

“That’s the way I live my life,” he said.

For more than 25 years, Levinson has served as president and chair of Union Real Estate, a Pittsburgh-based property management company.

Sufrin, who will complete his role as Federation board chair at the upcoming annual meeting, credited Levinson’s considerable professional and volunteer experiences

than delusions, Dietz said.

“It’s clear that this is hatred of Jews. This is antisemitism. This is not a mental health issue,” Finkelstein said outside the courthouse.

New Light Congregation echoed those sentiments in a statement, writing that there is still work to be done to counter the sort of antisemitic views that motivated the defendant.

“This trial is an important step in drawing a line between speech and action,” the statement read. PJC

Delaney Parks and Harrison Hamm write for the Pittsburgh Union Progress. They can be reached at dkparks@sas.upenn.edu and hammharrison21@gmail.com, respectively.

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial by the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle and the Pittsburgh Union Progress in a collaboration supported by funding from the Pittsburgh Media Partnership.

in the community.

“I know that he’ll hit the ground running in his new role, and I’m looking forward to working with him in the years ahead,” Sufrin said.

Federation President and CEO Jeffrey Finkelstein offered similar praise and called Levinson “an experienced, collaborative and adaptable leader with extensive volunteer experience in all of the areas of our mission: cultivating resources, connecting people and collaborating across the community.”

Levinson said there’s much for Pittsburghers to get excited about.

“Our new strategic plan has all the really good ideas that anybody could ever think of,” he said. “Once we put it in place, it’s going to have a major positive impact on the whole community.” PJC

Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.

Zober said he hopes his message resonates.

In fact, long before his daughter dominated diamonds, Zober implored Chronicle readers to recognize the value of the Jewish state. In 1985, as a 10-year-old living in Israel, he filed reports with the Chronicle’s “Kids Page.” Zober’s writings concerned fads, holidays and celebrities in Israel.

Being able to travel to Italy with his wife, Tiffany Zober, and watching their daughter represent the Jewish state is basically a grand slam, he explained.

“I’m so proud of her and what she’s accomplishing on the field but also what she’s doing for Israel,” he said. “This activity has brought Israel into her life in a deeper and more personal way.” PJC

Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.

p Izzy Zober pitches for Team Israel.

Photo courtesy of Yarone Zober

Izzy said that representing Israel is a chance to show the world that softball is a fun, accessible game and, though the rules slightly differ depending on locale, “anyone can play if they want to.”

“It’s clear that this is hatred of Jews. This is antisemitism. This is not a mental health issue.”

–JEFFREY FINKELSTEIN

Faith in the jury system confirmed

into the United States with the goal of white genocide — a claim reflecting a widespread conspiracy theory known as the “great replace-

hateful tropes promulgated in white supremacist subculture.

As forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz — who

On June 16, a federal jury determined that the man who murdered 11 beloved community members was guilty on all 63 counts he faced. Last Thursday, that same jury declared he was eligible to be sentenced to death for his crimes. This week began the third and final phase of the trial, in which the same jury will determine the appropriate sentence.

Regardless of the ultimate sentencing verdict, we commend the jury for its decision in the eligibility phase and recognize it as an unequivocal statement against the normalization of antisemitism.

Throughout the eligibility phase, defense attorneys sought to prove that the defendant was mentally impaired, and that his hatred of Jews stemmed from delusions rather than the white supremacist culture he embraced. The shooter believed and was motivated by the idea that Jews were helping bring immigrants

ment.” The defense argued that belief was so outlandish that it proved the killer was too mentally compromised to have intended to commit his antisemitic rampage. Therefore, his lawyers averred, he was ineligible for capital punishment.

The jury, however, agreed with the prosecution that the shooter’s crimes could not be excused by a purported mental illness. Rather, his beliefs about Jews originated not with him, but were based on the longstanding,

interviewed the defendant for 15 hours — testified, his crimes were the consequence of decades of right-wing extremism.

“When you see this promoted for 20 years or 40 years, promoted in books and online forums, it is clear they are subcultural beliefs,” Dietz said — and not the delusions of an individual.

It took the jury less than two hours to reach its verdict.

By summarily rejecting the defense proposition that only someone who is mentally ill could

adhere to and act upon an antisemitic creed, the jurors acknowledged the reality of the culture of white supremacism, and its pervasive and deadly manifestations.

And they emphatically and unanimously held that a crime inspired by that culture warrants consideration of the ultimate punishment.

We are heartened that a jury comprised of a cross-section of the community delivered a resounding rejection of hate. In these days of rising antisemitism, where Jews are the target of more than 50% of religiously-motivated hate crimes — despite representing just 2.4% of the population — we are reassured that mainstream America will not abide, or excuse, this vile ideology.

As the trial continues, we remember Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger. May their memories forever be for a blessing. PJC

What Jewish law says about balancing free speech and public safety in the internet age

Guest Columnist

Jay Michaelson

Afederal district judge known for his far-right ideological opinions issued a shocking order July 4 that prohibits government officials from sharing information about threats with social media companies, with narrow exceptions for national security and criminal investigations.

The unprecedented injunction arises out of a lawsuit by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri and resonates with those who say that the government and social media companies have unfairly targeted conservatives for censorship. But it is not a final order; contains broad, sweeping statements devoid of substantiation or evidence; has been widely criticized as inconsistent with First Amendment legal precedents; and seems very likely to be overturned on appeal. In the long term, it is not likely to have much effect.

But beneath that order is a roiling cultural debate over how to balance free speech with public safety in the age of the internet — a debate which, perhaps surprisingly, Jewish values might inform.

On one side, it’s clear that the spread of online misinformation is literally threatening our democracy — and the rise of AI and its ability to deepfake texts of all kinds will make matters even worse. Along with its many benefits, the internet has enabled the spread of dangerous misinformation like no technology in human history: lies about the 2020 election, disproven conspiracy theories about vaccines, antisemitic canards, fake accounts posting incendiary content, you name it.

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion,

but not to his own facts,” Daniel Moynihan famously said during his 1982 Senate campaign. But these days, as you may have experienced in arguments with ideologically opposed family members, we often inhabit different “factual” worlds entirely. This profusion of false and

Jewish community knows all too well, lead to acts of violence.

But finding that middle ground has proven nearly impossible.

Congress, for its part, has utterly failed to regulate Big Tech (whose largest companies heavily support both

Most people would say no, but some say yes. What if you use the word “apartheid”? Now maybe a few more are on board. How about the word “Nazi”? Or the accusation that Israelis literally drink Palestinian blood? Now a lot more people say yes. So is hate speech a matter of nuance and extent? Really?

distorted information makes a shared basis for dialogue impossible.

On the other hand, free-speech libertarians have rightly sounded the alarm about government overreach. It’s troubling to consider government officials cultivating back channels to executives at Twitter or Facebook and flagging posts for removal because they diverge from a supposed consensus. That’s a situation ripe for abuse, as the so-called “Twitter Files” alleged, and at the very least it reflects a Big Brother-like growth in government power.

Surely there’s got to be a middle ground here, right?

If the government knows about a sextrafficking ring, for example, surely it should notify social media companies to take down the posts that are coordinating it. That saves lives. And if loud voices are spreading harmful and disproven lies, those lies should at least be labeled so that they don’t draw more people into noxious conspiracy theories that often, as the

parties) and embarrassed itself with hearings where out-of-touch legislators showed just how little they know about technology. Have you tried turning your computer off and then on again, Senator?

That’s led the executive branch to try to fill the gaps, but without a sound legislative, or democratic, basis.

It’s not just government, though. Everyone agrees that free speech is an important American value, but we have no idea how to apply it in practice. For example, you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater, goes the cliché — speech that causes imminent danger is criminal, not protected. But how far does that principle go? Does it extend to posting false information about vaccines? That, too, puts people in danger, but the causal connection is a lot more attenuated.

Or take hate speech. Painting a swastika on a synagogue wall is obviously a crime. But is it antisemitic hate speech to criticize Israeli policies in the occupied territories?

In Jewish tradition, the destructive potential of speech has long been recognized. The rules of lashon hara — literally “evil speech” — are so strict that it’s almost impossible to say anything about someone else, even if it’s true, and even if it’s meant as a compliment. Of the 43 sins in the Yom Kippur confessional, 11 are committed through speech. According to Jewish law, you can’t even ask a shopkeeper how much something costs if you don’t intend to buy it, and can’t invite someone to a party if you know they can’t make it.

Of course, we would never want a democracy to enforce such draconian laws. They are moral, not civic, in nature. But they do point to an overall understanding that speech is not mere expression, but can also have harmful consequences.

That’s much more true in 2023 than in 1791, when the First Amendment was ratified. Then, it was much harder to transmit ideas, and only a limited number of people had the ability to share and read them. There was no television, no Twitter (or Threads). There was too little speech, not too much, and there were monarchies around the world which suppressed any speech they didn’t like.

Now, the problem isn’t too little speech, but, in a sense, too much. We are inundated by “speech” every waking hour of the day. While

Please see Michaelson, page 13

And really, limiting social media posts isn’t about stopping speech — after all, you can still say whatever you want — as much as accessing a digital megaphone to amplify that speech so it reaches millions of people.

We are heartened that a jury comprised of a cross-section of the community delivered a resounding rejection of hate

Opinion

Chronicle poll results: Ice cream

Last week, the Chronicle asked its readers in an electronic poll the following question: “How do you prefer to eat ice cream?” Of the 252 people who responded, 58% said in a cup or bowl; 31% said on a cone; 6% said some other way; and 5% said they didn’t eat ice cream. Comments were submitted by 75 people. A few follow. Milkshake!

I never learned to like ice cream. As a child, I got cold-headaches.

The best way to eat ice cream is to put it in a cup with the cone sticking out, so you can eat the cone and the ice cream together, but you can eat it with a spoon and avoid spillage and melting.

I don’t eat gluten, so although I adore them, cones are out for me. But it’s the ice cream that is the star anyway.

Michaelson:

Continued from page 12

in 1791, no one could get their ideas instantly heard across the country, in 2023, everyone can. And really, limiting social media posts isn’t about stopping speech — after all,

How do you prefer to eat ice cream?

ice cream with oat or almond milk.

I love an ice cream soda. A few places make them now.

We enjoy it straight from the carton with a spoon, or from the container of our ice cream maker. When our supermarket stopped carrying Talenti chocolate sorbet, we started making it, spiking it with a tablespoon of rum — an adult Fudgesicle.

I will eat ice cream any way that it is served.

I enjoy ice cream in a bowl because cones melt quicker than I can lick. Don’t want to lose a single bite!

How do I like to eat ice cream? Daily. With hot fudge, nuts and sprinkles. With caramel syrup, whipped cream and a cherry.

Cones are fun, but I have no shame eating straight out of the container. Works for me.

Love a cone but generally get a cup as I want to save those extra calories. Ice cream is one of the great pleasures in life. PJC

Toby Tabachnick

Unfortunately, I am allergic to dairy and ice cream is one of my favorite foods! I am happy that more places are making

you can still say whatever you want — as much as accessing a digital megaphone to amplify that speech so it reaches millions of people.

I’m not taking a stand on these particular allegations against the government; there is still much we do not know. And of course, I cherish freedom of artistic,

Synagogue shooter’s lawyers defamed people with epilepsy

As long as it’s mostly chocolate, I don’t care how it’s served — it will be delicious.

Ice cream belongs in a cone.

political, and even commercial expression, and I abhor authoritarianism and censorship. But as Jewish law recognizes (and Jewish history reminds us), the value of free expression exists in dynamic tension with protecting vulnerable people from harm. And justice lies somewhere within it. PJC

— LETTERS —

Thank you for your article on epilepsy (“Epilepsy association says synagogue shooter’s lawyers have misrepresented epilepsy,” July 7). As a member of Dor Hadash, a retired physician and, most importantly, the mother of someone with epilepsy, I was infuriated by the defense proposal that Robert Bowers killed 11 of our community members because he had epilepsy and possibly schizophrenia. The callow defense defamed and hurt people with epilepsy and those with schizophrenia. The Epilepsy Association of Western and Central PA has worked long and hard to dispel myths about epilepsy. Bowers has caused pain to the families who lost loved ones and our entire community. The defense resorted to old, harmful tropes to excuse this. Thankfully, there are journalists like you and the EAWPA.

Ellen Berne Pittsburgh

Praise for report about Murray Avenue Kosher

I just want to thank you for your gentle handling of the Murray Avenue Kosher situation (“Consumer alert posted at Murray Avenue Kosher,” July 14). I knew the story would have to be told, and am, of course, very troubled by what the investigators found, but am also so very sad and a little frightened that we may not have a kosher store to turn to. Everybody is talking about it. Everybody is disturbed by it, but what happens next is the question. This incident could do significant damage to their business. In this small a community, things could get much worse, and the Chronicle wields great power in the outcome of kosher food availability in Pittsburgh.

I was relieved that you did not take the opportunity to sensationalize the facts, which would have been very easy to do! What was alleged was bad enough. That being said, my husband was there last week and there was a huge professional crew scrubbing and cleaning. You could smell it in the air. That clean smell and appearance was present when I was there the following day. But the store was a ghost town.

So thank you for telling the story in an honest, fair and restrained way — and putting a hopeful spin on it. You really are community-minded and it’s appreciated!

Hoping that Murray Avenue Kosher will meet the expectations and the need that we all have for it.

Nina Butler Squirrel Hill

Chronicle weekly poll question: Do you fast on Tisha b’Av? Go to pittsburghjewishchronicle.org to respond. PJC

Rabbi Jay Michaelson is a columnist for Rolling Stone and the author of 10 books. He recently won the 2023 New York Society for Professional Journalists Award for opinion writing. This story originally appeared in the Forward. To get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox, go to forward.com/newsletter-signup.

Not willing to settle for ‘subpar conditions’

For way too long, our Pittsburgh Jewish community has accepted substandard conditions at Murray Avenue Kosher. Now we know, thanks to the Allegheny County Health Department, the severity of some of the issues (“Consumer alert posted at Murray Avenue Kosher,” July 14).

To the owners of Murray Avenue Kosher, I say that your response five days after the report was made public is a complete and utter disappointment. As a business owner, you (not the landlord) have full responsibility to maintain the standards required of a food retailer so as not to put the health of the community at risk, especially given your monopolistic market position. Furthermore, you should have immediately apologized to the community and then followed up with actions being taken to address the findings. You also need to acknowledge that some of the findings are severe and take full ownership for putting the health of our community at risk. What will change going forward?

To our Jewish community leadership, including clergy, the Vaad, the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh and leaders with both experience and resources, I ask for your support and guidance. A vibrant Jewish community needs a clean, safe store in which to shop with fresh products (not expired dates), a wide assortment and staff that is there to serve its customers. With the growth of Hillel Academy and Yeshiva Schools, and the expansion into Greenfield that the Pittsburgh Jewish community is experiencing, we can no longer settle for subpar conditions. What will be done to help our community?

Amy Dubin Pittsburgh

Fond memories of Squirrel Hill

Thanks for the article “The Marquis Club includes a lifetime membership” (July 7) and other previous articles which interest this former Squirrel Hill resident (living in South Florida since 1987 due to employment issues). As for my teen years, I spent two wonderful years in B’nai B’rith Youth — AZA for boys. I learned many valuable life lessons there that served me well for the 50-plus years that followed. Their office was on the second floor near Squirrel Hill News near Forbes and Murray. Our adult adviser, the late Meyer Tatelman, was a wise, patient mentor to this group of teen boys.

Joel Mandel Boynton Beach, Florida

Life & Culture

Summertime is gazpacho time

By Jessica Grann | Special to the Chronicle

Green gazpacho is refreshing on a hot summer day. Cold soups are generally underrated, and this is a tasty way to add one into your cooking rotation. It is incredibly nutrient-rich since it’s made almost entirely from leafy green spinach and herbs.

You can omit the yogurt and make this soup vegan, but it is delicious when made with plain Greek yogurt. While gazpacho is traditionally made with sherry vinegar (not sherry cooking wine) I’ve never been able to find kosher sherry vinegar, so I substitute rice wine vinegar, which has a similar acidity and flavor profile.

This recipe calls for half of a seeded jalapeno pepper, but the cucumber and herbs are so cooling to your palate that it won’t be too spicy when mixed.

This is a soup that I often make when I’m clearing out my fridge — I always have a bag of spinach that I meant to use but did not, a few scallions, some extra parsley and herbs from my kitchen garden. It takes fewer than 10 minutes to make and serves 4-6 people, more if using small bowls.

1-2 avocados, peeled and pitted

1 large English cucumber

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1 clove garlic, peeled

1 cup fresh basil leaves

½ cup fresh mint leaves

½ cup fresh parsley, leaves and stems

4-5 tablespoons rice wine vinegar

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 cup of plain Greek yogurt (optional)

¼ cup water

I suggest using a blender to make this soup. There are a lot of leafy greens to break down, so you will most likely need to blend a portion of them at a time and then add more.

it vegan, add two avocados. With the avocado, add 4 tablespoons of rice vinegar and 1 teaspoon of salt. Blend for 30 seconds.

If you’re using the yogurt, add it now and blend for one minute.

You can’t overmix this — you want it creamy and smooth.

Taste it to see if you need to add salt or another tablespoon of vinegar.

Turn the blender on and use the spout in the lid to drizzle in 1 tablespoon of olive oil. This adds a bit of richness and also helps to emulsify the soup so that it doesn’t separate after mixing. The olive oil also keeps the color bright. The soup

Put the jalapeno, garlic and scallions in the blender first and pulse a few times until they appear minced.

Add about 2 cups of spinach at a time, taking the lid off of the blender and adding more until it’s broken down.

Add the cucumber and blend on high for about 45 seconds. Add in about ¼ cup of water to the blender bowl, which is just enough liquid to help the ingredients come together.

Add the herbs and pulse again.

If making this with yogurt, add one

has a beautiful color with or without the yogurt.

Refrigerate the soup for at least one hour before serving. I recommend refrigerating it in the blender with a lid so that you can easily pour it into small bowls when serving. It will hold in the fridge for 4-5 days, but it needs to be sealed well for storage in a glass jar with an airtight lid.

Enjoy and bless your hands! PJC

Jessica Grann is a home chef living in Pittsburgh.

www.pittsburghjewishchronicle.org

p Green gazpacho

Photo by Jessica Grann

Cold soups are generally underrated, and this is a tasty way to add one into your cooking rotation.

The JCC has a great atmosphere, and all the people I’ve met here are very friendly, encouraging and helpful. It’s a great community feeling.

When I started with water aerobics I had back issues, so I could find a level of water aerobics that was healing for my back and still feel like I belonged, like I was accepted, and didn’t have to be embarrassed at the level I was working out at.

Longtime friends Pat Loughran and Eileen Crossey at the JCC South Hills

Life & Culture

‘Funny Girl’ national tour casts non-Jewish actor as Fanny Brice, reigniting ‘Jewface’ criticism

— THEATER —

By Jackie Hajdenberg | JTA

The announcement last week that Katerina McCrimmon would star as Fanny Brice in the national tour of “Funny Girl,” the Broadway musical about a trailblazing Jewish comedian, has ignited criticism from some Jewish actors who say the role should be played only by someone who identifies as Jewish.

The casting is a breakout role for McCrimmon, who previously appeared briefly on Broadway in Tennessee Williams’ “The Rose Tattoo” but has mostly done smaller productions.

But it has disappointed some Jewish performers and their allies in the theater community who knew that the production had advertised itself as “specifically seeking actors of Jewish heritage.”

Jennifer Apple, one of the first actors to discuss the decision on social media, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that because Jewishness was central to Brice, a pioneering early 20th-century vaudevillian, it should be for anyone playing her as well.

“Fanny Brice was a real human being,” said Apple, who also auditioned for the role of Brice and appeared in the national tour of “The Band’s Visit,” about an Egyptian police band’s accidental stay in an Israeli town. “She was a Jewish icon. She was a heroine. She in and of herself paved the way for performers like myself to be able to have a career. If it wasn’t for her, and her chutzpah, many of us Jewish women specifically wouldn’t be able to be performers. So it’s integral to this role, specifically.”

Someone can have Jewish heritage without embracing a Jewish identity — just ask the actor Lea Michele, who replaced Jewish actor Beanie Feldstein as Brice in the recent Broadway revival of “Funny Girl.” Michele’s father is a Sephardic Jew, but she was raised as a Catholic and said she does not identify as Jewish. (For six seasons on the hit television show “Glee,” Michele played a Jewish character, Rachel Berry, who was set on one day portraying Fanny Brice.)

But none of the coverage of McCrimmon’s casting in arts outlets has suggested any personal connection to the Brice character’s Jewish identity, and in the show’s materials, she identifies as “a proud Cuban-American from Miami.” She did not respond to a request for comment.

“I have no doubt that Katerina is freaking terrific and … that she is more than capable of leading a nat’l tour,” Samantha Massell, an actor who appeared in the revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” on Broadway, posted on Instagram after the casting announcement. “But if you consider yourself an advocate for representation in casting and you’re AOK with this (or celebrating it), you need to check yourself.”

The casting adds to an ongoing debate over identity and performance. Some argue that actors should be able to play any role, regardless of their background. But the idea that at least some roles should be reserved for actors whose identities overlap with their characters’

has gained steam in recent years — opening the door for criticism when people who are not Jewish are cast as Jewish characters. (Helen Mirren, who is not Jewish but is playing the Israeli stateswoman Golda Meir in the upcoming film “Golda,” is among those who say they “adhere to both camps.”)

Some have criticized the casting of non-Jewish actors in Jewish roles as “Jewface.”

The Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman, for example, lambasted the casting of Kathryn Hahn as Joan Rivers in a biopic that was ultimately scrapped; another frequent subject of criticism has been Rachel Brosnahan as the fictional Jewish comedian Midge Maisel on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”

The real-life Brice got her start in the 1910s headlining Florenz Ziegfeld’s revue, the “Ziegfeld Follies.” The 1964 musical and subsequent film “Funny Girl,” both starring Barbra Streisand, chronicle Brice’s rise to fame while she grapples with her own identity as a Jewish woman — including the shape of her nose, the cadence of her voice and the pacing of her humor.

“If there is something in the piece that when portrayed by somebody of a different identity could potentially be viewed as perpetuating a stereotype or veer into the land of cultural appropriation, you’ve made the wrong casting decision,” said Ari Axelrod, an actor and producer who organized a Broadway gathering in response to a neo-Nazi protest outside the first preview of “Parade,” the show about a 1915 antisemitic lynching, in which the main character is played by the Jewish actor Ben Platt.

Critics of the casting choice say specific lyrics and visual gags just don’t work as well when they are performed by people who do not have specific Jewish lived experiences because they are or can be offensive.

The song, “If a Girl isn’t Pretty,” for example, contains the lyric, “Is a nose with deviation such a crime against the nation?” referring to Brice’s own body image issues, which she partially resolved with one of the earliest rhinoplasties in the United States.

And in the song “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat,” Brice’s character plays the Jewish caricature “Private Schwartz from Rockaway,” who wears a harness outfitted with two suggestively placed bagels and sings in an exaggerated Eastern European accent about how his “bagels gave a spin, oy, oy.”

“The content of this show is specifically about how she was not considered a pretty Jewish woman, that she had to change her name and change her looks to ‘fit in,’ that she had to assimilate because of her Jewish identity,” Apple said. “To have somebody not be Jewish and do that could perpetuate stereotypes.”

Axelrod and Apple both pointed to the casting of actor Bradley Cooper as American Jewish composer Leonard Bernstein in the upcoming Netflix film “Maestro” as another example of a “Jewface” gaffe. (Early stills of Cooper wearing a prosthetic nose for the role reignited the debate; Silverman is set to appear in the film.)

The casting decision for the tour follows a 15-month Broadway run for “Funny Girl.”

Beginning in April 2022, Feldstein starred as Fanny Brice in the revival, bringing a childhood dream of hers to life. (Feldstein’s 3rd birthday party was “Funny Girl”-themed.)

“I truly believe that any Jewish woman who wants to be funny and perform and sing owes something to Fanny Brice,” she told the New York Jewish Week last year.

But after three months, the production announced that Michele would replace Feldstein — after a one-month performance by Jewish actor Julie Benko.

Under the laws of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, it is illegal for a workplace to discriminate against an applicant or employee’s race, religion, sex or gender identity, national origin, age or disability. But the law allows employers to select for aspects of personal appearance if they are essential for fulfilling the requirements of the job — a leniency that opens the door to casting Black actors as Black characters, for example.

There are legal ways to stack the deck in

favor of filling roles with actors of certain backgrounds, such as by encouraging people who hold specific identities to audition, or by encouraging others to choose not to.

Massell revealed in an Instagram story last week that when the casting directors of the musical “Double Helix,” which tells the story of the discovery of the structure of DNA, were auditioning for the other two Jewish roles (Massell plays the lead role of Rosalind Franklin), they asked people who do not identify as Jewish to “please pass” on auditioning.

“This feels like such a great actionable step for all of these types of roles that are specifically tied to an ethnic identity,” she said.

Those who are challenging the Brice casting on the national tour say there is room for actors to play characters unlike themselves. Apple — who said she has twice been one of just two Jews cast in professional productions of “Fiddler” — says it’s a “slippery slope” to argue that actors must only play their own identity.

“I don’t like that. I don’t subscribe to that. That’s not why I’m an actor,” she said. “It really just comes down to the integrity of the role and the story. And this one is literally about her Jewish identity. She was a Jewish icon.”

Who made the decision to depart from the character breakdown suggestion is not clear.

Sonia Friedman Productions and NETworks Presentations, which are producing the tour that is set to launch in Providence, Rhode Island, this fall, did not respond to requests for comment.

“I do know that for this to have happened, a lot of people had to say yes,” said Axelrod.

He said that even though he disagrees with the casting decision, he believes it could have positive dividends for storytelling about Jews.

“Katerina has an incredible opportunity to use this moment to educate herself and empathize with Fanny’s story, but also the story of Jews today,” he said. “If we can’t change the casting decision — and I don’t necessarily think we should, it’s not up to me — we can leverage the moment as an opportunity for empathy and education.” PJC

p Beanie Feldstein, center, as Fanny Brice in the Broadway revival of “Funny Girl”

Photo by Matthew Murphy

Life & Culture

Landmark exhibits shed light on life in German displaced person camps after the Holocaust

— HISTORY —

By Toby Axelrod | JTA

BERLIN — Rachel Salamander was born in an in-between time and place: The time was just after the end of the Holocaust, when no one knew what the future would bring for the remnants of European Jewry.

The in-between place was a displaced persons camp at Deggendorf, Germany. Her parents, Samuel and Riva — survivors from Poland — were among the flood of refugees arriving from the east.

The refugees and other local DPs, as they were nicknamed, were “survivors of concentration camps or gulags, or just people who had everything taken away from them, totally at the end of their rope physically and mentally,” Salamander said.

Her family moved from Deggendorf to another DP camp, in Föhrenwald, and eventually settled in the Munich area. “They gave all their love and attention to us children, because we were their future, their hope.”

Life in the DP camps is the subject of a collaborative exhibition between Munich’s Jewish Museum and its City Museum, situated across the square from each other in the city’s center. Called “Munich Displaced: The Surviving Remnant,” and “Munich Displaced: After 1945 and without a Homeland,” the twin exhibits, which run through January, tell the stories of tens of thousands of displaced persons — Jewish and non-Jewish — in post-war German limbo.

The exhibition project is, say its organizers, the first to focus on the lives and fates of all those people who fled, were displaced or deported during World War II and then found themselves in or near Munich after 1945.

After Germany capitulated in May 1945, there were more than 8 million so-called displaced persons in Germany, Austria and Italy. For some 250,000 Jews, including about 75,000 in Germany, the DP camps — administered by the Allied authorities and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) — were places where they could regain their strength and perhaps find lost family, or create a new one.

The DP camp “was the beginning of the beginning,” said Ruth Melcer, 88, who was liberated from Auschwitz and later reunited with her parents in their home country, Poland. After the Kielce pogroms, the family fled to Berlin, and eventually were housed in the Föhrenwald DP camp in Munich.

But while they offered DPs a new start, the camps — many of them set up in former Nazi camps — were bleak. In some cases, Jewish DPs found themselves in the same camp with their erstwhile persecutors.

President Harry Truman tasked Earl Harrison, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the American envoy to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, with producing a report on the conditions — which he found shockingly unsanitary.

“As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them,”

Harrison wrote in 1945. “They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops.”

In response to the report, General Dwight Eisenhower, in command of U.S. forces in Europe, helped separate Jewish DPs from non-Jews and improve their overall conditions, sometimes in local housing.

“Jewish people have really a will to survive,” said Melcer’s friend Lydia Barenholz, 85, whose family spent a few months in the same Föhrenwald DP camp. They survived the end of the war in hiding near their home city of Lviv, which was then Poland, now Ukraine.

“We are hanging together with the strength of knowing that everyone could be my family,” said Barenholz, who lives with her husband Jacques in Holland.

Despite the hardships of DP camp life, many were just happy to be free of the Nazis.

“My parents’ life began again” at the Landsberg DP camp about 40 miles west of Munich, said Abraham Peck, who was born there in May 1946. After moving to the United States, they “talked about the life in Landsberg, not about the death that they observed in Lodz and in concentration camps.”

Of her childhood in the DP camp, Salamander recalled having “a clear, religious orientation. We spoke Yiddish and we kept all the Jewish holidays. I never had an identity problem, because there were clear coordinates.”

In Munich, there were approximately 100,000 DPs immediately after the end of the war. Of these, about 5,000 were Jewish.

After the camps were dissolved, most DPs emigrated by 1950 to the United States and Israel, and only about 20,000 remained in Germany overall. That group, together with a tiny number of German Jews who had survived in hiding, made up Germany’s post-war Jewish community.

“The Jewish DPs were not only survivors or victims,” said Jewish Museum curator Jutta Fleckenstein. “They very quickly developed a Jewish self-awareness. And in this short ‘in-between time,’ after 1945, they could also be seen in the German landscape.”

“It all happened in this brief time,” added Fleckenstein, a historian who has focused on issues of identity and migration. “And then they were forgotten.”

Aiming to wrest this chapter from oblivion, the two museums are offering a program of events and have highlighted some 40 locations throughout the city where refugees once studied or gathered for social or religious events, where Jewish newspapers were printed and where Jewish aid organizations offered assistance. Objects on display came from the museums’ collections or were loaned by former DPs themselves.

“I kept all my high school certificates, pictures and books, so they installed a special corner for me” in the exhibition, said Barenholz, who had attended a Hebrew high school in Munich with her friend Melcer. Barenholz’s homework book is opened to a page that shows “I wrote a very nice Hebrew,” she said. “There were also some with corrections, but they didn’t open the book to that page.”

“My hope is that visitors will learn what happened so that it will never happen again,” said Melcer, who contributed photos from her school days. “But the times are very bad for these hopes.”

Melcer, who married her husband, Jossie, in 1959, has stayed in touch with numerous former classmates around the world. She frequently speaks with pupils in German schools about her family’s story. In 2015, Melcer co-authored a cookbook-memoir, “Ruths Kochbuch,” with Ellen Presser.

Salamander, who founded a chain of Jewish bookstores in Germany, has loaned artifacts to an exhibit at the Reichenbachstrasse Synagogue, which was built in 1931 and reopened in 1947. For many decades, it was the main synagogue for Munich’s post-war Jewish community. Ten years ago, Salamander and Ron Jakubowicz started a foundation to press for the building’s reconstruction, which is underway.

“This idea of the spirit of Judaism, of welcoming the stranger, all the liberal things that define a good part of American Jewish life, were defined in the DP camps,” said Peck, professor of history at the University of Southern Maine and former administrative director of the American Jewish Archives at HUC in Cincinnati.

It seems to be a story whose time has come: Germany’s public broadcasting company Deutsche Welle has also produced a film about the DPs in post-war Landsberg.

Peck recently organized a weeklong program

marking 75 years since Leonard Bernstein conducted an orchestra of Holocaust survivors in Landsberg. Peck also co-organized with the Landsberg City Museum the first in a dialogue series, this one focusing on the history of the DP camp. It featured a discussion between Peck and Katrin Himmler, grandniece of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS.

The idea behind the dialogue “was to talk with people who had ancestors who were in the concentration camps in Landsberg or in the DP camp, and to ask questions that are important nowadays about racism and antisemitism,” said museum director Sonia Schaetz. The museum will include the DP camp history in its new permanent exhibit, due to open in late 2025.

Also in Landsberg, local grassroots historians Manfred and Helga Deiler are planning an exhibition and visitor center at the site where traces of a World War II slave labor camp can still be seen. Some of its survivors became residents of the local Jewish DP camp, they said.

Growing up in Landsberg, the Deilers never heard about the DP camp. Today, they occasionally bring visitors to the site, part of which today houses refugees from Afghanistan and Syria.

It was typical for post-war Germans to forget about the DP camps, says Fleckenstein of the Jewish Museum in Munich. As German-born American philosopher Hannah Arendt noted in her 1950 report from Germany, Germans in general were feeling sorry for themselves and reacted, if at all, with apathy “to the fate of the refugees in their midst.”

For survivors, too, this chapter fell into a kind of “twilight zone,” said Fleckenstein. “In many biographies this time doesn’t even come up at all. This time of waiting, this transitional time, often was not discussed.”

“The people with whom we lived in the DP camp were special,” recalls Salamander. “They all had a piece of destruction in them, they all had come directly from mass murder, they were all completely traumatized people who cried a lot, a lot.”

“And the whole time, they said the names of people whom they had lost. They were people really who had nothing, who had never been in Germany and did not want to be here. But the war had swept them here. They were uprooted, they had no political power. And they were always waiting for things to get better.” PJC

p Lydia Barenholz and Ruth Melcer, who attended Munich’s post-war Hebrew high school together, are shown with some of the objects they contributed to the new exhibit, “Munich Displaced. The Surviving Remnant.” Photo by Daniel Schvarcz

Making Moments Matter

‘For want of a carriage shaft’: A Talmudic tale for Tisha b’Av

Rabbi Daniel Yolkut Parshat Devarim Deuteronomy 1:1 – 3:22

While as a rule of thumb Shabbat is an oasis of rest and joy, this week is shadowed by the nearing presence of the fast of Tisha b’Av. Tisha b’Av is the darkest day of the Jewish year, commemorating the greatest tragedies of Jewish history, particularly the destruction of both the first and second Temples of Jerusalem. There is a fascinating debate in Jewish law as to how Shabbat and its characteristic joy, which generally repels any expression of mourning, interacts with the gloom of the season, but it is in any case certainly an appropriate time to focus on the lessons that we can rescue from the jaws of defeat.

The Talmud is fascinated by suggesting the forms of spiritual malaise that lay behind these historical tragedies in the hopes of being able to confront and rectify them as they continue to challenge us centuries later. In discussing the fall of the city of Beitar during the final rebellion against Rome (c. 132 CE), the Talmud (BT Gittin 57b) offers the following enigmatic assertion:

1. Ignoring of others

The Romans, even after decades of occupation, failed to understand the Jews, or even have simple interest in their way of life. Given that reality, offense that could easily be avoided by a passing familiarity with the folkways of the local Jews was almost inevitable.

2. Projecting our narrative

The Polish Talmudic commentator Maharsha (R’ Shmuel Eidels 1555–1631) offers an intriguing insight into the violent reaction of the Jews. He suggests that given their own cultural assumption that the cedars represented Jewish baby boys, they saw this as a genocidal gesture on the part of the Romans. This assessment of the motivation of the Jews is tragically plausible, but reflects a series of assumptions about these Romans, who were acting in the moment from a place of ignorance rather than insult. In all rational probability, these Romans had no idea what the cedars meant to the residents of Beitar. And yet, the projection of an understandable narrative on the part of the Jews had about Roman wickedness, which certainly was born from centuries of abuse and conflict, created a misimpression that set off a chain of events that made this a tragically self-fulfilling prophecy.

Mazel Tov!

Mazel Tov!

“Beitar was destroyed on account of a shaft from a carriage.”

The Talmud clarifies that a carriage bearing a Roman noblewoman broke down somewhere in the Judaean hills. Looking to repair the shaft, a member of her entourage chopped down a convenient cedar tree at the side of the road. Unfortunately, the Romans had no cultural context for the backstory of these cedars.

3. Failure to communicate

Finally, all of this could have been avoidable had there been an ability to speak from a place of empathy and curiosity. Instead of contempt on the one hand and unnecessary assumption on the other, had the groundwork for reasonable communication already existed a regrettable incident did not have to deteriorate to historical tragedy.

SPECIAL OCCASIONS DESERVE SPECIAL ATTENTION

The Jews of the region of Beitar had a charming local custom. When a family was celebrating the birth of a child, the parents would mark the occasion by planting a tree, a cedar tree for a boy and a cypress for a girl. Years later, when the child would find their spouse, the chuppah for the wedding would be constructed by intertwining wood from the trees planted at the birth of the bride and the groom, and it was from one of these cedars that the hapless Roman attempted to repair his mistress’s carriage.

SPECIAL OCCASIONS DESERVE SPECIAL ATTENTION

What is a special occasion…a birth, a b’nai mitzvah, an engagement, a wedding, an anniversary? Absolutely!

What is a special occasion…a birth, a b’nai mitzvah, an engagement, a wedding, an anniversary? Absolutely!

Mazel Tov!

What is a special occasion…a birth, a b’nai mitzvah, an engagement, a wedding, an anniversary? Absolutely!

But so is a birthday, a graduation, an athletic victory, an academic achievement…anything that deserves special recognition. And there is no better place to share your joy than in...

But so is a birthday, a graduation, an athletic victory, an academic achievement…anything that deserves special recognition. And there is no better place to share your joy than in...

SPECIAL OCCASIONS DESERVE SPECIAL ATTENTION

But so is a birthday, a graduation, an athletic victory, an academic achievement…anything that deserves special recognition. And there is no better place to share your joy than in...

What is a special occasion…a birth, a b’nai mitzvah, an engagement, a wedding, an anniversary? Absolutely!

But so is a birthday, a graduation, an athletic victory, an academic achievement…anything that deserves special recognition. And there is no better place to share your joy than in...

SEND YOUR CELEBRATIONS,

SEND YOUR CELEBRATIONS, MAZEL TOVS, AND PHOTOS TO: announcements@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org

SEND YOUR CELEBRATIONS, MAZEL TOVS, AND PHOTOS TO: announcements@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org

SEND YOUR CELEBRATIONS, MAZEL TOVS, AND PHOTOS TO: announcements@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org

Enraged, the residents of Beitar attacked the Roman party, and the survivors escaped and interpreted this as an act of a rebellion against Rome, leading to a war that ended with the destruction of Beitar, a traumatic massive loss of human life and any hope of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel until the 20th century.

Clearly, any geopolitical event has multiple complex roots, but our sages use this particular incident as a reflection of how the perennial pitfall of self-absorption has disastrous consequences.

For many years Jews have marked this period not only by customs of mourning, but by introspection about how we can better ourselves and pave the way to redemption, particularly in the realm of interpersonal relationships. It often feels like we live in an incredibly fractious time, whether in America, Israel or in the Jewish world, where yawning ideological and political chasms drive wedges in communities and families. By challenging ourselves with the lessons of the cedars of Beitar, we can learn to better understand the perspectives and sensitivities of others, check our instinct to superimpose our narrative to ascribe the darkest motives of others, and most importantly, work on strengthening those bonds of communication to help us work through the most explosive moments of tension. PJC

Rabbi Daniel Yolkut is the rabbi of Congregation Poale Zedeck. This column is a service of the Vaad Harabanim of Greater Pittsburgh.

By challenging ourselves with the lessons of the cedars of Beitar, we can learn to better understand the perspectives and sensitivities of others.

Obituaries

SCHIFFMAN: Frances Anita Schiffman, on Friday, July 14, 2023. Age 70. Frances was the daughter of the late Samuel Schiffman and Ruth Rosenberg Schiffman. She is survived by her brothers Carl (Roni) and Frank (Adina) and many nieces and nephews. Frances had severe intellectual and physical disabilities. For the majority ofher life, Frances resided at the Polk Center. Most recently, she resided at the Ebensburg Center. Her family appreciates the excellent care Frances received throughout the years at Polk and Ebensburg Centers. Services and interment were private. Donations in memory of Frances Schiffman may be made to Beth El Congregation, 1900 Cochran Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15220. Arrangements entrusted to Ralph Schugar Chapel, Inc., family owned and operated. schugar.com

SHRUT: Shirley A. Shrut, April 19, 1928 – July 15, 2023. Shirley grew up in Donora Pennsylvania, a small town outside of Pittsburgh. The “A” — her middle initial — is for Anstandig, her maiden name. The Anstandigs owned a grocery store in Donora. Shirley plus her two older brothers and parents were part of the family business, one of the places Shirley gained her strong business acumen and warm personality. Shirley attended college at the University of Pittsburgh, and majored in English. She also pursued additional studies at the University of Wisconsin. While at Pitt, she met Martin Shrut, and it was a “fait accompli” that they would get married. They lived in Mt. Lebanon, a suburb of Pittsburgh, raising their three daughters. Plus, they had a short stint in Idaho Falls, Idaho, as Martin’s company Westinghouse transferred him there for two years. As cold as Pittsburgh was, Idaho Falls made Pittsburgh weather seem tropical. In addition to Shirley being a terrific wife and mother, she forged a career of her own. She worked for a major retail company in Pittsburgh training sales teams, and later became a successful residential real estate agent for Century 21. As the winters seemed to get colder, and more and more family lived out of state, Shirley decided to split her time between south Florida and Pittsburgh. Her winters were at Wynmoor in Coconut Creek and summers in Pittsburgh. Eventually, south Florida became her year-round residence. Shirley always enjoyed traveling, and sojourned virtually around the world. She was a voracious reader and lifelong learner. Attending live theater, opera and other classical music performances were among her favorite activities. In recent years she became an avid fan of NBA basketball. Wherever she lived, Shirley was an active leader in the Jewish community and the synagogue. Shirley built many wonderful friendships, and in her free time, played top-notch bridge. Shirley was preceded in death by her husband, Martin Miles Shrut; her parents, Abraham and Sarah Anstandig; and her brothers, Louis Anstandig and Myer Anstandig. Her inimitable “joie de vivre” will always be remembered and cherished by her three daughters: Dr. Arlene Ruth Shrut (Gary Kendall), Nancy Shrut Matczak (Rabbi Barry Altman), and Barbara Lynn Shrut (Steven Gretenstein), and her grandchildren, Mark and Julie Gretenstein. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made in Shirley’s memory to a charity of their choice. Graveside service and interment were held at Beth Shalom Cemetery. Arrangements entrusted to Ralph Schugar Chapel, Inc., family owned and operated. schugar.com

WECHSLER: Jacquelin Wechsler, on Tuesday, July 11, 2023. Beloved wife of the late Norman Weissman and the late Irving “Buddy” Wechsler. Loving mother of Roberta Samuels, Michael (Nancy) Weissman and Amy (Dean) Drezner; stepmother of John Wechsler and Robert Wechsler. Daughter of the late Maurice and Rose Greene. Cherished grandmother of Nicholas Samuels, Benjamin Samuels, Andrew Weissman, Timothy Weissman, Kathryn Kaplan, Julie Drezner and Renee Drezner. GG to Oliver and Joaquin. Services were held at Rodef Shalom Congregation. Interment West View Cemetery of Rodef Shalom Congregation. Contributions may be made to Rodef Shalom Congregation, 4905 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213; Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh “Bud Wechsler and Doc Greene Geriatric Wellness Fund,” 5738 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15217; or Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, in memory of Jacquelin Wechsler, carnegielibrary.org/give. Arrangements entrusted to Ralph Schugar Chapel, Inc., family owned and operated. schugar.com PJC

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Rep. Pramila Jayapal walks back criticism of Israel as a ‘racist state’

By Philissa Cramer, Ben Sales | JTA

Apowerful House Democrat walked back her description of Israel as a “racist state” after she faced backlash from her colleagues and party leadership.

R ep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, chair of the 100-member Congressional Progressive Caucus, made the comments on Saturday at Netroots Nation, a progressive conference in Chicago, when faced with pro-Palestinian protesters at a session.

“As somebody that’s been in the streets and has participated in a lot of demonstra tions, I think I want you to know that we have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state, that the Palestinian people deserve self-determination and autonomy, that the dream of a two-state solution is slip ping away from us, that it does not even feel possible,” she said.

That statement prompted a response from the leaders of House Democrats, who issued a joint statement the next day that didn’t mention Jayapal by name but disavowed her remarks. A separate letter authored by Jewish Democratic members of Congress, which is still gathering signatures, also decried the comments and reiterated the signatories’ support for Israel and a two-state solution to the IsraeliPalestinian conflict.

extreme right-wing government has engaged in discriminatory and outright racist policies and that there are extreme racists driving that policy within the leadership of the current government.”

The dust-up came days before Israeli President Isaac Herzog was set to address a joint session of Congress, a speech that caused fissures among House Democrats.

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“Israel is not a racist state,” began the letter by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and three other senior Democratic members of Congress. It cited pledges of democracy and equal rights in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, and affirmed the signatories’ support for Israel’s right to exist, though it added, “Certainly, there are individual members of the current Israeli governing coalition with whom we strongly disagree.”

At least four progressive members of Congress who have been outspoken critics of Israel in the past said they would boycott the speech in protest. Jayapal did not said whether she would boycott the speech, but she is a longtime critic of Israel and has played a role in recent legislative battles related to the country. In 2021, she took part in a successful push to separate voting on new funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system from the general U.S. defense budget. The move was symbolically significant but did not result in blocking or reducing the funding.

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Soon, Jayapal issued a four-paragraph clarification on Twitter, also saying that she meant to criticize Israel’s current government, which includes far-right parties, and not its existence as a state.

In their letter, seven Jewish House Democrats wrote that Jayapal’s remarks were “unacceptable” and added, “we appreciate her retraction.”

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“Words do matter and so it is important that I clarify my statement,” she wrote. “I do not believe the idea of Israel as a nation is racist. I do, however, believe that Netanyahu’s

“We will never allow anti-Zionist voices that embolden antisemitism to hijack the Democratic Party and country,” the letter said. PJC

p Pramila Jayapal speaks in Seattle in 2015.

Photo by Joe Mabel,creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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These 6 Jewish baseball players were just drafted into MLB

By Jacob Gurvis | JTA

Though there were no Jewish players at this week’s MLB All-Star Game, the future is bright.

The best bellwether of what’s to come is the MLB Draft, which included 20 rounds split between three nights. A total of 614 players were drafted this year and, according to Jewish Baseball News, six of them are Jewish.

Scott Barancik, the site’s editor, said six picks in 20 rounds is a fairly high number — especially considering the fact that the draft used to be twice the size.

Here’s the 2023 Jewish MLB draft class:

Jake Gelof, 60th overall

Taken in the second round by the Los Angeles Dodgers, Jake Gelof is a

power-hitting third baseman who just concluded a record-setting career at the University of Virginia. The 21-year-old Delaware native holds the all-time home run record at his alma mater, where he slugged 48 home runs across three seasons. Gelof’s older brother Zack, also a UVA alum, was just called up to the big leagues by the Oakland Athletics, who drafted him 60th overall in 2021. Zack represented Team Israel in the 2023 World Baseball Classic, and the two brothers are likely to play for Israel in the 2026 WBC.

Zach Levenson, 158th overall Outfielder Zach Levenson was taken in the fifth round out of the University of Miami, joining the St. Louis Cardinals organization. In 114 college games across two seasons with the Hurricanes, the Florida native hit .295 with 21 home runs and 73 runs batted in. Levenson was ranked 204th in MLB’s prospect rankings.

Lucas Braun, 189th overall

The first of two Jewish pitchers drafted this year, Lucas Braun was taken in the sixth round by the Atlanta Braves. Braun finished his college career with two seasons at California State University, Northridge, where the 21-year-old right-hander posted a 3.97 earned run average with 177 strikeouts in 165.2 innings. The Los Angeles native was named to the All-Big West Second Team in 2022 and 2023.

RJ Schreck, 277th overall

A fellow LA native, RJ Schreck played for Vanderbilt University as a graduate student after four years at Duke University. The 23-year-old outfielder, who was drafted by the Seattle Mariners in the ninth round, slugged 40 home runs and 153 RBIs across his five-year collegiate career. Schreck graduated from the same LA high school as Jewish Braves ace Max Fried.

Ben Simon, 396th overall

The New Jersey native pitched at Elon University for three years, where he struck out 103 batters across 88.1 innings, mostly as a reliever. Simon, 21, was named to the 2022 All-CAA Second Team for the Colonial Athletic Association conference. He was selected in the 13th round by the New York Mets.

Will King, 609th overall

One of the final draft picks, New York City native Will King was selected in the final round by the Braves. A catcher, King played three seasons at Eastern Kentucky University, where he hit .306 with 25 home runs and 124 RBI in 145 games. King, 19, was named the First Team All-ASUN Conference catcher his sophomore year and the Second Team catcher his junior year. PJC

p Zach Levenson singles to left field as the Miami Hurricanes faced the Penn State Nittany Lions on Feb. 19 in Coral Gables, Florida.

Photo by Samuel Lewis/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

p Jake Gelof playing for the University of Virginia on April 10, 2022.

Photo by Samuel Lewis/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

Community

Garden Sizzler

NCSY Central East hosted its annual Garden Sizzler at the home of Nina and Dan Butler. The June 13 barbecue welcomed nearly 300 people, including Mayor Ed Gainey and County Executive Rich Fitzgerald. Attendees enjoyed a smorgasbord of meat, chicken, salads and desserts.

Smiles in the round

Summer support

Student leaders from Hillel Jewish University Center of Pittsburgh donated approximately 100 pounds of food and $2,998 in funds to JFCS Squirrel

Building the future

p Mayor Ed Gainey, center, is joined by teen volunteers. Photos courtesy of Nina Butler

p Classic carousel look

Camp Gan Israel campers enjoyed a day at Kennywood.

Photos courtesy of Chabad of Squirrel Hill

p You, too, can care for community.

Photo courtesy of JFCS

Hill Food Pantry.

p Work now, bench later.

Photo courtesy of Rabbi Barbara Symons

Temple David congregants repaired the Monroeville synagogue’s outdoor sanctuary.

KOSHER MEATS

•Variety of deli meats and franks

•All-natural poultry — whole chickens, breasts, wings and more

•All-natural, corn-fed beef — steaks, roasts, ground beef and more

Available at select Giant Eagle stores. Visit GiantEagle.com for location information.

Empire Kosher Chicken or Turkey

Franks

16 oz. pkg.

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