#Pittsburgh synagogue
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anonymousdandelion · 1 year ago
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Tomorrow, October 27, is the five-year anniversary of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, when a white supremacist terrorist attacked the Tree of Life—Or L'Simcha synagogue and murdered eleven people.
It does not feel like it has been five years.
This is not where I hoped we would be in five years.
May their memories be a blessing; may Hashem avenge their blood; may we all know better days.
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memenewsdotcom · 2 years ago
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Pittsburgh synagogue gunman found guilty
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girlactionfigure · 2 months ago
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clavalanche · 1 year ago
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I cannot express my disappointment in the news outlets of my hometown. I grew up in Pittsburgh, where there is a massive Jewish community and while I understand the Israel-Palestine conflict has affected many members of the Jewish community here, there is no doubt that Israel IS the oppressor in this situation. All I get are front page articles supposedly addressing the conflict when in reality all they make references to are the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, which, though completely deplorable, is NOT relevant to Palestine’s occupation in any way, shape, or form. It’s so incredibly manipulative to leverage the community’s shared loss at Tree of Life, to sway minds away from the actual conflict: Israel’s war crimes. It’s so incredibly performative and it’s so transparent that these news outlets are using this horrific attack on the Jewish community to push their agenda. It’s disgusting on so many levels; using one hate crime to draw attention away from another. This isn’t a fucking game. This is a situation completely isolated from the Tree of Life shooting and it should be treated at such. Deplorable. Shame on you Pittsburgh Post Gazette for manipulating people’s emotions like this. Eat shit.
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quotesfrommyreading · 2 years ago
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Isabel Fattal: In your newsletter post, you wrote that anti-Semitism is not just a personal prejudice—it’s a conspiracy theory. Can you explain this concept?
Yair Rosenberg: When people think about anti-Semitism, they often think about it through the prism of other prejudices they encounter, which typically take the form of people saying, “I don’t like people like that.” “Like that” could be Jewish, Black, Muslim. And that is certainly a component of anti-Semitism, but it's not the only component. Anti-Semitism shares things with other prejudices, but it also has things that distinguish it from other prejudices. One of these distinctions is that anti-Semitism can take the form of a conspiracy theory about how the world works. It blames society’s problems on some sinister, string-pulling Jewish cabal behind the scenes.
This conspiracy theory is infinitely malleable. Whatever the problems you perceive in the world, you can blame them on the same invisible culprit. So you end up with people who have entirely opposite worldviews who somehow land on the Jews as their enemies. You can have an Islamic extremist who takes a synagogue hostage in Texas, and you can have a white supremacist who [allegedly] shoots up a synagogue in Pittsburgh because he sees the synagogue as facilitating the entry of Muslims into the United States as refugees. [Robert Bowers pleaded not guilty; his trial is set for April 2023.] These are people who have completely disparate ways of seeing the world, but somehow, they’ve ended up in the same place, because they’re both conspiracy theorists.
  —  Why Conspiracy Theorists Always Land on the Jews
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sofflysteel · 1 year ago
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So…he got guns.
This is an excerpt from today’s testimony in the penalty phase of the trial of RB who is on trial for murdering 11 at their synagogue in Pittsburgh. (my transcription from KDKA TV News report)
“Bowers had multiple, severe chronic traumatic life events and circumstances that put him at risk for the development of serious mental illness. Time and time again Robert did not get the care and intervention he needed, and his mental health deteriorated over the course of his life. Robert does not think in balanced normal ways. He has reactions that are not at the level that are normal.” [emphasis mine]
Katherine Porterfield, psychologist
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landerfoxx · 2 years ago
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my house shall be called a house of prayer for all
people Isaiah 56:7 ביתי יקרא בית תפילה לכל העמים
Rodef Shalom was built in 1906 it is the home of the oldest Jewish congregation in Western Pennsylvania and the largest Reform congregation in the area.
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newtownpentacle · 1 year ago
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Rodef Shalom
Friday – photo by Mitch Waxman Recent endeavor found a humble narrator on a tour of Pittsburgh’s Rodef Shalom Synagogue. The photo above was gathered back during the winter, as for one reason or another (mainly, it was raining), a similar shot of the entire building wasn’t gathered during on the day of the tour, which was offered by the Doors Open Pittsburgh outfit. For the history, and origin…
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nando161mando · 1 year ago
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Judge formally sentences Robert Bowers to death in Pittsburgh synagogue shooting
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timothy-kang · 1 year ago
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Trendy News—Robert Bowers
Robert Bowers, the gunman who killed 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, was unanimously sentenced to death by a federal jury on Wednesday.
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sofflysteel · 2 years ago
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Remember.
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I grew up in Pittsburgh and lived most of my adult life a few miles from where yesterday’s shooting happened. I know my hometown is strong but no community should have to bear this tragedy. I created this art to remember the victims and the lives of faith they lived.
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girlactionfigure · 1 year ago
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The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, Robert Bowers, who murdered 11 Jews in 2018, has been handed a death sentence by the jury.
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watercress-words · 1 year ago
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Still healing at Tree of Life synagogue
The final phase of the Pittsburgh synagogue gunman’s death penalty trial began Monday. Prosecutors claim the shooter should be sentenced to death, citing his continued lack of remorse in the attack that left 11 worshippers dead and six others wounded. His defense team pleads for mercy, saying a life sentence is enough punishment.
When we read about far away tragic events in the news, it’s easy to feel disconnected, and to think things like that don’t happen in my circle. Behavioral health professionals tell us that most people became numb to the massive number of deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic because we can’t relate to that much tragedy. But when things happen on a smaller scale, it’s easier to identify with the…
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ruminativerabbi · 2 years ago
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Pittsburgh
Like most of my readers, I suppose, I have been watching the trial of Robert Bowers, the perpetrator of the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, with a strange brew of emotion concocted principally of fascination, horror, pride in our American justice system, and intense personal engagement—the latter despite the fact that I’ve never actually been to Pittsburgh, thus also obviously not to that synagogue, and that I did not know any of the victims personally.
The charges alone were hair-raising enough to consider during the trial, but the verdict feels even worse: guilty of 22 crimes, eleven capital counts of obstruction of free exercise of religious beliefs resulting in death and eleven capital counts of using a firearm to commit murder during and as part of a crime of violence. Of course, none of the above was at all unexpected: even Bowers’ own lawyers did not waste the court’s time by arguing that their client was not the shooter, choosing instead to argue that he was not primarily motivated by hatred of Jewish people in general, but specifically by his hatred of the HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and his understanding that at least one of the congregations housed in the building he attacked worked with the HIAS to assist immigrants in need.
There’s a lot here to unpack. The HIAS has been around for a long time, having first been founded in 1881 to assist Jewish persons newly arrived on these shores in finding lodging and employment, and in developing a sense of belonging in a new place so unlike their countries of origin. That remained its primary focus for a long time too—which is why supporting the HIAS was, in my childhood, as uncontroversial a thought as supporting the March of Dimes or the JNF. And it did its work famously well, establishing an office on Ellis Island itself in 1904 and assisting hundreds of thousands of those who arrived there. They provided translation services for would-be immigrants who didn’t speak English well or at all. They lent the truly indigent the $25 “landing” fee that all who passed by those portals were obliged to pay one way or the other. They provided lawyers to argue before the so-called “Boards of Special Inquiry” the cases of individuals who might otherwise have been sent back to Europe. On top of all that, they found the funds to launch nation-wide searches for relatives of the newly arrived so that the former could provide affidavits of support for the latter to guarantee that they—the new immigrants—would not end up as indigents living off public money. They opened a kosher restaurant on Ellis Island that eventually served more than half a million meals. And they created a kind of charity travel bureau to assist new immigrants in covering the cost of train tickets to wherever it was they were going to settle. Perhaps most useful of all, they opened an employment bureau to help newcomers find work.
All that being the case, what’s not to like? My parents were big supporters, never setting aside an envelope from the HIAS without putting a check or at least a few dollar bills inside before mailing it back. As well they should have: three of my four grandparents came to this country through Ellis Island and all benefited from the presence of the HIAS officials waiting for them to disembark and helping them through what could easily have been a harrowing experience in a foreign language they could barely speak. And that, of course, was without knowing that being sent back to Europe would almost definitely have meant eventually being killed along with two-thirds of European Jewry during the Second World War.
Later, the HIAS was instrumental in saving as many European Jews as possible, famously saving 1400 children the Nazis had incarcerated in French concentration camps and bringing them to America. (Nearly all their parents were subsequently murdered by the Germans.) All in all, about 45,000 Jews were saved by the HIAS during the war, none of whom would otherwise have survived. And then, when the war was over, the HIAS assisted in finding homes for more than 300,000 Jewish souls left in D.P. camps with no place to go. Eventually, the HIAS would also play a major role in helping Jews permitted to leave the Soviet Union in finding new homes in Israel, Western Europe, or the U.S.
It's hard to imagine why Robert Bowers would have cared about any of this. Nor, apparently, did he. But the HIAS also took on another role in the latter part of the twentieth century. In 1975, the State Department asked the organization to assist in the settling of 3,600 Vietnamese refugees here in the U.S. And that constituted a sea change for the organization, which now turned from its original raison d’être of helping Jewish immigrants to helping refugees of all nationalities in need, extending its mission to address the needs of all displaced persons in need of assistance in finding or settling into new homes. And that was the part that Robert Bowers apparently couldn’t stand. “HIAS,” Bowers posted online, “likes to bring invaders in who kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch our people get slaughtered.” And then he famously concluded that post with words that were subsequently repeated a thousand times: “Screw your optics! I’m going in.”
And in he went—to a synagogue housing three different congregations, one of which had indeed participated just a week earlier in HIAS’s annual National Refugee Shabbat. Shouting, by police accounts, “All Jews must die,” he set to his deadly work. It didn’t take that long: Barrows entered the building at 9:50 AM and by 11:08 he had surrendered to police. And so, in just a little over an hour, eleven died. Two were a married couple. Two others were brothers. Six others were injured, which figure includes four police officers. The dead, in alphabetic order, were Joyce Flenberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal and David Rosenthal, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, and Irving Younger. They ranged in age from 54 to 97. None was guilty of anything other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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At first, it might almost sound as though Bowers’ lawyers were right, that this was “about” HIAS and its mission to assist refugees of all kinds and points of origin and not “just” about killing Jews. But Bowers didn’t shoot up a HIAS office and neither did he take aim at any of their refugee clients. Instead, correctly understanding that part of the Jewish worldview includes a deep and ineradicable sense of identity with the refugees and displaced persons in this cold, uncaring world we inhabit (a point presented in Scripture not as a good idea or even as a noble one, but as a divine commandment), he took aim at Jews because they had embraced their Judaism and the worldview that their faith calls upon them to adopt. And it was that specific part of Jewishness that Bowers couldn’t tolerate, the sense that it is requisite that all who would call themselves godly or decent feel a deep sense of kinship, not with the masters and rulers of the world, but with the powerless, with those seeing refuge from tyranny or poverty, with the defenseless and the desperate. And it was expressly to express his loathing of that kind of worldview—one so identified with Judaism that it would be impossible to imagine Judaism without it—that Bowers chose to act. He chose innocent victims because they were Jewish, because they were in synagogue on Shabbat morning to affirm their Jewishness, because they were associated—both in Bowers’ mind and probably correctly—with the mission of the HIAS not to turn away from those seeking refuge in the world but to turn towards them and to embrace them as fellow children of God.
And now, the verdict having been handed down, we turn to the next part: the sentencing phase of the trial scheduled to begin on Monday, at which time the jury will have to decide whether to sentence Bowers to life imprisonment without parole or to death.
As always, I find myself unsure where I stand on death penalty issues. On the one hand, who could possibly qualify for execution if not a man like Bowers, a violent extremist who mercilessly executed eleven innocents to make some sort of demented political statement about an issue to which none of his victims had any direct connection? He falls in the same category, then, with Dylann Roof, the young man who murdered nine innocents in 2015 after spending an hour studying Bible with them at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and who was subsequently found guilty and then sentenced in state court to nine consecutive sentences of life without parole and in federal court to death. Both men acted willfully and intentionally. Neither had any particular personal animus against any of his victims. Both were angry souls fueled by violent hatred. If the death penalty is the ultimate punishment our justice system metes out, then to whom should it be meted out if not to people who fully intentionally kill innocents specifically because of their faith or the color of their skin?
On the other hand, I see the arguments against the death penalty too. The victims don’t come back to life when their executioner is executed; the death penalty speaks to a need to punish felt by the living but yields exactly nothing at all to the dead. Should it matter if the deceased individuals were on record as being opposed to or in favor of the death penalty? And how should faith itself impact on the way we feel about the death penalty? Do we argue that the Bible itself, which clearly has no problem at all with the notion of execution as the proper response to violent crime, should be our guide? What about the strictures that Jewish tradition places around the death penalty, strictures so tight that it would be more or less impossible for a traditional rabbinic court to sentence anyone to death even if such a court were to have the authority to hand down such a sentence? In the end, do we support the concept of the death penalty in theory because it is, after all, the ultimate in punitive acts at the same time we oppose it in reality because of the possibility of error? Is it relevant in this regard to mention the over 300 convictions that have been overturned based on DNA evidence since the Innocence Project began its work in 1992? Surely that should be irrelevant here—neither Bowers’ own lawyers nor even the defendant himself tried to deny that he was the Pittsburgh shooter. Or is it irrelevant, given that, by supporting the idea of sentencing the man to death, we are saying clearly that we support the death penalty while knowing that that the work of the Innocence Project makes it more or less certain that innocent individuals have been executed in our nation’s history?
All these are the thoughts I bring to the conviction and eventual sentencing of Robert Bowers, the perpetrator of the Pittsburgh massacre. What happens to Bowers will happen without any input from myself. But what I can do, and invite all my readers to join me in doing, is to pray that his victims rest in peace and that their deaths collectively serve as a mass sanctification of God’s name in this violent, crazy world we inhabit.
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gwydionmisha · 2 years ago
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thejewishlink · 2 years ago
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Prosecutor: Gunman In Pittsburgh Synagogue Massacre Harbored ‘Malice And Hate’ For Jews
PITTSBURGH (AP) — Prosecutors on Tuesday described how a heavily armed suspect barged into a Pittsburgh synagogue and shot every worshipper he could find in the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history. Robert Bowers’ federal trial got underway more than four years after the shooting deaths of 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue. Twelve jurors and six alternates — chosen Thursday…
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