California resident arrested for threatening former Tree of Life executive director
Phoning in hateMelanie Harris made antisemitic calls for almost 5 years

California resident arrested for threatening former Tree of Life executive director

“There are people out there who would love nothing more than me not to exist,” Reich said.

A view of the Tree of Life synagogue, which housed three congregations, New Light, Dor Hadash and Tree of Life, photographed Wednesday, April 19, 2023, in Squirrel Hill. (Alexandra Wimley/Union Progress)
A view of the Tree of Life synagogue, which housed three congregations, New Light, Dor Hadash and Tree of Life, photographed Wednesday, April 19, 2023, in Squirrel Hill. (Alexandra Wimley/Union Progress)

It was only a few weeks after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that Joel Goldstein received his first voicemail message from Melanie Harris.

He said the call was strange and filled with antisemitic terms.

“I had never encountered anything like that before in a public setting, and it took me a minute or two to gather my thoughts,” Goldstein said.

Goldstein is a former executive director of Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha congregation. He resigned a few months before the shooting at the building and was still mourning the friends he had lost.

The message from Harris was just the first in an odyssey that would traverse three states and nearly five years. It would include Goldstein, his wife Linda Myers, Myers’ child J.E. Reich, the Anti-Defamation League, several police forces and the FBI.

Myers said they answered some of the calls that came after the initial voicemail.

“It seemed like it was a recording,” she said. “You tried to talk to her, and she kept saying the same thing over and over again. I said we really need to report this.”

Myers began recording and transcribing some of the calls so that she could give them to the police.

The antisemitic messages attempted to connect Reich, who had recently had a story published in Vanity Fair about their experience growing up at Tree of Life and in Squirrel Hill, and the victims of the shooting.

Goldstein and Myers reported the calls to their local police force — they were living in Oakmont at the time. The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh’s then-director of community security, Brad Orsini, notified the FBI.

Initially, Myers said, the local police added extra patrols around their home and stationed an officer outside of Reich’s Pittsburgh apartment 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The calls continued. Myers described Harris’ voice as “weird.”

“It was monotone, it was mechanized-sounding and I think she wanted it to sound like a recording,” Myers said.

Eventually, the FBI told the couple that the calls were likely a recording and that, somehow, they had ended up on an antisemitic call list, Myers said. The FBI also said the couple was not likely in danger and that nothing could be done because there were no threats in the messages.

Still, the calls persisted. Myers said that about 80% of them mentioned Reich. All had antisemitic messaging like, “Run like a hymie, kike,” “kiker,” “Heil Hitler,” a fixation on Anne Frank and mentions of death in a German oven. The calls never referenced Goldstein directly.

If the couple didn’t answer their phone, Harris would call back or leave 3-minute messages filled with hate speech.

Each time a call was made, Myers would report it to the ADL so that it would be included in the organization’s public hate crime statistics — first to the Cleveland office, which oversees Pittsburgh, and then Miami, where the couple resettled several years ago.

Over the years the couple became accustomed to the calls and Myers began to occasionally challenge Harris, hoping to glean information they could pass along to the police.

Yael Hershfield, division director of incident response and law enforcement initiatives for the ADL’s Southern Division, called the messages she heard “pernicious, serious and long-term harassment.” She explained that the messages she listened to rose to the level of threats and she presented the recordings to the FBI in Miami. She also helped Goldstein and Myers take the necessary steps to prepare for an investigation.

Because the case involved different states, the FBI was able to get involved.

Harris, of Riverside, California, was eventually arrested and in March pled guilty “to knowingly and intentionally transmitting a threatening communication in interstate commerce.”

Myers said Harris “definitely suffers from some form of mental illness.” Myers also called her a “racist” and “an antisemite.”

Reich, who identifies as nonbinary, said that as a queer person who’s a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, they always lived within the proximity of antisemitism and hate crimes. Harris’ phone calls actualized that reality.

“I was always aware of the dangers that exist out there,” Reich said.

And unlike many who repeat the claim that hate doesn’t exist in Pittsburgh, Reich said it can and does live everywhere.

“There are people out there who would love nothing more than me not to exist,” Reich said, “just because you’re Jewish or queer or whatever.”

Reich doesn’t shy away from talking about the emotional and physical toll the case has taken on their life.

“There are so many ways this has affected my life. It made my life a lot smaller,” Reich said. “There’s a unique paranoia I lived with for a long time, just about my own safety and my loved ones. It was so difficult to talk about. If I tried to describe what was happening it sounded like I was making it up.”

For Reich, Harris’ antisemitic actions exist in the same continuum as the Holocaust.

“We have a handful of photographs of long-dead family members,” Reich said. “My dad has them in a photo album, and we’ll never know their identities because they were erased by the force of antisemitism.”

Harris is scheduled to be sentenced on May 23 in Miami and faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison. PJC

David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.

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