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On the First Shabbat After Pittsburgh Attack, ‘Everyone Is Going to Come to Shul’ On the First Shabbat After Pittsburgh Attack, ‘We’re Here to Be Jewish Together’
(35 minutes later)
The Jewish Sabbath begins tonight at sunset, just as it does every Friday night. PITTSBURGH — As the sun went down on Friday, they walked into synagogues across the country in solidarity and in grief. Some carried prayer books. Some carried their children. Others carried the memories of friends who had been slaughtered nearly a week earlier in a gunman’s hate-filled rampage at the Tree of Life synagogue.
But this is no ordinary Sabbath. Some were Jews with a strict practice of religious observance. Others set foot inside a synagogue only once or twice a year. There were Christians and Muslims, political dignitaries and Hollywood stars, greeting one another with a “Shabbat Shalom” that on this first Sabbath since the killings felt less like the usual friendly greeting than a plea for a shattered peace.
Less than a week after the Pittsburgh shooting that killed 11 people attending shabbat services, synagogues across the country are expecting packed congregations. “We are all grieving,” Dr. Mitchell Antin, a regular congregant at Congregation Beth Shalom in Pittsburgh, which was holding regular services as well as private services for two of the congregations at the Tree of Life, where 11 people were killed.
There will be Jews with a strict practice of religious observance, along with those who typically only set foot inside a synagogue once or twice a year. There will be Christians and Muslims, political dignitaries and Hollywood stars. So it went: Candles were lit, songs were sung, and rabbis and congregants spoke about finding healing in community, about finding hope in grief and about the fears that now loom over the simple practice of faith. These are scenes from their Shabbats.
“There is no RSVP provision for shabbat,” said David Harris, the chief executive of the American Jewish Community, an advocacy group that started the hashtag #ShowUpForShabbat earlier this week. He said millions of people all over the world had pledged to attend services on Friday night or Saturday morning. “I think synagogues are going to be very well attended tonight and I think the rabbis are going to be making special efforts to make everyone feel welcome and supported. At the Rodef Shalom congregation in Pittsburgh, where three funerals were held over the past week, people fell into weary hugs in the lobby and greeted newcomers.
“It’s grief, it’s solidarity, it’s anger, all that is motivating people,” Mr. Harris added. “Once you get beyond thoughts and prayers, here’s something tangible you could do: show up.” “Have you been to a Jewish service before?” an older woman asked one of the many women at the service who were wearing hijabs.
Mr. Harris said he was taking four European ambassadors with him Friday night to Temple Israel on the Upper East Side in New York. The leader of the Islamic Center of Pittsburgh received a standing ovation, as did Joanne Rogers, the widow of the children’s television host Fred Rogers, whose neighborhood, after all, was Squirrel Hill.
In Pittsburgh, hundreds of people were expected to attend Friday night services at Rodef Shalom, the stately synagogue that hosted three funerals this week for four victims of the shooting. The Israeli consul general from New York and Wasi Mohamed, executive director of the Islamic Center of Pittsburgh, were both expected to attend. Just a few feet away, the Tree of Life congregation will hold its Friday night prayer service in a small chapel inside the Rodef Shalom building. The services, Rabbi Jeffrey Myers said, will only be for its members. “It’s been confusing for me; I’ve been frightened,” Mrs. Rogers told the congregation. “I have had trouble dealing with the fact that this happened, but I don’t want to give credit to the fact that it happened.
A half-mile from the scene of the massacre, Congregation Beth Shalom is opening its soaring worship space to two of the three congregations attacked inside the Tree of Life synagogue. The services for those two congregations, Dor Hadash and New Light, will follow the synagogue’s regular Friday evening prayers. Rabbi Amy Bardack, who is leading the main service, said that the entire Squirrel Hill community was still incredibly traumatized, and that she was crafting a message that would focus on the value of finding strength and comfort in just being together. “I want to tell you how wonderful you are,” she said. “How beautiful you are. I love you.”
“Now is our time to just be,” Rabbi Bardack said. “We’re here to be Jewish together. We’re going to reclaim our sacred spaces.” As the cantor sang, a smaller, private service was taking place nearby in Levy Hall for members of the Tree of Life congregation, whose synagogue was now a crime scene and whose membership was now seven fewer. It was holding its first Shabbat service since last Saturday.
Synagogues across the country — in Chicago, Denver, Boston — will welcome in visitors. “I do not ordinarily go to Friday night services,” said Marcia Stewart, 88, a member of Tree of Life for four decades. When she goes to Saturday service, she usually shows up late. That’s what happened last Saturday, and it probably saved her life. That is in part why she felt obligated to go tonight.
“Everyone is going to come to shul, and I don’t say that lightly,” said Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, the chief executive of the Conservative movement’s rabbinical organization. “They were there Saturday,” she said of the dead. “And I was not.”
Her organization held a conference call with rabbis across the country on Thursday to help them prepare for Friday night. She said she hoped the message they give will be more focused on mourning than security planning. At the service, they too sang, prayed and recited kaddish; the rabbi at one point removed his prayer shawl and jacket, and put on a T-shirt with a Star of David worked into the Pittsburgh Steelers logo.
“We’re trying to connect people to their own grief,” Rabbi Schonfeld said. “People are very fundamentally shaken as Jews, and they need a way to connect to their highest selves as Jews.” She had spent this past week at funerals for people she had been having lunch with not a month ago. Irv Younger. Bernice Simon. Rose Mallinger, whose funeral she had attended earlier on Friday at Rodef Shalom.
She had texted one of her colleagues in Pittsburgh after the attack, and she said he texted back: “Everything is going to change now.” At that funeral the rabbi had talked of still being here, “not ready to disappear yet,” she said.
She added: “I keep thinking about that. Tragically, this is a watershed moment” for American Judaism. “We’ve never been attacked this way on American soil.” That is another reason she felt she needed be there on Friday. “Tree of Life needs to be there together again,” she said, “or we will lose our identity.” — Campbell Robertson
Hundreds of worshipers are expected to show up for rooftop prayer services at IKAR, a nondenominational congregation in Los Angeles, where blessings will also be offered by Muslim and Protestant religious leaders. Herbert and Arlene Moses were supposed to join friends for dinner Friday night. They turned them down. The evening, they said, belonged to home, to their Jewish community, to Tree of Life. In the same Squirrel Hill synagogue where 11 were killed, Ms. Moses had gone to Hebrew school. It is where she was confirmed. It is where her parents held their 50th anniversary.
“There is a need for people to be together and be together in prayer,” said Rabbi Sharon Brous, who expected twice as many worshipers than usual. “Prayer is an act of protest of the world as it is and sense of yearning of what it could be.” So the retired couple, members of Tree of Life until they moved to Florida 18 years ago, walked into Temple Bat Yam, a small synagogue with arched ceilings and stained-glass windows in East Fort Lauderdale, Fla. They sat in the fifth row, where Ms. Moses, 76, quietly cried. She was full of childhood memories, but also couldn’t help wondering what those dreadful moments must have been like last Saturday morning.
There will be singing, as there always is, she said, but there will also be time set aside for people to speak with each other about their own feelings after a week that “really upended our sense of stability and security in this country.” She thought of how Rose Mallinger, 97, and her late mother had been friends and sold purses together.
Rabbi Brous, a liberal activist who frequently speaks about politics from the pulpit, said she has spent much of the week reading the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s remarks after the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, looking for guidance on what to tell her own congregation. “It was such a tough week. It’s hard to describe,” she said as her eyes welled. “We had to come back here, we needed to hear the Rabbi’s words.”
“If you fuel hatred and create a culture where people have easy access to guns, eventually that hatred turns deadly,” she said. “That’s something I think we need to speak about very clearly. We have to create a space for both healing and for moral outrage that will lead to action.” Mr. Moses, 72, nodded. “We needed to be with our people.” — Audra D. S. Burch
At Temple Sinai, a large Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles, the message will be less political: Roughly half the congregants support President Trump, said Rabbi David Wolpe. At Temple Emanuel in Newton, Mass., a conservative synagogue in a leafy suburb of Boston, congregants arrived under a drizzling rain, awash in sadness, fear and anger.
“I’m going to say that if you have an objection of the rhetoric on the one side, you have to be willing to criticize the other side,” he said. “I always get people who want me to scream at the other side, and I want to tell them: please yell at your own side. When I started in the rabbinate 30 years ago, I thought anti-Semitism was my father’s issue, but it’s not going to be mine. And now I am heartbroken this is a serious problem in our country.” “We just weren’t the ones who happened to be shot, but we feel like it happened to everyone here,” said Sheldon Rowdan, 45, who came with his wife and two children. He described Newton as a family-centered community that felt similar to Squirrel Hill.
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, which represents the largest stream in American Judaism with about 900 congregations, said that a lot of people have asked him whether this moment would prove to be like Germany in the 1930s, when anti-Semitism began to break through the veneer of acceptance. He said that he had been thinking about his grandparents, who were Holocaust survivors. “They had always said, ‘It’s going to happen again — don’t ever feel complacent,’” he said. “I think in the United States people did get complacent. They did kind of feel like it wouldn’t happen here.”
“I think this is not that moment,” Rabbi Jacobs said. “There was not a wide interfaith community that stood with us and marched in the streets. What we have here is unprecedented — the solidarity of the faith communities, the Muslims, the Christians, the Buddhists, the Sikhs. Linda Gelda, 64, said she had come to services on Friday full of emotions.
“This is a deeper kind of security,” he added. “A security that comes from building an interconnected community that shows up for one another.” “I’m partly here out of outrage,” she said. “I feel like it’s one thing I can do. It protects against a feeling of despair and helplessness.”
When Jewish cemeteries were desecrated in Philadelphia and St. Louis, he said, Muslims raised money to repair them. And it goes both ways. In Canada, after a mosque was attacked by a gunman in Quebec City, Jews organized human chains to surround mosques across the country in “rings of peace.” Friday night, he said, Muslims and Christians will form human chains around synagogues in Toronto. Several people who were not Jewish said they had come to show solidarity with Jewish friends. Heather Neal, 39, said she had heard about the #ShowUpforShabbat campaign organized by the American Jewish Committee to encourage Jews and non-Jews alike to attend services on Friday. She decided to bring her daughter, Victoria, 4.
By 6:30, when the service for families started, there were several hundred people in the sanctuary, greeting one another with hugs and kisses. The rabbi, Michelle S. Robinson, made only brief allusions to the tragedy in Pittsburgh; the synagogue’s main Shabbat service is Saturday morning, and Senator Elizabeth Warren was set to come and deliver a prayer.
“Each of you who made the choice to come here tonight, to stand together, to pray together, are angels of peace,” Rabbi Robinson said. “Let us raise our voices against the darkness.” — Kate Taylor
At the Lincoln Square Synagogue in Manhattan, a new poster on the table that announces coming events offered a quiet signal of a changed world. It showed pictures of the 11 Pittsburgh victims.
“It’s unspeakably terrible and sad,” said Gideon Schor, who has been a member of Lincoln Square, a modern Orthodox synagogue on the Upper West Side, for more than 20 years.
But as people gathered, many said the events in Pittsburgh would not disrupt their Sabbath.
“Nothing will prevent me from coming,” said Mr. Schor, 54, who attends synagogue daily.
He added: “Our strength comes from daily unity. We draw additional strength from each other in challenging times.”
Rabbi Shaul Robinson, the senior rabbi, said he spent much of this week in conversations about how to enhance security. Though he would not divulge what additional preparations the temple had made, he said he had heard from many Jews who were even more committed to “to show up for Shabbat.”
“It is absolutely a sign that we will not be cowed or intimated or too frightened to walk into a Jewish building,” Rabbi Robinson said. — Tyler Pager
At the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, thousands lined up on a rainy evening to try to claim one of the 800 sanctuary seats in one of the city’s oldest Jewish institutions.
At the Shabbat service there on Friday, underneath the synagogue’s 69-foot Moorish-style dome, Rabbi Shira Stutman lit 13 candles: 11 for the victims in Pittsburgh and two for the victims of a shooting at a Kroger grocery store in Kentucky. The service, full of laughing and crying, ended with a rendition of “This Little Light of Mine.”
Turnout was so high that the synagogue held a second, abbreviated Shabbat service for the hundreds who could not get into the first, and a separate Orthodox service in the basement of the building.
Jennifer Cook and Zachary Weinstein, both 24, said they typically celebrated Shabbat at home in nearby Silver Spring, Md. But they were spurred to make the trip to the city after the shooting.
“It comes down to the Jewish community being visible,” Mr. Weinstein said. “We need a positive experience, some way to interact positively with Judaism instead of reading bad news.”
Kelli Rubin, 21, and Lee Friedman, 24, both Washington residents, said they had made a renewed commitment to Judaism.
“This week has showed me I need to take more action,” Mr. Friedman said.
“Sixth & I represents the persistence of the Jewish people,” Ms. Rubin said. “We can’t forget this is a hard time for the Jewish people.” — Noah Weiland
Just as it does every Friday night, as Sabbath begins for Jews everywhere, the congregation at B’nai Jehoshua Beth Elohim in Deerfield, a suburb of Chicago, lit the two sabbath candles. But then Rabbi Karyn D. Kedar dipped a long taper into the flame, igniting the tip. She turned to the center of the pulpit and, one by one, lit eleven candles more.
The yahrzeit, or memorial candles, burned throughout the service, before packed pews holding about four times as many people as is typical at the Friday night service, according to several congregants. Some of the heads bent over prayer books had skullcaps, others were bare: Parishioners from at least three churches had joined in the service, and the homily was recited by the Rev. Anne Jolly, the rector of nearby Saint Gregory’s Episcopal Church.
“We spent the week crying and burying the dead,” the rabbi said.
“Communities all over the world gather in their sanctuaries,’’ she said, “to turn them into sanctuaries again.
“The pain doesn’t diminish the hope.”
Rector Jolly spoke about Richard Godfried, one of the people killed in the Pittsburgh attack, who was a friend’s uncle. Mr. Godfried, she pointed out, was married to a Roman Catholic woman, and the two ministered as a unit to the needy faithful in their separate congregations. As the service ended, Christian and Jewish clergy who had been sitting in the pews joined the rabbi on the bimah, or stage. They wrapped arms around each other and sang a final song in Hebrew. — Sarah Maslin Nir