Tree of Life book finds kindness in the darkness
On Oct. 27, 2018, Robert Bowers, a 46-year-old white nationalist from Baldwin Borough, murdered 11 worshippers in the three congregations housed in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill, an ethnically diverse neighborhood that has remained the center of Jewish life in Pittsburgh for over a century. This antisemitic atrocity was the deadliest in U.S. history.
In “Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood,” Mark Oppenheimer draws on interviews with 250 people to provide an evocative, empathetic and emotional account of responses to this unfathomable slaughter.
Oppenheimer, former religion columnist of the New York
Times, author of the
Newish Jewish Encyclopedia and director of the Yale Journalism Initiative, does not focus on the killer. Instead, he reveals how survivors, family members, congregants and rabbis buried the dead and conducted their funerals; treated
“trauma tourists”; distributed over $6 million raised by a
GoFundMe campaign and the Jewish
Federation of Greater
Pittsburgh; decided whether to renovate the synagogue or sell the building for seven figures, relocate and set up a substantial endowment; and marked the first anniversary of the shooting. Oppenheimer examines how they and other residents of Squirrel Hill responded to President Trump’s visit and compared media attention devoted to Tree of Life victims with coverage of murders of African Americans.
From the outset, Oppenheimer suspected that with deep roots in the community, relative affluence, robust Jewish identities and warm relationships with neighbors, Squirrel Hill Jews would provide “a model of resilience.” Not surprisingly, he found what he was looking for: acts of hesed (the Hebrew word for “lovingkindness”) by Jews and non-Jews.
Two days after the shooting, we learn, a rabbi and a funeral director were preparing bodies for burial when an elderly woman knocked on the door, clutching a thousand dollars in cash. “This is for the married couple,” she said, referring to Bernice and Sylvan Simon, who were murdered in the chapel in which they had been married 62 years earlier. When she refused to give her name, the funeral director asked if he could hug her. “No hug,” she replied and walked away. The two men looked at each other and embraced, amazed, said the rabbi, “that there could be such goodness after such darkness.”
Nicole Flannery, a former art teacher in Pittsburgh schools and “not a very strict Catholic,” Oppenheimer indicates, painted a Star of David, a tree of life and a dove, each of them surrounded by a heart, with the words kindness, love and hope rendered in Hebrew and English beneath them, on the windows of the Starbucks on Forbes Avenue, where Squirrel Hill residents had assembled to discuss what had happened and how they might respond. The paintings are still there. “Stronger Than Hate” posters, designed by Tim Hindes (based on a Pittsburgh Steelers’ logo), continue to be displayed in local shop windows.
Some Squirrel Hill Jews, Oppenheimer writes, worried that acts of hesed exacted a cost. They regretted that survivors and victims’ families agreed to refrain from injecting politics in “public discussions of our loved ones,” condemned Rabbi Jonathan Perlman for pleading for gun control at the memorial service marking the first anniversary of the shooting, and pressured him to go on an apology tour.
Oppenheimer gives Tammy Hepps, a 39-year-old member of Beth Shalom synagogue, the last word on this perennial controversy. Couldn’t a community have both hesed and political activism, Hepps wonders.
“If the thing we are best at in Pittsburgh is keeping the community together and looking out for each other, then that is the best of what we accomplished in that first year. But as Jews, that’s not the best we’re called to be.”
‘SQUIRREL HILL: THE TREE OF LIFE SYNAGOGUE SHOOTING AND THE SOUL OF A NEIGHBORHOOD’ By Mark Oppenheimer Alfred A. Knopf ($28.95)