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October 27th is a podcast that tells the story of the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting through the voices of the local community.
Each episode introduces us to the story of a person who experienced the synagogue shooting and its aftermath: survivors and family members of those who were killed, Jewish community members, and their non-Jewish neighbors.
October 27th is adapted from Meanings of October 27th, an oral history project that interviewed over 100 Pittsburghers about their life stories and reflections on the shooting.
Visit the oral history archive: https://october27archive.org/oral-histories
Donate to support this project: https://bardian.bard.edu/register/meanings
Noah Schoen: I’m Noah Schoen, and I’m Aliza Becker and this is October 27th, a podcast about the October 27th, 2018 synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. Aliza and I co-founded an oral history project that recorded over 100 interviews with local Jews and non-Jews about their life stories and reflections on the shooting. Our interviewees taught us so much and we’ve created this podcast to share their insights with you. This is October 27th.
Ira Frank was one of those adults in your life who was always around. At Beth Shalom, he would give you candy when you entered the main sanctuary on Shabbat. At Hebrew school, you’d see him in the halls. Ira had a bit of trouble remembering names, so whenever I’d run into him, he would usually call me Sam. But I knew he knew who I was.
Because I got to know Ira as a kid, it wasn’t until I returned to Pittsburgh as an adult that I realized what a tremendous Jewish communal leader he is. Ira is the president of the Downtown Shul, a regular at morning minyans, and one of two people who still maintains the Rankin Jewish cemetery outside of the city—and those are just a few of his many roles.
Ira is a doer. He’s someone who leads by example, through his actions.
Ira Frank: I am Ira Frank. I was born in Pittsburgh. I've lived here almost all of my life, living in Squirrel Hill and working in Uptown in a family business.
On my mother’s side, I’m a fourth generation of Pittsburgher. My mother grew up in Rankin, Pennsylvania and then moved into Squirrel Hill when she was in high school.
My father’s family settled in Turtle Creek, which is one of the small steel river towns. And they moved into Squirrel Hill when he was in elementary school. My parents then, until they passed away, were always in Squirrel Hill and other than college, I’ve lived in Squirrel Hill if I’ve been in Pittsburgh.
Aliza Becker: Do you know why they moved to Squirrel Hill?
Frank: In both cases it was the small towns were not becoming habitable for young Jewish kids. They wanted their children to be in the Jewish environment. They had very little Jewish friends and you know the synagogues were already having problems. It was a much nicer community. They were leaving, I don't know that it was slums, but it was slum-like housing apartments, and they had a few more dollars and could afford, you know, as in the Jeffersons, to go on up that hill.
My father went to Allderdice, my mother went, and I followed them to Allderdice. It was the biggest high school in the city. There were always various racial divides and ethnic divides. And you know my father, he was always picked on in high school for being, for being Jewish.
I started high school in seventh grade. Allderdice started at seventh. 1969, when I was in seventh grade, the kids that were seniors—they were going off to war.
Everything that was going on in the world was falling down, from Vietnam to segregation to integration to forced busing to equal rights, all that stuff. And Allderdice sat in a neutral land of Squirrel Hill.
Lots and lots of riots and lots and lots of fights. And you'd go to school in the morning, and you'd see police buses waiting there to arrest the kids when the fights started.
You know that you make generalizations and there’s going to be someone that says I didn’t have it that way. But generally speaking, in those days it was the Black kids, the Greenfield kids, and the Jewish kids, and they had different tables, and you basically stayed completely to yourself.
And when the fights would start out, the trays start flying, we’d duck and be in the middle and get out of the way. As long as we didn’t get beat up, we never were in the fights.
And there were no guns. I mean, that was not heard of. People could fight today and be best friends tomorrow. That's the difference between the world now.
Becker: What was it like growing up Jewish?
Frank:. Everyone I knew was Jewish. My family had a business in Uptown. And I remember working my whole life in Uptown and seeing all flavors, shapes, of people, but in Squirrel Hill, everyone I knew was Jewish.
There was kosher butcher shops, and there was the bakeries, and the delicatessens. In the lower Hill with Steinbergs that had the best corned beef that they made themselves. There hasn’t been a good corned beef sandwich available in Pittsburgh for thirty years.
I remember the chickens parked outside of Greenberg's, because they used to butcher the chickens live in the basement. What was Rhoda’s, was Hebrew National, it's gone through a bunch of different names in its lifetime. I was never a great fan of theirs, but we would go there a lot in Allderdice for breakfast during the riots when the teacher didn't show up.
It was just assumed that you weren’t going to school for the first two days and last two days of Passover. In those days the schools were open on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but it was just absolutely assumed that there would be no kids in school. And for the few non-Jewish kids in the school, they had gym all day or something. They didn't even attempt to have classes.
Squirrel Hill's changed. Today it's more diverse. I think when we were kids, even the pizza shop shut down on Passover for the week. The Jews tended to think that oh it was so nice that he, that Mineo’s shut down for Passover. In reality, that was a week when business wasn't going to exist, and he could remodel, clean, and he could go back to Italy and see his family. But it was still a symbolic action of showing some solidarity.
Becker: How do you think your experience growing up Jewish in Pittsburgh shaped you as an adult?
Frank: I think Allderdice shaped me more than anything else, to be honest, because there were very rough years of riots and fights. And got mugged every day in seventh grade for being Jewish. I learned, you know, you hit first, ask questions later. Defend yourself first and then figure out what the problem was.
Becker: How do you relate to your Jewishness today?
Frank: I'm very involved in the Jewish community, probably overly involved. Am I overly
religious? I don't believe so. Overly observant? Depending on who you speak to.
I am the president of the Orthodox Shul downtown Beth Hamedrash Hagodol-Beth Jacob. And I think I've been president now for somewhere around twenty-two years, And just been involved in making sure that we have daily minyans, which is for the most part, what we do.
At Beth Shalom, which is a Conservative synagogue where we grew up, right now I'm president of the Men's Club. I've done just about every job there is to do as a volunteer, never paid.
I'm involved in two congregations, but really three, because my mother grew up in Rankin, so her family and my ancestors are in the Rankin cemetery, which was the Sons of Israel, which was the Rankin Shul. It doesn't exist anymore, but the cemetery does. Me and one other person maintain the cemetery and do all of that. So, I bury you, I pay to get the grass cut, I do the maintenance.
To my non-religious friends, I'm way too zealot and too kosher and too observant of Sabbath. If you talk to my Orthodox friends, I'm a heathen who drives on Shabbos and doesn't have a strictly kosher house and eats out and isn't observant at all. You do the best you can, you do what you need to do.
Becker: We’re going to pivot to the events of October 27th, 2018. Can you tell me about that day?
Frank: That day, like any other Saturday morning, I started off at Beth Shalom at around six in the morning, heading up for a 6:30 early morning minyan.
Finished around 8:15. Hang around for the second service. It starts at 9:30 that day in the ballroom at Beth Shalom.
Shortly after services started, a relatively new couple that's been coming to the synagogue came in and said that there had been something going on on Wilkins Avenue, there was some type of a shooting. So, I did start putting Beth Shalom into a lockdown.
The president had just come in, Debby Firestone. So we were quote-unquote on lockdown, but we were letting people in. A lot of people walk to Beth Shalom on Shabbos. So nobody in their right mind was locking and saying, "No, you have to go back out, and you have to walk back home again. You can't come in." But word started spreading that something was going on at Tree of Life.
Shabbat observance went completely out the window real fast. We were getting a lot of calls checking on people or people coming by looking if people were there. There were also people that were leaving to go check on their family at home.
Every phone call we were getting and every news report was slightly different. We could hear ambulances going by. We continued on as normally as we could with services not knowing what was going on because nobody knew.
There was a young African American girl who came to the door with a huge backpack, with her cell phone at her ear. And it was pretty much everything that you'd been trained for a lockdown in an emergency situation where you don't let somebody in that's suspicious with a big backpack that's looking nervous. And she was at the door, you know, but a little bit on tears, and she's on with her mother. And she had been at the program at Allderdice, the high school, which is a couple blocks away. And she was trying to get home to Homewood, and she couldn't get home because all the buses had been stopped and all the traffic, and no Ubers were out, and she didn't know what to do. And she was shaking. So I made a call and let her in.
She was just a poor child who was caught in the wrong spot at the wrong time and terribly nervous and didn't know what to do. And hopefully somebody would do the same for one of our children if they were in another neighborhood where they didn't fit in.
Becker: What was it like for people around you in the synagogue?
Everyone's an expert on security all of a sudden. The people that used to complain to me for years that we had police officers on Rosh Hashanah, and why did we need guns in the building, and why did we need a police car out front were the ones that were in my face, "Why isn't there a policemen here, and why hasn't the city sent over a police car?" And I'm like, "You're the pacifist. You're the one that doesn't believe in guns." "Well, I want a gun here right now, and I want to be protected.” People were nervous; people were confused.
But if the shooter's goal was to scare people and make them not want to go to synagogue, I think that, overall, it's been the opposite effect. The following Saturday there was a service at Beth Shalom and the place was packed. There were more people than we get on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
For a long time, the daily services were almost standing-room only. People were coming to shul, people who would never come to synagogue—Jewish, primarily, but of all faiths.
You know, in tragedy, the most important thing is that life goes on. You don’t stop. You show you're going to move forward. The thing that has amazed me in this time since, being at Beth Shalom and watching the parents that are dropping children off that are not Jewish, that are coming to a synagogue for the first time in their life for a friend's bar or bat mitzvah that they know from school or they know from camp or from a baseball league or something and saying, “Okay, see you in four hours, I'll pick you up.” That's the statement to me that we won.
I joked this morning to one of my congregants, because we had a lot of kids here, and we keep the door locked that we've been locking since the event. And we only let you in if we know you. But who was the one that was opening up the door and letting people in? Who was my security guard today was the four-year-old little boy. He was the one that was opening up the door for people that he basically knew.
And that's what I think security is worth. If somebody wants to get in, they're going to get in. My grandfather taught me that when I was a little kid. He had a butcher shop up on the Hill. Had the best alarm system for the day, so he had all the windows wired, and so they came in through the roof and stole the meat. If they want it, they’re going to get it. If somebody wants to hurt you, they’re going to hurt you. You can’t live your life in total fear.
And is there a little more security? Eh. There is. Is it real? I don't know. Is it meaningful? I doubt it.
There’s going to be death, and there's going to be destruction. But the reaction of every religion, of every faith was, “We're there for you” as opposed to saying,”Yeah, go out and get the Jews.” I mean there was a lot of times in Jewish history when the police were the ones giving the bullets, giving the guns to the perpetrators, not risking their lives going in to save you.
Becker: Could you describe the connection you had with any of the people that were killed that day?
Frank: I knew everyone, in one way or another. The problem with using names is I can no longer remember anybody’s name. But Dr. Gottfried was a member of this congregation and was here on a regular basis. Danny Stein used to come to the synagogue when he worked up the street, and we were in our old location. I would call up there in the mornings to his business where he worked at Meyers Plumbing, and I needed a tenth, and he would come down and daven. Irv Younger changed at the JCC with me on a regular basis and onwards and onwards. There's a connection to all of them when you're involved in synagogues, and you're involved in the Jewish life. I knew everyone, some more than others.
Becker: What impact has October 27th had on you as a Jew?
Frank: Living here in Pittsburgh, it's affected everything. Has it affected my daily life? I'm not going to synagogue any more or any less than I did before. Am I a little more cautious when somebody comes in the building, somebody comes to the door? Maybe. I'd be lying if I'm on full alert at all times, because I was always on alert at some point. But if we stopped everyone that doesn't look and act like us—you know all Jews aren't White, Caucasian, yarmulke-wearing individuals. So, there's Jews in every shape, flavor, and variety that come to synagogues. So, we want to be open, we want to be welcoming, and we want to include everybody with as wide a web as we possibly can to get people.
Having said that, I'm a sixty-one-year-old person who has lived my life, and I come with my biases and my bigotry that everybody has. So, what sets off my alarms is different than what sets off the other two people sitting in the room’s internal alarm as to what's strange and what's different.
I've got a Stronger Than Hate yarmulke on. “Stronger than Hate” isn’t sitting around with your soulmate that agrees with everything and saying, “Oh, we agree on everything. The world is good.”
You ever listened to Christian broadcasting? Sometimes I listen to the preachers in the middle of the night. I'm not getting converted, but I like hearing their arguments. I like hearing what they have to say. It's fascinating to hear what their opinions are and how they come to their conclusions.
Listen to what the other side has to say. Don't have to agree with it but know their arguments. Nobody's going to always agree with you. You're not going to always agree with you. You're going to change your opinion as life goes on. But the hatred comes from the inability to see other persons’ points of view.
Schoen: October 27th is written and hosted by Aliza Becker and Noah Schoen, and it’s produced and edited by Carly Rubin. We get administrative support from Tina Stanton Gonzalez of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Our music is from Blue Dot Sessions and our closing theme is Tree of Life by Nefesh Mountain. If you want to support our work and the creation of more episodes like this one, you can make a donation at October27podcast.org where you’ll also find episode transcripts, a link to this full unedited interview, and more. That’s October27podcast.org.
And lastly, thank you to all of the amazing Pittsburghers who shared their stories for the Meanings of October 27th oral history project. We’re so grateful for your trust and your generosity.