Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue moves forward with rebuilding plans
(JTA) — The Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha congregation in Pittsburgh has taken more steps toward rebuilding.
The synagogue has hired a consultant to create a plan and one to come up with a fundraising campaign to pay for renovating the site of the October 2018 attack hat left 11 worshippers dead, the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle reported.
“We have a desire to make something new – we’re not erasing anything but we need to look forward,” Barb Feige, the congregation’s executive director, told the newspaper. “This is about renewal and remembrance and reflection.”
The consultants’ fees will be covered by grants for rebuilding.
In October 2019, one year after the shooting, the congregation said it would rebuild and return to the building.
The congregation has not returned to the site since the attack. Two congregations that rented space in the Tree of Life building, Congregation Dor Hadash and New Light Congregation, were taken in by area synagogues and decided to remain in their new locations.
Two organizations, Chatham University and the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, have expressed interest in using space in the renovated building.
No funds donated to help the victims recover from the shooting will be used for the rebuilding campaign unless they were designated for it, Feige told the newspaper.
The post Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue moves forward with rebuilding plans appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO