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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.
One of the focal points of Jewish life in Pittsburgh is the Jewish Community Center, the JCC, which is located in the heart of Squirrel Hill. As a kid, I played basketball at the JCC gym, swam in the pool.
And Alan Mallinger was someone I would often see when I went there. He coached kids in seemingly every sport offered by the JCC, and as health club staff, he would often be in the front of the building, greeting people as they came in. His warm smile always made me feel welcome, and his twin children Eric and Amy were my age.
On October 27th, 2018, Alan’s mother, Rose Mallinger, was killed in the synagogue shooting. His sister Andrea Wedner was shot and wounded, but survived.
In this episode, we don’t just meet Alan. We get a feel for his whole family, a tightly-knit bunch. and we also get to hear some of his favorite memories of Rose, the Mallinger matriarch.
Allan Mallinger: I'm Alan Mallinger. My mother was murdered on 10/27 at the Tree of Life synagogue, and my sister, who was sitting next to her, was shot and wounded, and, thank goodness, survived.
Well, I was born and raised in Squirrel Hill, five minute walk from the JCC, and actually probably a five minute walk from the Tree of Life synagogue. We lived in the middle of what I felt was the middle of Squirrel Hill. And now I'm actually right next door to the house that I grew up in.
We lived in a duplex, a side by side, our family, and my mother's sister and their family lived next door. And, you know, there was three kids in our house and three kids in their house, and you know we were in and out of each other's houses a lot. We did a lot with them.
I mean when we were little there was probably you know twenty, twenty-five kids on the street, and just being in and out of houses, and you know there would be no problems you know going into someone else's house and just you know sitting down. And our one neighbors, they owned a pawn shop, and they got a big old colored TV. We used to go down there on Saturday mornings and watch cartoons, because it was in color. It was the first color TV.
And my parents and my aunt and uncle were very involved in the Tree of Life. My mother and her sister were involved in the sisterhood and you know my dad, he was very involved in the men's club. And you know there’d be times on a Sunday night when they wouldn't have enough for a minyan, and they would call my dad and he'd get my uncle, and he would grab whatever kids were around, and we would walk over to Tree of Life and we would make the minyan.
And we went to Wightman School kindergarten to 6th grade and we went Allerdice 7 to 12th grade.
And after I graduated from high school, I went to Connelley Trade School for graphic arts and that was a two-year program. Then after that I started working in the graphic arts field printing, basically. I worked in that field for quite a while, actually. You know I guess I like working with my hands.
I worked at a lot of different places. I got into the union because I was working at a union shop. You know I worked at Continental Can Company, and you know we would print Iron City beer cans and Quaker State oil cans, and Right Guard cans, and you know Arrid XX Extra Dry aerosol cans We would print all that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, the printing field was something that I enjoyed.
Currently work at the Pittsburgh Jewish Community Center. My childhood, we used to go to the JCC, and it's a big part of our life.
Our family was raised there. I met my wife at their outdoor swimming pool. The twins, Amy and Eric, they're they’re twenty-eight years old, and I've been working at the JCC for twenty-seven years, so they were born and raised there, just about. And our older son, Andrew, was five when I started working there. Ultimately, all three of them worked there at some point, volunteered there, Eric you know coached basketball a little bit, Amy coached basketball. And so yeah, it’s certainly been a big part of our life.
It was nice, I could see the growth of you know not only our kids but you know a lot of their friends. And it was just nice to be around that.
My sister lives in Squirrel Hill, and my brother is in Squirrel Hill—my brother is not married, and my sister has two kids, and you know we have three kids. And you know even nowadays when we get together with their kids we have a good time. We joke around a lot. You know, nobody takes anything too serious. So that’s, I think that's a good thing.
Schoen: What do you like about that style, that approach to life?
Mallinger: I just think that you know your family is your family, and you can joke around with them, you can be serious with them, and you know whatever is said or whatever happens, it's within the family. And people get it over it or people get it or they don’t get and you work it out because you have to, because you're family. That's the nice thing about our family, I think we do that with a lot of stuff.
Schoen: How was your sense of Jewishness evolving or changing, if at all, over these years?
Mallinger: Well, I mean we'd still go to you know synagogue on all the High Holy Days, of course, and you know I remember one place I worked, there wasn't a lot of Jewish people there, and I would tell them, I need off for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, whenever, you know if it would be during the week. And they, like, "Well, What's What’s you know Rosh Hashanah?" I said well, "That's the Jewish New Year." Jewish New Year? You don't celebrate on January first?" And I'm like, "No, we celebrate then too. We like to party.”
And so you know my running joke with them was all the time was like, "Why are we closed for Christmas? I'll work Christmas. I don't have any problem working Christmas. Why, what's the big deal?"
I mean again, you know Lauren, my wife was, she was Jewish. And we would go to High Holy Days together. She was born and raised in Butler, and her family was still in Butler, her parents. And you know we would go to Butler. We would go to synagogue there when we could. You know I would go occasionally. My mother would say that the sisterhood is having a big oneg on a Saturday morning. They're going to have some really good food, you should come to services, so I would go. But you know I wouldn't call myself real religious. I mean we raised the kids Jewish, obviously, and you know we were members of the synagogue once the kids were born, and so, yeah, I guess we were, we were pretty Jewish, whatever that means.
Schoen: It sounds like you used humor to navigate some of the tensions that might come up around being Jewish in some of these non-Jewish spaces.
Mallinger: Oh yeah, I tried to. Most of the non-Jews that I worked with were okay.you know, some of them, I don't know if they've ever even met a Jewish person before. But you know I never really had any problems. I never had any antisemitism, at least directed right to me, or had any confrontations about, you know, being Jewish or not being Jewish or anything like that. That was not a problem.
Schoen: I want to pivot now to the events of October 27th, 2018. And just to start, if you'd just tell me a little bit about that day and what it was like for you.
Mallinger: My mother lived next door. And my sister would pick her up on Saturdays. I mean, I would go sometimes to shul. If my sister was out of town, I would take my mom to shul. But you know this was just a normal Saturday. My sister picked up my mom. I remember being up in my bedroom and looking out and seeing my mother getting in the car, and my sister walking around the other side and getting in the car, and off they went to shul.
And came downstairs and just were going about our day, me and Lauren. And I got a phone call from a retired police officer who came to the JCC. He was Jewish. And he told me that there was an active shooter outside the Tree of Life. And I was like, "Wow, that's pretty crazy." And he said, "Do you think we should call the JCC and have them go into lockdown?" And I said, "Well I mean I can see if I can get a hold of somebody, and I'll let you know."
He called back and he said, "There's an active shooter in Tree of Life." And I said, "My mother and sister are in Tree of Life, I need to go over there." And he said, "You don't need to go anywhere near there. If this shooter comes out, he can start shooting people on the street." And I said, “What am I supposed to do?” And he said, “There’s nothing you can do.”
And then we got a call from my nephew that my sister, his mother, had been shot and was in the hospital. She was going in for surgery. And so then I said, "Well, what about Bubbe? You know, we haven't heard anything."So I'm walking around just trying to find somebody to say like, "Where are the people that got out?" And I couldn't find anybody to talk to or nobody knew anything.
Finally, they said, "We're going to take everything up to the JCC. That's going to be our control central.
And so we went up to the JCC. And I didn't really know any of the other families. Everybody was kind of at a different table with their families. And then I started to see people that I knew. So then I started talking to them. And you know I'm like, "What are you doing here?" And they said like, "Well that was my uncle. Mel Wax was my uncle." And you know someone else, "Oh, I'm very good friends with the Rosenthals, I’m very good friends with you know Diane Rosenthal—you know nobody really kind of knew what was going on and it just kind of got to the point where—I mean I obviously knew a lot of people who were there from the JCC. I said, ‘Hey listen if something happens, you know give me a call, I'm going to go home. We're not, getting anything done here."And we walked home, and I guess it was probably two or three hours later. Someone from the JCC called me and they said, "You need to come up to the JCC." And I remember it was dark, so it was probably you know 5:30. It was raining. My brother and I walked up. He took us into one of the conference rooms. There was some police in there, and the coroner was in there and assistant coroner I think was in there. And that's when they told us that our mother had died.
Schoen: What were the following days like for you?
Mallinger: Well, with my sister being in the hospital, you know that became our next point of focus, and you know getting our son home. You know of course, we had to deal with the funeral as well. And my brother and I went and we made arrangements, but we couldn't have a definite date of the funeral, because we didn't know what the status of my sister was going to be. And we weren't going to have the funeral without her being able to be there. And you know getting Andrew here, you know he took multiple different flights and it took him about thirteen, fourteen hours to get here, so we were all together. And just because of that, you know we were the last funeral of the eleven. And we spent time at the hospital quite a bit, and then just made the funeral arrangements. And that’s pretty much what we focused on the next few days.
You know, obviously, the word got out that it was Rose Mallinger, and you know all the kids' friends were calling them, and a lot of them started to come in, and friends of ours started to come into town.
And you know you could see all around, you know the community and the support we were getting from the JCC staff, and there was rallies happening, and it was amazing that our kids' friends, one came in from London. And we had friends that we knew that lived in California, Orange County, and they flew in, and they just said, "We just couldn't watch it on TV anymore. We just had to come and be in Squirrel Hill," Because they were in Squirrel Hill for many years. And it was just the outpouring of support and friendship, it was just amazing.
You know we were very busy you know doing different things, you know again making the arrangements and worrying about my sister and visiting with her, and it was a very busy time but it was a good busy because you know it just kind of kept your mind moving on to the next thing and not really focusing on you know what had happened. And although obviously that was always in your mind.
And as we saw all the different funerals happening, you know very sad. And I mean David and Cecil, I mean just terrible. I mean I would see Cecil not only at the JCC, but at the shul, and David would be at the shul and Irv Younger. Irv was a health club member, I would see him, he'd be in my office. We’d be kibbitzing, and he coached Maccabi games with me a few years, baseball. Dan Stein, you know Dan would come to the health club and play pickleball. And you know it was just very sad. And there's just a lot of different connections that were happening. All these text messages I’m getting, and I'm like texting back like, "Who is this?" A lot of people just didn't know what to do.
Schoen: At what point did your mind start to drift a little bit more towards reckoning with what had happened and the circumstances of it?
Mallinger: Well, I mean that would mainly be in the evening you know when we were home and the dust had cleared, basically. You know everyone was gone and it was just us. And everything kind of goes through your mind, you know.
"But why didn't I go to shul that day?" Or, you know "If I would have been there, would this have happened.” You know all that kind of stuff. "How does this happen?" or, "Why does this happen?" You know, during the quiet times when trying to relax at night and go to bed and just the senselessness of it all. That's kind of what we, we talked about a lot.
I mean, I never understand why someone would do something like that. I mean obviously it's happened way too many times, and you know, you kind of see it happen in, whether it's Parkland or Sandy Hook or you know wherever. You just kind of shake your head and it's just like, it's unbelievable And you just kind of sit back and say like, "Man, I'm glad that never happens around here." And then it happens around here. And you think, "Wow, if it happened around here, well, you know it's never going to happen to us," but it did.
Schoen: As the months started to go by, what happened next?
Mallinger: Well, the next thing was going back to work, and that would have been the next thing. But prior to that, I talked to Brian Schreiber, who's the CEO of the JCC, my boss, and you know he asked me, "Where are you going to do the shiva?" I said, "Well, we're just going to do it at the house." He said, "No, you can't do it at the house. You need to do it at the JCC."
The JCC was very helpful to us, and, you know, and having the shiva there was a great idea. You know we were able to have my sister, they actually brought her up in a wheelchair one night. We were just about done with the shiva, and this woman came in and she had, I think it was three boxes of food. It was kosher food, she said. And she was there with her two little kids, and I forget where she came from, but she came a distance. And she just you know was there to support and give us condolences and you know wanted to give us these meals.
It was incredible, you know the outpouring from the community was unbelievable, from the city, and just everywhere around the world. All three of us have stacks of cards from all over. And It was very heartwarming to see that and be a part of that.
And then going back to work —that was difficult. You know having worked at the JCC for as long as I did I you know, it was obviously a lot of people that I knew,a lot of people that I even didn't know that were coming up to me and you know giving me condolences And there was a lot of people that came up to me and and were hugging me, and they were crying. And it was, it was tough. And I just had to get through it. And you know even it's been three years, and there's still people that you know I haven't seen for a long time, and they’ll bring it up and say you know, "I never really had a chance to talk to you, and I wanted to let you know how sorry I was about your mother." And that part was difficult, but again, you just have to do what you have to do and..
I live right next door to where my mother lived and I think about it every day. You know I would take her every Friday, because I was off on Fridays. I would take her to the beauty salon, and then we would go out to lunch, unless you know one of the kids was off or one of the kids was in from out of town or something. Then they would take her and they would go out to lunch, and that was the Friday activity. And wherever you would take her, she would go. She would grab on to you, you know her balance wasn't great, and she had her cane, and take off, and there you go.
Schoen: What were the other aspects of her personality that were essentially her?
Well, you know of course, most older people, you know they kind of say what they want to say when they want to say when they want to say it. And we always joked, when we were in shul, she would whisper to you, or what she thought was whispering. And you know you could hear her three rows in either way you know. She'd be like, "Can you believe they just walked in? It's halfway through the service, and they're just coming in?" I’d say "Shh, shh. Quiet, mom."
And one time she fell on the porch, so we took her to urgent care, and she had hit her head a little bit, so the urgent care said, "Well, we can't treat you because it's a head injury. You have to go to the ER." So we took her to the ER. She’s getting checked out. And the doctor comes out to me and says, "How old is she?" I said, "She's ninety-three." He said, "She had a cracked kneecap. How is she walking?" "I didn't even know that that happened." And he said, "She shouldn't have been walking. She couldn't have been walking." I said, "She was walking."
So you know she was just amazing. She was a tough, tough lady, and I try to follow in those footsteps, you know. Do what you need to do.
Schoen: Any other ways you particularly want to remember her by, or that you do often remember her by?
Mallinger: Yah, just some little things, that kind of inside jokes and ah. One was, whenever you were talking to her on the phone and you knew she was done with the conversation, it would be like, "Alright. We'll talk to you soon." She would get that, "Alright." So, you know, whenever we're talking to somebody and we'll say, "Alright," I say, "Okay, time to hang up." So maybe those kind of things.
Yeah, just things that she would do, and, you know, we’ll do them, and or, "Oh, Bubbe would love that," the kids will say and try to make some of the foods that she made. That’s how we remember, think about her. Always in a good way, though.
Schoen: Glad you got all that time with her in those last few years.
Mallinger: Yeah, I was glad you know I was in the city pretty much my whole life, and she got to know my wife, Lauren very well, and she got to know the kids very well. And they liked spending time with her, which was nice to see.
It was nice having her around, and who knows how long she could have gone? We think about that a lot.
Schoen: Before we close, if there's anything that you'd like to say to address future generations who might be listening to this interview?
Mallinger: Ah, well just cherish your family and respect them and try and stay as close as you can to them, because nobody makes it out alive and you just have a limited time with the people that you love. And—I know it's a cliché, but cherish every moment. And hopefully you don't take any hard feelings with you when you go.
Stanley Mallinger: Hello, I’m Stanley Mallinger. I’m Alan’s older brother, and we are both part of the REACH Speakers Bureau, a group of family members and survivors of the synagogue shooting who share our stories with students, schools, and organizations.
REACH stands for Remember, Educate, and Combat Hate. Six members of my family are involved with the REACH program, which was started by my niece Amy. We share about our experience of the shooting and its aftermath and answer any questions that people have.
If you are interested in bringing a REACH speaker panel to your school or organization, check out the episode description for a link to learn more. We would love to meet you and share our stories with you.
Noah 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.