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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
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.
Nina Butler is known for her warmth and hospitality far beyond Pittsburgh’s borders. I was introduced to her by a friend who lives in Israel. Nina, she told me, is Pittsburgh’s master Jewish connector.
After reaching out, Nina invited Noah and I to her home for Shabbat dinner just as we were getting started on the oral history project. The evening reminded me of a family Thanksgiving in its abundance and warmth. It was my first Orthodox Shabbat, and she and her family knew exactly how to welcome me into Jewish traditions I was only nominally familiar with. Just as generously as they shared their world with me, they showed genuine curiosity about my own life.
It was a memorable welcome to Pittsburgh, and I understood it even more after interviewing Nina who had moved to Pittsburgh after marrying a native. Nina is deeply committed to building inclusive Jewish spaces where nobody feels like an outsider.
Nina Butler: I'm Nina Butler, and I've lived in Pittsburgh for my entire married life, which is now forty-three years. It's a long time.
Aliza Becker: What was your community growing up?
Butler: I lived in Detroit. I lived in the suburb of Southfield. It was a newer suburb. I have two brothers, an older and a younger, and each one of us, one at a time, became observant through attending NCSY events. NCSY stands for the National Conference of Synagogue Youth. And the director from our region of the United States is actually the man I married. But that was after being in college. We were best friends first, and then it grew to something else.
My father was really so happy that we had become Modern Orthodox. And what had happened to Judaism, in those years—so, I'm talking the late ‘50s and really the ‘60s—is that there had been a big push before that for people who had immigrated to assimilate quickly. So, women pulled off their sheitels, and the dress was as American as you could be with bare shoulders and certainly pants, all of that. But they were compromises.
We davened growing up in B’nai David so it was an Orthodox kind of shul, but not really. Had mixed seating but used a Birnbaum siddur, so when NCSY had an event there, we had separate seating. The president of the shul walked by, and kind of had a meltdown there with all us kids. And he started to yell and scream, and he insisted that we drag those mechitzas out of the room, and he made us physically move them out of the space. And he insisted we not use them, and then he stormed off, and we were all kind of shocked. And we finished our davening with the girls standing outside, with the doors open, and the boys still inside trying to figure out what to do next.
But what that gentleman didn't realize is every single teen who went through that traumatic experience became observant, because we felt we had to fight for it. We had to think about what we were doing, and we had to fight for the right to observe the way we wanted.
Becker: Tell me about what it was like moving to Pittsburgh.
Butler: I was coming from concrete suburbs where everything is organized in a grid, by mile roads, and every mile road has another strip mall. There's three or four different basic house types and the door might be moved to one side versus the other, but you recognize the kinds of houses.
Moving to Pittsburgh where everything was older and the houses were just so different. There's arches of trees, huge old tree branches. It just charmed me to the soul.
Moving here was part of a time in life that was quite tumultuous. I was moving away from family, moving away from friends, moving to be with this guy who I was just head over heels for and starting school in a new place and moving to a city where he had a big family tree in the community, and I had nobody, nothing.
I was only here two, three years when I took on the job of being in charge of welcome wagon, in the synagogue that my husband attends, Poale Tzedek, that I attended too. How do you welcome new people to the community? So, I actually took my experiences and tried to think of how to pay them forward.
And we did have this really beautiful little life, living in the heart of Squirrel Hill. And I was going to the University of Pittsburgh, and my husband was going to Duquesne Law School. And we came back to our little coach house, and I got pregnant with our first child. And I had a perfect pregnancy and perfect delivery.
And then, the pediatrician in our practice, something had troubled him. And he asked if he could bring another doctor to see our baby. I said, "You can bring the world to come see our child, our perfect child."
Well, he sent in the head of surgery, and the head of surgery felt our son's belly, and said, "Your son needs immediate emergency surgery within the next twenty-four hours.”
They sent me home without a baby, which I'd never heard of. No one I knew had ever gone through that.
And my husband went over to the Children's Hospital to be with our baby who was having surgery. And after the surgery, he was told that the baby had cystic fibrosis.
And then our life became very different. And I had to grow up really quickly. I had to learn how to care for another individual who needed that care so much more than anything else going on in my life. And we were blessed to have that beautiful son in our life for twenty-four years.
I can tell you that our second son. He's brilliant, off the charts, and he is the one who those people who watch statistics would tell us not to have, because we have a one in four chance of every child having CF. Which also means that we have a three to one chance of not having a child with CF.
Number three, Uri is, he has Fragile X. And Fragile X is a genetic marker for autism. And we've learned so much from him, because he wakes up with a smile on his face, and he goes to sleep with a smile on his face, and he is the happiest person in the world. So even though he has developmental disabilities, I don't really know if he's disabled, because he is truly, sincerely, thoroughly happy. And it's something that all of us just dream of attaining one day, and he's got it. But he is really weird.
And number four is our only daughter. And number five, somehow lightning struck again at number five is also autistic. He also has Fragile X, but it presents itself more as someone with Asperger's. So, his social deficits are really what gets in the way. Where Uri is totally happy speaking to people who aren't there, our youngest son, JJ, struggles with how to fit in, how to meet people, how to participate in a typical conversation.
So, JJ and Uri are both, I'm very proud to say, contributing members of the community, where they do a lot of chesed, a lot of nice things for other people. And they still live at home with us, but they do have a lot more independence than other individuals their age who have similar prospects.
Squirrel Hill is a different Jewish community than other communities in America, and it's very important that you understand that, because it just draws the picture of why it was so shocking that something like this would happen in Squirrel Hill.
Coming from Detroit, where the Jewish community would pick up and move ten miles every ten years, the Jewish community of Squirrel Hill has been in the same place for hundreds of years. It's just such a stable community.
And there are Orthodox, Conservative and Reform houses of worship all within blocks of one another. And because of that, there's been negotiations for everyone to get along in a way that you just don't see in other cities.
We belong to five different shuls. And that's because some of them are little shtiblach, and the membership is just paying for upkeep of the cemetery, because that's what you do when you live in a small community. Fish are much bigger in smaller ponds, so each person really matters.
There's a lot of that intermingling where we work together for a common good. That's really unusual in America, but that's the kind of symbiosis that there is here in Squirrel Hill. So, that's why, when there is something so horrific that happens in one synagogue, it's shocking to all of us, because we care about one another.
When a new young couple moves to Squirrel Hill, if they're in our congregation, we pretty much tell them they're probably not going to have to cook for their first year, because they're going to be invited out every single Shabbat for a whole year. That's very common in the Orthodox community. It's just a kind of caring place.
That's the backdrop that I want you to understand before we get to October 27th.
So, October 27th. On that day, there happened to be a bar mitzvah in the Orthodox community. And as often happens, people from other congregations will either pray in theirs and go over just for kiddush to the congregation of the simcha, or they'll just spend the whole morning there, which means that, at the time of this going on several blocks away at Tree of Life, there are three or four hundred people at another synagogue up the street.
What happened in our synagogue is the waitresses were setting up the kiddush, and the waitresses are not Jewish. And there's windows, they're right on the street. There was one siren after another, after another, and then another.
The waitresses knew something was up, and their phones started ringing. In the congregation, people didn't have their cell phones with them. So they found out about the shooting and were notified that the building had to go on lockdown.
Somebody from Shaare Torah then had to run up to Poale Zedeck, which is up a couple blocks, and tell them they had to be on lockdown and spread the word.
People didn’t know. Lockdown, what does that even mean? Like, none of us even had an inkling what we should do with that.
One of the fathers who was manning the door there said that a little kid came up to him and tugged at his tallis and said, "Are there people coming to kill us?" It's rather heart-wrenching.
We got the notice that things were under control, and the lockdown was lifted. So, people could walk back home.
Walking home was eerie, because there was no traffic on the streets, no traffic at all. People walked home and carried on with their Shabbat meals.
By the end of the day, just a few blocks from our home, as people were walking to mincha and ma'ariv, the afternoon and evening services, hundreds of people had gathered at the intersection of Forbes and Murray, because some high school kids put out a call for there to be a rally. It wasn't a nice day, it was raining, and people came from all over to be part of this rally, to show support.
So, after Shabbat, the Orthodox community was starting to hear details. The names hadn't even come out yet of who had been killed. There were just rumors, but there wasn't confirmation. So, my husband and I, along with lots and lots of other people in the Orthodox community, just started to go over to the Tree of Life site.
And it was there in the streets that we got confirmation of some of the people who had passed away including Cecil and David.
Well, I told you that we had sons with disabilities. And our son Uri was a good friend of theirs, because they hung out together. And Cecil was kind of the mayor of the city. He would talk to anyone, anytime, and welcome them. And our son Uri is like that, too.
I want to just tell you a story about David and Cecil. David and Cecil were always the first people to show up in synagogue at Tree of Life. David was relatively nonverbal. And Cecil was the big, gregarious one. They would both come every morning to have breakfast with Augie Siriano, the janitor. And then David, the nonverbal one, would arrange all the tallitot and siddurim so they were all ready for services to begin. And Cecil, the big gregarious one, he would stand by the door. He would be on duty to greet each person who walked in the door, and to say “Shabbat shalom,” and hand the person a siddur.
And there's no doubt in people's minds, knowing Cecil, that that's probably what he said to the shooter when the shooter walked in. He probably greeted him.
We realized we had to tell Uri, because he needed to know. It was going to be on the news, and we didn't want him to hear from other people. And so we called him down to talk to him. And somehow this kid came to us and saw how choked up we were when we said we had some bad news for him. And he said, "Did Cecil die?" And to this day, I don't know how he knew.
I remember, as each name was coming out, how each one just hit right at your chest and knocked out your wind. Everybody knew somebody, and many of us knew several of the people. And all of Squirrel Hill was like that, where everybody knew some of the people.
Squirrel Hill was kind of thrown into chaos, didn't know where to go and what to do. During this tragic, chaotic time, the Jewish Community Center it’s leadership just rose to the occasion in a way that this community will never be able to adequately thank them.
People showed up to help. They just showed up, including psychiatrists and psychologists and doctors from other cities, who just got in cars and got here. So then, what do you do with them?
And one of the first things they need to do is have nametags so you can identify who is there to help. So, I love the fact that those nametags had each person's first name, big. Not last name—didn't matter. Under it, instead of having the organization they were from or the city they were from, under it, they decided to put one word. “helper.” So, there was Susie Helper and David Helper and Mordy Helper.
And somebody walked in, I heard, and took a look at all these nametags, and saw a bunch of people with that name "Helper" under it, and they said, "Are you all related?" And sure enough, someone said, "Yeah, I guess in a way we are." Mr. Rogers always said, "If you are in trouble somewhere, look for the helpers." And that's exactly what we could do here in Squirrel Hill.
Now, Pittsburgh has an Orthodox chevra kadisha. There's a Conservative and Reform chevra. The Conservative and Reform chevra turned to the Orthodox to be in charge of cleaning up the human remains that were left in the shul.
When a Jewish person passes away, we honor that body who had housed that soul by accompanying the body at all times until that body is buried. So, we had to sit in the medical examiner's office. And when the head of the Orthodox chevra kadisha posted the sign-up sheet, all of us took shifts so quickly.
I have to tell you that being a member of the chevra kadisha is really supposed to be very private. We're not even supposed to identify ourselves, because it's called chesed shel emet. It's called a kindness that you do that is such a true kindness, because there's no way the deceased person can thank you. So, it's supposed to be entirely selfless. Identifying myself as a member of the chevra is something that I do with a bit of discomfort.
Walking into Tree of Life was really eerie. We walked into the entrance that was off the social hall. And one of the lasting images in my mind was a card table in the main foyer. It was still set up for kiddush with the napkins neatly laid out, and the shot glasses and the schnapps were all right there, frozen in time.
I can tell you the people working came from all walks of life. There were doctors and there were housewives and there were doctors who were housewives. There were all kinds of you know men and women, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, working side by side.
In the building itself, I'm most thankful for the professional doctors who were there, because they had seen so much but still describe this as being so different from what you see in an operating room. But they understood intuitively that it wasn't so everyday for the rest of us. And they continued to circulate through the crowd to check in on people and make sure they were all right.
There was great care taken to make sure that people were not overextending themselves, either in the length of time that they were volunteering or in the particular tasks they were asked to do. Nobody worked alone. Everyone worked as a team.
And then we had funerals. The first one was for Jerry Rabinowitz. He was a doctor, a GP, known for his incredible compassion for people who had AIDS. He had actually gotten out safely, and he turned around and went back to go and get his friends, and he got killed.
An hour after Jerry's funeral, everyone went to the funeral for David and Cecil Rosenthal. David and Cecil's funeral was at the largest Reform temple. And over two thousand people came. The Pittsburgh Steelers came. It was unbelievable who was there. And we hadn't been to a funeral like this before, so we didn't know what to expect.
As the crowd quieted down and up on the bima were the two caskets of the brothers. The firemen, Engine Company Number 18in their dress white uniforms, came marching in two by two down one aisle to absolute silence in the room. They walked up to the coffins, they gave a stiff salute, and they turned around and went back up the other aisle. The whole engine company came and did this.
And then the funeral went on. We didn't really know what that was about, but it ends up that, although Cecil was the mayor, the gregarious one, David, the less verbal one, loved fire engines and firemen. And he spent a lot of his free time hanging out at the fire station. So, the fire chief the next day said, "We thought David would like that."
After all the funerals and all the shivas, Members of the chevra kadisha got together again with their plastic gloves and aprons and toothbrushes and goggles and knee pads. We had scrubbed every part of the building, and we had saved all the blood and all the body parts and anything we found that could have come from a human being. And we had bagged it all up so that after the funeral for all the victims was held, there was another funeral to bury the carpet from the children's room that could never be saved, to bury all of the gloves of all of the workers from cleaning up Tree of Life.
So, in the time after the shooting, people were really focused on how to be supportive and how to show their care and concern. Well, how do you show your care and concern to the children of the community?
Our mayor, Mayor Bill Peduto, really stepped up to the plate. He and a bunch of policemen came to Hillel Academy, and I heard he came to the other day schools, too. And he ate lunch with the kids. Then at the end of lunch, he said, "My name is Bill Peduto, and I'm the mayor of the city and these men all work for me. And we all came today to let you know that we are here for you, and we will keep you safe, and you can count on us." Who does that? Who takes that time and does that?
Becker: What did you do for comfort and healing from the trauma?
From having a child who had passed away, I learned what comforts me is doing things for other people. That it prevents me from sliding into a dark place. So, I guess I ramped up my efforts thinking of what I could do for other people. I'm the organizer of bikur cholim, efforts to support families who come to Pittsburgh for medical needs from out of state and out of the country. Our bikur cholim gathered around some of the rabbis who were involved and delivered them meals that week. So, they were getting some dinners from the Orthodox community, because it was something we knew how to do, and we could do without, without thinking twice. Everyone was so eager to do something to help.
I think that's an antidote against becoming depressed is to do random acts of kindness for other people.
Becker: What have you learned that you want to share with future generations?
Butler: I want future generations to be convinced, to know wholeheartedly that people are generally good. During this whole episode of Tree of Life, ordinary people acted in extraordinary ways, and each person has inside of them the opportunity to act in an extraordinary way. We saw that. It was palpable.
What happened was horrific. But I make a choice to prioritize in my mind those remarkable acts of chesed, those remarkable acts of kindness. That's what I want to be at the forefront of my thoughts, not one sick man's act of hatred.
Ze hu!