Melvin Wax, Killed While Leading Synagogue Service, To Be Buried In PIttsburgh
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Funerals will be held on Wednesday for two victims of a mass shooting at their Pittsburgh synagogue, including the man who was leading shabbat services when the attack – in which 11 worshipers died – took place.
Melvin Wax, 88, and retired university researcher Joyce Fienberg, 75, will be remembered in separate services, local media said, four days after they were killed in the deadliest ever attack on America’s Jewish community.
The first funerals for victims took place on Tuesday, when President Donald Trump visited the Tree of Life synagogue while thousands protested his presence in the city.
Wax, a retired accountant who had just become a grandfather, was leading shabbat services in the basement when he was shot and killed, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said.
“He was a gentle man. Easygoing, simple, quiet,” his friend Bill Cartiff told the newspaper.
Fienberg spent 25 years as a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center until she retired in 2008.
“She was an engaging, elegant, and warm person,” the center said on Facebook.—Reuters
Why I became the Forward’s Editor-in-Chief
You are surely a friend of the Forward if you’re reading this. And so it’s with excitement and awe — of all that the Forward is, was, and will be — that I introduce myself to you as the Forward’s newest editor-in-chief.
And what a time to step into the leadership of this storied Jewish institution! For 129 years, the Forward has shaped and told the American Jewish story. I’m stepping in at an intense time for Jews the world over. We urgently need the Forward’s courageous, unflinching journalism — not only as a source of reliable information, but to provide inspiration, healing and hope.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
