Squirrel Hill resident helps ready memorial garden before 9/11 and start of Jewish new year
'There’s just a lot of goodwill in that garden'
With foliage showcasing the seasons, and new buds perennially offering hope, a garden is a testament to time. Working with the earth, especially this time of year, elicits a sense of optimism, master gardener Lauren Mallinger explained.
“It’s a preservation of feeling,” she said. “You see a renewal of life.”
For nearly three years, Mallinger, 72, has volunteered at Kavod Garden. The 40-foot area, located in Stoystown, was constructed in 2024 in collaboration with Pittsburgh’s 10.27 Healing Partnership.
Located 40 feet from the Remember Me Rose Garden — a “living tribute” to the memory of the 40 people aboard United Airlines Flight 93, who overtook terrorists and downed a plane headed toward Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001 — Kavod Garden serves as the Jewish community’s tribute to Flight 93’s passengers and crew, and offers space for visitors of all faiths to reflect and hope for peace.
Nearly once a month, Mallinger treks from Squirrel Hill to Stoystown. Often, with a fellow volunteer or two in tow, she weeds, prunes and helps tend an area that includes nearly 500 plants and a host of hollies shaped in a Star of David.
“There’s just a lot of goodwill in that garden,” Mallinger said.
Over the years, the Squirrel Hill resident, whose mother-in-law, Rose Mallinger, was among the 11 worshipers murdered during the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, has bonded with other people who have experienced “similar issues of grief and sorrow,” she said. Together, volunteers have “created beautiful things.”
Working hand in hand is sort of a “phoenix rising out of the ashes kind of thing,” Mallinger told the Chronicle. “A lot of the people that volunteer up there are also very religious in their own right.” And by snipping leaves, mulching and beautifying a space together, a “feeling of closeness, camaraderie” has come.
In time to mark 25 years since 9/11, a new visitor’s center has been built at the Remember Me Rose Garden site. Landscaping is underway, according to organizers. A dedication is planned for Sept. 11.
Mallinger said she won’t be in the garden that day — it’s Rosh Hashanah — but when the Jewish new year arrives, she said she’ll consider lessons espoused both within the synagogue and in the dirt.
Rosh Hashanah is a “renewal,” she said. “It’s a chance to look forward and ask ‘What will you do? How will you be next year? How are you going to treat your fellow human being?’”
At tables throughout Pittsburgh, foods eaten on the holiday — apples, honey, dates, pomegranates and round challahs — are reminders of the importance of the harvest, nature’s rhythms and the desire for a sweet new year.
Building on the theme, rabbinic literature explains that Rosh Hashanah is the day to begin calculating shemitah — a seven-year cycle in which the final year requires land to lay fallow and debts to be released — vegetable tithing and orlah, a biblical command forbidding use of fruit for the first three years after a tree’s planting.
When Rosh Hashanah arrives this year on Sept. 11, there will be much to consider — even inside a garden 75 miles from Squirrel Hill. There’s a “similar goal of love, worship and remembering people that were meaningful in your life,” Mallinger said. Whether they were on Flight 93 or inside the Tree of Life building, taking time to remember loved ones is “humbling,” she continued, especially when “you all come together over a plot of land and you work together to recreate.”
Rosh Hashanah is traditionally marked by renewal, but the period shouldn’t be seen in isolation, said. “Every year you plant.” Seeds are placed in soil. The sun comes. Rain soaks the earth. Time passes, she said, “and you see the product of your plantings the next year.” PJC
Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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