PITTSBURGH — April 24 marked the beginning of the trial of the gunman who is accused of killing 11 worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October, 2018.
The Tree of Life synagogue is surrounded by a chain link fence draped with paintings from schools around the country, in Pittsburgh, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
The trial threatens to broadcast the white supremacist ideas that lay behind the attack, even as it may help survivors move forward.
Beginning on April 24, these countervailing expectations came into play around the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American Jewish history. The trial, which began with jury selection, is expected to last about three months.
Few doubt the guilt of the accused shooter, Robert Bowers, whose name is hardly uttered by Jewish residents of Squirrel Hill. But what remains unclear is what the trial will mean for American Jews — and for the families most directly affected by the attack.
Some hope for the defendant to get the death penalty — even though that will mean prolonging the legal ordeal — while others have advocated against it.
Some hope for the trial to shed light on the threat of white supremacy, even as renewed attention on the attack could inspire other violent extremists.
Some hope the trial will help them move past the tragedy, even as they know it will be difficult to hear the details of the shooting laid out in court.
The attack on Saturday morning, Oct. 27, 2018, killed 11 people from three congregations, all of which met at the same building, and injured six others, including four police officers.
The defendant faces 63 criminal charges, including hate crimes and murder charges. He has pleaded not guilty.
The prosecution is seeking the death penalty — a choice some relatives of victims are vocally supporting.
Previously, leaders of two of the three congregations that suffered the attack opposed the death penalty in this case.
“This massacre was not just a mass murder of innocent citizens during a service in a house of worship,” Diane Rosenthal, sister of David and Cecil Rosethal, who died in the attack, told local journalists, according to reporting by the Pittsburgh Union Progress. “The death penalty must apply to vindicate justice and to offer some measure of deterrence from horrific hate crimes happening again and again.”
Some survivors and families of victims told the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle that they intend to take time off work, delay a vacation or be away from family for an extended period of time to be present at the proceedings.
“I want to see justice happen, but at the same time, I hate to think about the families having to potentially see images of what happened and things of that sort,” Steve Weiss, who survived the attack, told the weekly Jewish newspaper.
“I’m sure they have mental images, but to have to actually see photos of victims and things of that sort I think can really be difficult for them.”
The killer offered to plead guilty in 2019 in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table, but prosecutors, determined to pursue capital punishment for the crime, rejected the plea.
The same thing happened in the case of the man charged with killing nine black worshippers in a Charleston, SC church in 2015. The shooter was sentenced to death. (In an illustration of the length of death penalty cases, his latest court proceeding happened in October, and he has not yet been executed.)
The alleged shooter’s lead attorney, Judy Clarke, has defended a series of high-profile attackers: the Unabomber, the attacker in the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics bombing and the Boston Marathon bomber, among others.
According to Pittsburgh’s local CBS affiliate, her singular goal is to avoid the death penalty for her client.
Parallels between the Charleston trial and this one are clear. Both concern shootings by alleged white supremacists in houses of worship, tragedies that have become gruesome symbols of a national rise in bigotry. In both, the culpability of the defendant was assumed before the trial began. Like the Pittsburgh defendant, the Charleston shooter has been lionized by white supremacists, including some who cited him as an inspiration for their own violent acts.
Some who are watching the Pittsburgh trial closely hope that it will bring new facts and connections to light. Amy Spitalnick, the executive director of Integrity First for America, a nonprofit that spearheaded a victory in a civil trial against the organizers of the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., hopes that the Pittsburgh trial illustrates the links among different white supremacist shootings — such as the attacks in El Paso, Tex.; Christchurch, New Zealand; and at a synagogue in Poway, Calif.
Spitalnick said that the accused Pittsburgh shooter allegedly communicated with the organizers of the Charlottesville rally on the social network Gab.
“Trials like this can really be illustrative of how deep the poison of white supremacy and anti-Semitism goes,” she said.
In the Charlottesville trial, she said, “The reams and reams of evidence . . . really helped pull back the curtain on what motivated the defendants, how they operated, the tools and the tactics of the movement, the conspiracy theories at its core.”
There’s also the possibility that, with the attack resurfacing the shooter’s motivations, and putting him back in the spotlight, it will act as an inspiration for other white supremacists.
In the years following the synagogue shooting, Pittsburgh became a kind of pilgrimage site for the defendant’s admirers — leading to continued harassment of local Jews.
In the face of concerns about retraumatization, Jonathan Greenblatt said the ADL is preparing resources on how to discuss the trial with students and amid the Jewish community.
“I would much prefer this trial didn’t happen — I would much prefer this crime never happened, I would much prefer that those people were all still with us today — but this is where we are.
“If there might be some ability to raise awareness among the non-Jewish population of what we’re facing, [that] would be of value.”
While the trial will conjure a mix of emotions for Jews locally and beyond, prosecutors will be more focused on the nuts and bolts of what happened that day and the details of the accused attacker’s actions and motives.
