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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.
Noah Schoen: When Aliza and I first reached out to people across Pittsburgh at the start of the oral history project, we began with the adults I knew as a kid, my parents’ friends. But it wasn’t long before I noticed something interesting—none of them were born here. Almost their entire social network was made up of fellow transplants.
In some ways there are two communities within this city—one of people who moved here last week, or fifty years ago, and another that has been here for much longer.
But when it comes to having deep roots in Pittsburgh, there aren’t too many people who have a leg up on Cheryl Moore. Cheryl was raised by a Presbyterian father whose family goes back hundreds of years in Western Pennsylvania, and a Jewish mother whose grandparents immigrated to Pittsburgh from Eastern Europe at the turn of the century.
She is a fierce and committed Jew with a unique perspective on the challenges that Jewish people face. It is Cheryl’s honesty, and her willingness to talk about hard things, that make her such a thoughtful voice on Judaism, antisemitism, and racism.
Cheryl Moore: I am Cheryl Moore. I was born in Pittsburgh and raised in Pittsburgh, all in Squirrel Hill. I left for a number of years, and then moved back, but then came home to Squirrel Hill, and have been living here since.
My mother's mother came from Odessa after a massive pogrom. Her parents said, “We’re out.” She did, in fact, think that the streets would be paved with gold, and was very disappointed coming through Ellis Island to see that they were not paved with gold, and were, in fact, filthy. She had family here in Pittsburgh, and she settled here. And then she met my mother's father, who came from Mihaileni, Romania, who was a tailor. He was a proud communist. They had conversations at the dinner table every night about overthrowing the government. So, he went to work in a number of different department stores as a tailor here in Pittsburgh, and was fired from all of them because he would organize.
He was a big official in the Garment Workers Union and was in Philadelphia for a meeting and came back late at night and was killed in a car accident. So she was seven, her brother was fourteen. Their mother spoke Yiddish and Russian—very little English. So, they struggled.
Schoen: What was it like growing up in Pittsburgh?
Moore: So, growing up in Pittsburgh was wonderful. I grew up on Pocusset Street. My father was Presbyterian and very spiritual, but not really into organized religion at all. He was a cop, he was a detective, but he was also a musician, played in clubs in the Hill District.
My mother was raised in a very Jewish home, but was not spiritual, and not into organized religion at all, and was a scientist, and just sort of rejected the whole religious practice aspect, but did send me to Hebrew Institute for preschool, and through all of Sunday school and Hebrew school. Hebrew Institute was for families who did not belong to a synagogue either, because they couldn't afford it, or because they were protesting something and chose not to affiliate with a synagogue. Everything also there was very heavy. So,the example I always think of is the way we sang “Mi Chamocha.” We sang “Mi Chamocha” like a dirge at Hebrew Institute. It was a sad and heavy song.
And I was passionately Jewish. When I would walk home on Pocusset Street, I was pretending to be Deborah, or David. It didn't have to be a female, but the biblical men and women of Judaism were living in my mind all the time. I mean I loved the stories and the lessons, and it was very important to me. My father, who was not Jewish, really encouraged that. He loved that I was spiritual, and that I was learning, and that I had that.
Moore: My father asked me to tell him what I was learning, you know, to explain what he called Old Testament stories to him. And we would talk through them. He really wanted to learn and was into how it made me feel and my pride. I think he loved that I was really into my Judaism.
Schoen: Sweet.
Moore: Yeah, very, very. Not sure how much you know about Presbyterianism, but it's not very warm and effusive, and people don't get very emotional, so I think it was different for him, and he liked it.
So for my mother, Judaism was about everybody’s trying to kill us, basically. It was really dark and heavy, and my father kind of encouraged the light.
I think that the Judaism of my mother made me feel kind of vulnerable and unsafe, and my father's encouragement of my Judaism was about strong figures, strong women, strong people, brilliant people, thinking people, kind people.
Because my father was not Jewish—and his last name is Moore, and my last name is Moore—there were times where I did get “Who are you?” from my friends’ parents and grandparents. “Who are you?” “Who is your mother?” and, “What was your mother's maiden name?” So when “Friedman” came out of my mouth, it got a little bit easier.
So there were times where, you know, there was a little bit of, “Not sure that she's Jewish enough to be your friend.” And sometimes it was a little hurtful, but generally it was a welcoming, warm, inviting community.
Schoen: I was wondering if you had any other experiences of antisemitism?
Moore: Yes, lots. So, my parents, they sent me to a YMCA camp. And we went to this YMCA pool. Oh, and I always wore a Jewish star, even as a little kid. And I'm in the deep water, and I suddenly became aware that people were throwing things at me in the water, and were yelling something that it took me a minute to understand, which was “Christ killer.” So, I was going underwater crying. I was literally crying underwater.
On the bus on the way back they kept saying, “Hitler should have finished all of you. Hitler should have killed all of you. Christ killer.” So, I didn't go back to that camp.
And then I went to Brandeis and had maybe the one non-Jewish kid in the school as my roommate, who used to taunt me by looking out of the window and saying, “Look at that girl's hair. It would make a great lampshade. Look at that kid. He would make great soap.” I kid you not.
And then I got my graduate degree at NYU. And then I went to work at JP Morgan, where, on the first day, when my boss was taking me around, introducing me to people, he said, “This is Cheryl. She just graduated from NYU.”And this guy said, “Oh, we're hiring from NYJew now?”
And I don't necessarily think that my face screams Judaism, so I'm sure he did not think that I was Jewish. And I said, “Yup, you've got this big Jew from NYJew.” So to me, it was kind of shocking that at Brandeis and in New York City, on Wall Street, I got antisemitism, but I did.
And I think that being Cheryl Moore has made people comfortable to express antisemitism in front of me, not realizing that I'm Jewish.
Schoen: What impact has it had on you?
Moore: I think that when I was little it was scary and confusing, and then it sort of became frustrating, like, “Why can't you see that I'm the same as you?” Or, “I'm nice, I'm okay, even though I'm Jewish.” And anger. I mean, it’s based on things that aren't real. Sometimes you can see that. It’s people are maybe trying to feel better about themselves or whatever situation or to understand something that's threatening to them by demeaning someone else. So, I guess I can understand in some ways where it comes from, but it just feels very unfair. You are hating me or not liking me or assuming something about me because of my genetics, half of my genetics?
Schoen: So when you moved back to Pittsburgh to have children and raise your family, what was Jewish life like there?
Moore: It was wonderful. I mean Jewish life with children, I think, is fabulous. I think that was my favorite time being Jewish. Being a Jewish mother of young Jewish children. There was so much learning, and there was so much socializing together, and there were playgroups, So Jewish kids being with other Jewish kids was great.
I joined Rodef Shalom, and I got very involved with adult learning. And lo and behold, there was a woman rabbi, and she was playing the guitar, and she was singing “Mi Chamocha” in a really happy way.
Truly, I wasn't sure that it was the same song. And then it dawned on me, and I said to her like, “So the ‘Mi Chamocha’ that I grew up with—it sounds like this—and this is so different.” And she's like, “You're right. It's a happy song. The context of it is, it's happy; it's a celebration.”
It's so symbolic to me, that song, because it went from the emphasis on, “They're chasing us, right, the Egyptians are chasing us, we’re at the edge of the sea,” to, “But we got away from them.” You know, we’re now free.
So I had the Rodef community and the Squirrel Hill community and the Pittsburgh community. And I felt like that was a gift to give to my children, because it was like a building full of grandparents every time they went to Rodef. And every time we walked out of our house and walked a few blocks onto Murray and Forbes, there were all kinds of people there who knew them and missed them and looked for them if they didn't see them. I mean their absence would be noted. It's nice to be missed. It's nice for somebody to notice if you're not there. It's important.
I think Squirrel Hill is very much about that. People have their routines. There’s the walkers, and there’s the dog walkers, and there’s the shoppers, and there’s the people that go to this coffee shop or that coffee shop. And people notice if you don’t show up, people are going to say, you know, “Where were you? And that’s what Squirrel Hill is about to me—a place where people notice your absence.
I mean Judaism permeated our lives and defined our lives. Basically, everything that we did was Jewish. We lived Jewishly. We talked about everything in a Jewish context. The values that I taught my children and hopefully modeled for my children were in a Jewish context. Problem-solving was in a Jewish context. We scheduled our time by Shabbat and by holidays. And simchas were celebrated.
And we even brought my mother along a little bit. My mother became more involved in the Jewish community, because her grandsons wanted her to come to things and to be part of it.
Schoen: You really love being Jewish.
Moore: I do love being Jewish. Being Jewish is pretty great.
It’s just really—provides everything. And it's also challenging. It's not necessarily easy to be Jewish. I think in Judaism you have to learn. You have to decide what is meaningful to you, and you have to actually work to be Jewish, so I love that. If you allow Judaism in, I don’t want to say lifesaving, but it's sort of really life enhancing.
Schoen: I'm wondering if there's anything else about your life story that you’d like to mention or include?
So, I was eighteen, in between my freshman and sophomore year of college, I was living in Pittsburgh in the summer, and I was dating this African American man. He’s actually Puerto Rican but Black, dark.
We were sitting outside one night next to each other. And we were surrounded by eight police officers, thrown on the ground and put in two different paddy wagons and processed, spent like nine hours in jail, arraigned in the morning. The charges were disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, public intoxication. We hadn't had a sip of anything. We were sitting outside, chatting.
And my father was a cop, remember? And I didn't mention my father during the whole process. I called my father, and he said, “People hate interracial relationships.” So, this was in 1982.
We hired a lawyer, and the lawyer said, “They'll never show up.They probably just looked up and saw you sitting there, didn't have anything to do at the time, and decided to give you a hard time. So, we'll go to the preliminary hearing, and they won't show up, and it'll be dropped, and that'll be that.”
So we went, and I think there were five that showed up. So our lawyer went and chatted with them and came back and said, “Okay, you're going to go and apologize, shake each of their hands, look them in the eye, say you're sorry, and they're going to make it go away.” And I said, “I’m not doing that, I didn’t do anything.” And Ray said, “No, no. That’s exactly what we’re doing.” Because, of course, his perspective was a young Black man, which was a very different perspective than a White girl.
And so we did. I walked down the line, I shook these police officers’ hands who had thrown me on the ground, you know, stuck the rod thing into me a couple times, falsely accused me of doing all kinds of things, never read me my rights. I looked them each in the eye and apologized, and everything went away.
So, that was a huge turning point in my life. It was the first time I think I realized that we're not always in control of our destiny and of what will happen to us. I remember thinking, “This is the United States, like I'm a straight-A student sitting outside doing nothing. And because I'm sitting next to somebody who's Black. I now was arrested—spent time in jail. I had to apologize for something that I didn't do. But this is what happens to other people all the time.
So, it was the first time that I ever felt that my destiny. You know, I'm not in charge of it all the time. And I started to feel very vulnerable, whereas before I felt pretty powerful. And this was a horrible experience, I mean very traumatizing and really a horrible experience.
So, the other thing that happened—I’ll get super personal here—is that my first husband and the father of my children was abusive. We escaped. Spent some time at the women's shelter. And again, when things were happening, I was thinking, “I graduated summa cum laude. I have a Master’s degree. I can speak a couple languages. I can't believe this is happening to me,” until eventually I realize that it's happening.
So, those two things, I wouldn't wish them on anybody, but I think they've given me something that a lot of people in my socioeconomic group in my community don't have, which is the realization that anything can happen. And the degrees and the success and the things that we think sort of put us above those things happening don't make a difference.
Anything can happen.
Schoen: I want to turn now to the events of October 27th, 2018. What did you think when you found out that it had happened?
Moore: So, I wasn't shocked. Not because I was expecting it to happen at all, but there was just this feeling of sort of a natural progression of things that had been happening. I mean the enabling, maybe encouragement of—of hatred, of xenophobia, of all of the -isms. And, I mean I think there was an element of like “It’s happening three blocks from my house,” but it was not that shock. And, “How could this have happened at all?”
I did, for months, cry every day just at random times, like walking to work. I mean I was definitely very, very, very sad, and just filled with grief about it. But not shock, unfortunately, not shock. I did then become consumed with thinking about hatred and where that can go, because I'm so interested in what happens in people's minds that encourages them to do heinous things.
I don't know if that's the way that I feel more in control. And maybe that's because I have been exposed to so many different kinds of people over my life and have known and loved them despite some not nice sides of them.
So after October 27th, I took my sons and my mom to Auschwitz. And then three weeks after that, I took my boys on a tour of Alabama, because I had such a need to explore hatred, specifically antisemitism, but also just generalized hatred. And obsessed about it—and still do, but not quite as intensely as I did in probably the six months to a year after.
I mean, in some ways I have sort of the imposter syndrome, because I didn't lose a family member. I mean I knew people. My mother was friends with Bernice and Sylvan, and I knew a number of people who died and people who were wounded.
I wasn't there personally, and it wasn't my family members. But certainly everybody had their own reaction, which deserves to be felt and dealt with. But I mean I probably think about it every day, still, in some way. Not with the same deep grief that I had for a long time, but I definitely think about it.
Fear is traumatic. It’s just such a violation. You don't have the right to do that. I mean sometimes we hurt other people by accident, or in a way that just can't be avoided, but to make somebody afraid is such, a, an exertion of power and control over somebody. Violence just takes everything from people.
I resent that somebody came and made people afraid to wear their Jewish star or wear their kippah in public or walk into a synagogue.
Schoen: You've spoken a lot about antisemitism and racism, and I'm curious how you think about the relationship between those two things.
Moore: I think we have to really get hold of ourselves and look at hatred as a whole, like globally, but it's also super important for us to look at antisemitism and racism and homophobia separately.
I mean for years I heard the saying, “Black lives matter.” And then somebody said, “All lives matter,” and then a lot of African Americans were very upset by that. And I kept thinking, “What's so upsetting about saying ‘all lives matter’?”
And then Tree of Life happened, and then I said it was about antisemitism. and many people said it was about hatred. And it struck me why it's so important to say “Black lives matter.” Of course, we acknowledge that all lives matter, and of course, we know that there's hatred everywhere, but to dilute it, like that is a problem.
What happened on October 27th was about antisemitism. We don't need to water it down as hatred. We can acknowledge that there's all kinds of hatred and talk about antisemitism specifically. I think it's really important to look globally at hatred, but each individual hatred needs to get its time.
And what Black people face, people of color face, is certainly similar in some ways to antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, but it's unique in many ways as well.
When young Black people reach into their pocket to pay for their soda at the store, they get shot. It's important to say “Black lives matter.”
Schoen: Have there been any gestures from outside of the Jewish community that were significant for you after the synagogue shooting?
Moore: I work with, well mostly non-Jews, some of whom came into work on Monday and said, “Oh, my God, like I'm so glad you're okay. I mean, that was horrible.” They just sort of moved on, and that’s it. But there are some who will still say, “Did you know this?” or, “What does it mean in the pictures that I saw of Tree of Life? And, “What is that statue that I saw on the news in the front?” And, “Have you ever experienced antisemitism, and what is it like?”
And I really appreciate people who just want to stay there. I mean I understand the feeling of wanting to just not look at the horrible scene. But people who ask questions, who really seem to want to understand, I really appreciate that. I personally really appreciate that. And I think it's really important.
I hope that we are able to get a grip on this disease in our society and are able to somehow right the ship. It feels like a huge and almost impossible task, but I don’t think that we can afford to not at least try.
I'd like to look down from wherever I am a hundred years from now and wow. Now I actually would be surprised if some horrible violent event happened and people relate to each other in a loving, open, “live and let live” way.
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.