Community members, survivors and families of 10/27 victims create mosaic with tiles from Tree of Life
It’s a constellation of sentimentality: a key, letters spelling names and words like “love,” a bottle cap, a pattern of four-leaf clovers — objects that mean something to someone.
As birds chirped and mellow music flooded the Frick Environmental Center, Squirrel Hill community members took turns passing by a newly installed mosaic mural, placing their hands against the tiles and saying a blessing, a solemn recognition of the mural as a quiet, safe place for grief.
The tiles were taken from the Tree of Life building, where a gunman killed 11 worshippers on Oct. 27, 2018: Joyce Fienberg, Dr. Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger.
Each community member spent six weeks working on the mural until its debut at Frick on June 2. Some lost loved ones in the shooting. Some survived it.
For survivors and married couple Rabbi Doris Dyen and Deane Root, the mural meant taking the pain of the shooting and transforming it.
Participants were encouraged to bring personal objects to add to the mural. Among the tiles are many embedded figures and seashells and, the longer you look, the more pieces you find. It’s a constellation of sentimentality: a key, letters spelling names and words like “love,” a bottle cap, a pattern of four-leaf clovers — objects that mean something to someone.
As Dyen worked on the mural, she found a shattered mirror in storage. It was a gift for her 60th birthday, and many of her friends had signed the back. Rabinowitz, one of the victims, had written on it. She took those shattered pieces and added them to the mosaic.
She connected it to the day of the shooting, where she and Root had planned to enter the synagogue but stopped because they saw shattered glass.
“It’s one of those sort of deep connections, you know. What occurred to me to bring personally was my own mirror pieces, but then I realized that it really is connected to the 10/27 [shooting],” she said. “It was glass that kept us from going any further and saved our lives.”
“To use pieces from a place where we lost — so many parts of our community were shattered in many ways and lives were shattered — to be able to use those pieces from that broken space, and to create something that was transformed into beauty was very meaningful,” Root said.
“It’s no longer sort of shattered, jagged edges,” Dyen added. “They’re still there, but the totality of the mosaic mural is not jagged and shattered. It’s whole.”
The idea of making shattered pieces whole is central to the project. It was conceived by therapists Ted Cmarada and Susan Spangler. Over the six weeks and 10 sessions, the participants ventured into Frick Park and spent time in nature, worked on the mural and ended the sessions reflecting around a candle at a center altar.
While in nature, they gathered materials to press into clay medallions that speckle the design.
Many organizations — Jewish Family and Community Services, 10.27 Healing Partnership, Age-Friendly Greater Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and Media, Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy and Lively Pittsburgh — supported the creation of the mural, dubbed the Healing with Nature Mosaic Project. The group was guided by mosaic artist Laura Jean McLaughlin.
Cmarada and Spangler drew on the grief and loss they’ve shared as a married couple to inspire the use of each mural-making session as a therapeutic space. Spangler would bring in a Pueblo storytelling figure, a gift from her mother, to remind Spangler of her mother’s ability to tell a story. Others brought their own objects to the altar.
“We work from our own authentic experience in order to work with other people going through their real and deep and emotional experience,” Cmarada said. “We may go in communities that are quite different from one another, but the grief is no different.”
Rituals were a key part of the sessions. At the first session, participants picked up stones and placed them around the center altar, forming a ripple like those in the mural. As they placed pieces of the mirror in, participants were encouraged to say a prayer, blessing or a name.
While they shared somber moments, the sessions weren’t without levity and joy.
“There was a feeling of family, and sitting around the mosaic table really felt like breaking bread together,” Spangler said. “It really felt like a Thanksgiving table where we were all together, sharing life together, making this thing, making our meal, our mosaic meal together, and sharing stories around the table.”
Their therapist gave the two of them rocks in the first year of the shooting. The granite rocks had three different layers within them, which reminded their therapist of the three congregations affected by the shooting: Tree of Life, Dor Hadash and New Light.
When Durachko brought her rock to add to the mural, Stein followed suit. Among all the occupied spaces on the mural, there was just enough space next to Durachko’s rock for Stein to add hers.
Stein wasn’t able to join as the group finished the mural, so she saw it for the first time at the unveiling. Attendees were encouraged to write messages on hearts and place them on the wall around the mural.
“It was awesome and overwhelming that it came together so well because doing it and seeing it were two different things,” she said. “When we were working on it, it was just sort of like a jungle, but it did come together so beautifully.”
The mural will be available for visitors to view over the summer at the Frick Environmental Center. While no plans are set for the mural after the summer, Spangler and Cmarada hope that it will continue to find new places to give viewers a space to reflect on their own grief.
“We all have come with grief and with some kind of trauma in our lives,” Root said. “That individual pain is like the individual broken pieces that we all put together in physical form into something that is beautiful.” PJC
Abigail Hakas is a freelance writer living in Pittsburgh.
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