Pittsburgh’s Jews, united by Tree of Life shooting, divided by election and Gaza war
In Pennsylvania’s second city, a tight-knit Jewish community grapples with traumas past and present
Pittsburgh aerial view by Haizhan Zheng/iStock; Pittsburgh street by Benyamin Cohen, vigil and mourner outside Tree of Life by Getty Images, campaign volunteer by JP Leskovich. Image by Lauren Markoe
By Lauren Markoe October 22, 2024
PITTSBURGH — Joel Ettinger, a retired health care executive, could have been relaxing at his second home in Florida, but instead spent an afternoon last week bundled in a winter jacket on the chilly concourse of the Pittsburgh Steelers stadium, doing crowd control at a rally for Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president.
Ettinger, 74, said he is voting — and volunteering — here in Pennsylvania, because it’s the swing state with the most electoral votes, 19. And like many local Jewish activists for both parties, he has found these last frantic days of the campaign particularly challenging because of their timing.
The election is not only coming on the heels of the first yahrzeit of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel, but a scant nine days after the sixth anniversary of the Tree of Life massacre, where a gunman murdered 11 Jews during Shabbat services. “It all weaves together,” said Ettinger, whose two sons became bar mitzvah at Tree of Life decades before. “There’s a rising sentiment of fear.”
He was one of dozens of Jews of every generation and denomination I spoke with over three days in Pittsburgh, the state’s second-largest city and home to a proud and politically involved Jewish population.
I sat down for coffee, tea, and hummus with rabbis, political organizers, poll workers and survivors of the Tree of Life tragedy. I went to the Walz rally and another for JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, and had hot chocolate in a sukkah. They told me who they were voting for, and why — or why they were afraid to say.
To a person, they lamented the state of our divided nation. Many also bemoaned divisions within Jewish Pittsburgh. Some said their synagogues have been places of refuge during this difficult season; others said they were scenes of sometimes painful debate.
Rabbi Hindy Finman, who works at the Pittsburgh JCC, said Oct. 7 “retraumatized” the city’s Jews, who were still scarred from the 2018 shooting, the deadliest act of antisemitism in U.S. history. They were saddened, she said, that the profusion of compassion from across the city after 10/27 did not reappear.
“There was a lot of confusion and hurt, and people were really, really upset,” she said. “Like, where are they now?”
The election has further cleaved the community, with disagreements over Israel’s response to the Hamas attack and, especially, whether former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris is best suited to handle it and the antisemitism that has spiked in its wake.
PIttsburgh Jews who held each other close after Tree of Life and on prior anniversaries now do not trust each other to vote in the best interest of the Jewish people — or their country. All in the neighborhood that the late Fred Rogers of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood called home.
“It’s harder to love your neighbor,” Finman said. “It’s really, really hard to remember to say ‘Good morning.‘’”
‘Zionist, full stop’
Built on three rivers and the steel industry, Pittsburgh declined rapidly in the latter half of the 20th century but has since rebounded, with high-tech enterprises replacing the steel mills that used to line the riverfronts.
There are now 300,000 residents in the city and 2.4 million in the metropolitan area, including 50,000 Jews, who support dozens of synagogues. One is Temple Sinai, a Reform congregation of 650 families whose senior rabbi, Daniel Fellman, moved to Pittsburgh three years after the Tree of Life tragedy.
Sinai is located in Squirrel Hill, home to Tree of Life and the JCC, and dotted with Jewish day schools and a kosher market, a kosher Dunkin Donuts and a Jewish bookstore.
“We run into each other at the store,” he said of the city’s diverse Jewish populations.
Fellman, 51, is the son of a Democratic Nebraska state senator and worked as a speechwriter for a Nebraska governor and an intern in the Clinton White House before going to rabbinical school.
The congregation is largely Democrats like him but includes Trump voters, including one who accompanied Fellman to a Pittsburgh Pirates game in September, where they talked about the election as they watched the team lose. They don’t like everything that comes out of each others’ mouths, the rabbi said, but “he and I respect each other.”
There is tension to his left, too. In his Rosh Hashanah sermon, Rabbi Fellman called Israel a “core element” of Jewish identity and said, “I believe that anti-Zionism equals antisemitism, full stop.” But Squirrel Hill is part of the U.S. congressional district that in 2022 elected Rep. Summer Lee, who has supported a U.S. arms embargo against Israel and accused it of committing genocide in Gaza.
Lee was among three local Democrats who signed a statement marking the anniversary of Oct. 7 that the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh criticized for making a “dangerous and false moral equivocation” by seeming to compare the actions of Israel and Hamas. She is a member of the so-called Squad that includes Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and advocates for a reevaluation of U.S. military aid to Israel.
“I should note,” Fellman told me, “there’s a significant chunk of the Jewish community and a chunk of my congregation that supports her, that is on the far left side of the Democratic Party, that have bordered on anti-Zionist, and they think what she’s doing is right.”
He added: “And I’m fine with that.”
The survivor
Audrey Glickman was leading prayers at Tree of Life when the gunman entered the building. She grabbed a 90-year-old congregant, Joe Charny, and raced upstairs to a small room where they hid under their prayer shawls.
Glickman, now 67, didn’t talk about that day publicly until after she testified at the 2023 trial of the shooter, who was eventually sentenced to death. Since then, she speaks “more than once a week” to groups, Jewish and non-Jewish, about how antisemitism can fester and explode.
Up until recently, Glickman told me, she “tried not to be too political” in those talks. But that changed as the campaign heated up. Trump “fomented the horrors that were perpetrated here,” she said. “And now I see my friends ignoring that.” She said these friends are ardent supporters of civil rights but tell her they are voting for Trump because he supports Israel more than Harris. “I get worried that they’re missing a point,” she said.
A Forward-CHIP50 poll of American Jews released last week reflected what Glickman is seeing in her own life. Harris had less support among Jews nationally than President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had in 2020 and 2016, and Jews seemed to be ranking Israel and antisemitism higher on their list of priorities than in prior elections.
Like Fellman, Glickman has issues with Jews to the left of her, too. She’s among many Pittsburgh Jews I spoke to who were offended by the statement Lee signed. But that does not compare to her frustration with those who point to Lee as a reason not to vote for Harris, convinced that the vice president is also “a member of the Squad.”
Glickman has twice met with Doug Emhoff, Harris’ Jewish husband, during his visits to Pittsburgh, and has no doubts about her support for Israel and commitment to combating antisemitism.
“I don’t know how to fight the propaganda that’s out there,” she said.
Prime seat at GOP rally
Joshua Lamb, 46, knows many Pittsburgh Jews do not understand how he could vote for Trump, and that some at his Reform synagogue just south of downtown, Temple Emanuel, consider him a “crazy conservative.”
But he sees the former president as a protector of Israel and does not trust Harris, who, he pointed out, called for an end to the Gaza war right after Israel announced last week it had killed the chief architect of the Oct. 7 attack, Yahya Sinwar.
“Well no,” Lamb said. “There are still hostages, woman!”
We met at a rally featuring JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, on Thursday at a downtown wedding venue. Lamb, who was wearing a yarmulke, did not arrive in time to snag a seat. Then a campaign aide invited him to sit in the bleachers just to the side of the podium.
I wondered if he thought that was to show off Jewish support. “It did cross my mind,” he said.
Lamb is a former tech professional who now works as a handyman and caregiver for the elderly. He’s been a registered Republican for the past 15 months and says he aligns with Trump on a host of concerns beyond Israel, including how “woke” society has become.
He is particularly worried about how a nephew who will be going to college in a few years will be treated as a Jewish student on campus.
And while he doesn’t appreciate Trump’s bluster, he also doesn’t hold him responsible for violence committed by others.
“You are always going to have crazy people in the world,” he said.
‘Conflict in my congregation’
JP Leskovich, 27, a third-year law student at the University of Pittsburgh, voted “uncommitted” in Pennsylvania’s April primary to protest President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
When we spoke at a café near the university, he praised Biden for reaching out to Jews this past year but criticized him for failing to support Palestinians and dismissing antiwar protesters.
“It isn’t just rabble rousers,” said Leskovich, who himself has stayed away from demonstrations. “It’s something that people really care about. And Jewish people care about also.”
Harris is not his perfect candidate, Leskovich told me, but he still plans to vote for her, because they’re aligned enough on issues he cares about, like LGBTQ+ rights and support for Ukraine. In fact, he’s been canvassing neighborhoods on the Democrat’s behalf.
Leskovich belongs to Dor Hadash, a Reconstructionist shul that lost a congregant in the Tree of Life shooting. He worked this past year, unsuccessfully, to pass a ceasefire resolution at the synagogue, which exposed fault lines in the congregation.
“A couple of really tense board meetings,” he said, “but everyone kept coming back.”
Back in 2018, when the shooting happened, Leskovich was an undergrad at Pitt, as the university is known locally, and in the process of converting to Judaism and pledging AEPi, the Jewish fraternity. He felt safe in the aftermath, he said, given the citywide outpouring of kindness. And he also felt supported by his law school classmates right after the Hamas attack.
But in August, according to a police report, a man wearing a keffiyah threw a glass bottle at two students on the campus who were wearing yarmulkes, as Leskovich does (a suspect was arrested and charged with assault). And in September, a Jewish student wearing a Star of David said he was punched and kicked by a group of about seven young men who made derogatory comments about Judaism and Israel.
Those incidents have made Leskovich feel less safe, though his prime concern remains antisemitism from the right, not from the left. He is confident that Trump’s reelection would embolden white supremacists like the Tree of Life gunman, who had posted antisemitic conspiracy theories on the far-right social platform Gab.
“In Pittsburgh it’s not a fear of the unknown,” he said. “It’s a fear of the known.”
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