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6 years after Pittsburgh's synagogue shooting massacre, a renewed sense of mission

FILE - This is the signage on the dormant landmark Tree of Life synagogue is pictured in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood, July 13, 2023. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar/File)

Pittsburgh and its Jewish community are six years removed from the 2018 synagogue shooting and more than a year removed from the shooter's trial in which the events of Oct. 27, 2018, were laid bare in excruciating detail.

Work on the renewed synagogue space at the corner of Shady and Wilkins avenues started in earnest earlier this year. The name of the man who killed 11 congregants during Shabbat services has left the headlines, and he has been condemned to death for the terror he wrought on the three congregations worshiping that morning, Tree of Life, Dor Hadash, and New Light.

Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil and David Rosenthal, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, Irving Younger: The focus now for many of the family members and other loved ones of the victims is wholly on honoring their memories.

"One of the things that is really remarkable is that people have gained more confidence in their way of remembering in those first few years," said Maggie Feinstein, director of the 10.27 Healing Partnership, the organization born out of the aftermath of the shooting.

When a trauma is communal, people look to each other in the early days, Feinstein said. Are they "grieving right?" Are they "healing right?"

"As years go on, people are more confident in that they found ways that are meaningful to them," she said, "and that doesn't have to be the same as other people."

And that looks different for the different people affected by Oct. 27, 2018, she said.

"That's true for families and survivors, but that's also true, I think, for neighbors and public officials and different people," she said. "There's more sense that it's OK to do it in your own way."

For Amy Mallinger, that's come in the form of telling people about her grandmother, Rose — about her life and about the antisemitic hatred that led to her death.

"I could talk about the subject all day, every day, and I think a lot of people feel the same," she said.

Mallinger has taken the lead in organizing the REACH Speakers Bureau, an arm of the 10.27 Healing Partnership. The program, which stands for Remember, Educate and Combat Hate, takes those who survived the shooting and family members of those who didn't into schools to talk about their experiences.

"We're hoping to reach younger adults and younger students who can basically bring that forward into their next chapter," she said. "So when they go to college, they're fully aware that antisemitism exists and they can help to be the solution and not continue to be the problem."

She said it's been healing to take ownership of her family's story in the years since Rose was killed.

"I was always in this place of, 'I want to do more,'" Mallinger said. "I feel like this terrible thing happened to my family, and I don't want it to just be this terrible thing. I want it to be something good. We want to do something good from it.

"So that empowered me to start speaking and to share my story."

She said the healing comes from students' responses to her story: "When students come up to you after and say, 'Your story really affected me,' or, 'I'm going through a really hard time right now, but hearing this made me feel a lot better.'"

It's an evolution that other survivors and those who lost loved ones have gone through in their own ways, in their own times.

"They're thinking about the story that they want to tell — the story that they want to tell for the people who are learning about it for the first time in the years to come," said Feinstein. "It's a new phase of grieving. It's a new phase of remembering to start these different projects."

Carol Black, who survived the shooting but lost her brother, said she's also found comfort in talking about what happened to her. She pointed to the freedom that she and others felt to really take hold of their own stories once the shooter's trial concluded.

"I relish the opportunity to go to schools or go to programs," she said, noting that it's not just schools where she speaks. "We speak to adult groups about the horrors of hate and, when hate is unchecked, what can happen."

Black and others have said they've looked to other communities that have survived violence for how to remember and honor as time goes on. They've also become those people to other communities who have survived violence in the six years since Oct. 27, 2018.

"We're just trying to provide whatever kind of support we can," she said, "just like we were supported by other communities that have gone through it."

All of those things are facets of the same end, which is healing, she said.

Nothing about that healing — or grieving — is linear, Feinstein said. Those emotions are dynamic, and so too are the ways in which those closest to the incident remember, memorialize and honor.

There are the public memorials, she said, and then there are the smaller, quieter ways in which people honor those lost. There are the individual community members who attend services now to help congregations reach a minyan — the group of 10 Jewish adults who are needed for certain prayers. Many of those killed in the shooting were core members of their congregation's minyan.

"They go and they replace the presence of the incredible people who had always been there," Feinstein said. "There's this newer era ... where people do it in a way that feels just for them."

That shift has meant a departure from previous commemorations. Ron Wedner, whose mother-in-law was Rose Mallinger and whose wife, Andrea, was injured in the shooting, said the group that organizes the commemoration did its best to take the temperatures of the families and plan accordingly.

"We always want to honor the 11 people who were killed and to be together, but that doesn't always have to look the same," Wedner said.

A smaller, shorter commemoration ceremony will be held indoors at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh on Sunday evening. The past several years have seen the commemoration held on an outdoor stage in Schenley Park during the day.

"We knew we weren't going to please everyone, and it wasn't an easy or clear-cut resolution," he said. "But for year six, based on what we had learned from others and from how the last few commemorations evolved, it was a reasonable middle ground."

It's about what the families and survivors need right now, Feinstein said.

"What is the current climate? How do we start to make these decisions about meeting the community where they are?" she said. "And how do we hold the space that we were really commissioned for, which is that the events of 10/27 will always be remembered ... the hate-fueled actions but especially the love-fueled actions in response. And that's what we'll continue to do."

Black said that as long as there is an audience for her and her brother's story, she is willing to tell it, even if it hurts to do so sometimes. Holocaust survivors continued to tell their stories decades later, and their children told their stories for them when they no longer could.

"We have a story to tell, too," she said. "And I think people need to hear this."

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