Synagogue shooting survivors share how global support restored faith in humanity

In the weeks and months following the Oct. 27, 2018, Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the survivors and family members of victims received thousands of gifts and letters from people around the world, most of them strangers.

Jodi Kart, whose 88-year-old father, Melvin Wax, was murdered during the attack, felt uneasy at first.

“I was in such a fog. I had not a processed what had happened,” Kart told a group of about 60 friends and neighbors at the University of Pittsburgh’s University Club on April 22. “I felt very vulnerable, and all of a sudden, I’m receiving things from strangers. And it felt uncomfortable.”

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But as the days progressed, she said, she began to “look forward to receiving the cards and the letters and the items.”

“Suddenly, I could see that there was so much kindness in the world and that was the exact opposite of what I had just experienced,” Kart recalled. “I had experienced the worst kind of hate that anybody could experience.”

When she began to focus on the fact that people took the time to reach out to her, “it truly was like a wave of kindness,” she said.

About a year later, when the items started coming more sporadically, Kart missed receiving them.

“I didn’t realize how impactful they were,” she said.

Several of those items were on display from March 27-April 25 at the University Club, showcased in the exhibit “Lessons from The Tree of Life,” which was created in partnership with the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives at the Heinz History Center. The exhibit is slated to travel to Cleveland, New York and Miami over the next year.

The items range from heartfelt notes, to children’s drawings, to handmade Judaica, such as a challah cover embroidered with the names of the 11 people who were killed: Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Dan Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger.

Kart was among a panel of speakers from REACH (Remember, Educate and Combat Hate), the 10.27 Healing Partnership’s speakers bureau, which connects with schools in the region to share firsthand accounts of the real-world consequences of antisemitism and hate-based violence. Also on the panel were Amy Mallinger, whose grandmother Rose Mallinger was murdered during the attack; Andrea Mallinger Wedner, who was seriously wounded in the attack, and whose mother, Rose Mallinger, was killed; Martin Gaynor, a survivor of the shooting and a former member of Congregation Dor Hadash; and Dan Leger, a survivor of the shooting and a member of Dor Hadash.

The panel was moderated by Eric Lidji, the director of the Rauh Jewish Archives, which cares for the objects sent by people who felt moved to respond to what Lidji described as a “public tragedy.”

In the expansion of grief that happens when a tragedy is broadcast far and wide, he said, “a lot of very unusual things happen. All of a sudden, people who don’t know you feel connected to you. And one of the ways that manifested in Pittsburgh was that people from all over the world sent things to Pittsburgh, and they sent them in ginormous quantities.”

So far, the Rauh Jewish Archives has catalogued at least 10,000 objects that came in after Oct. 27, 2018.

“And they come from all over the place, from towns that you would not think of would care about Squirrel Hill, from other parts of the world,” Lidji said.

Lidji said it was important to consider the process of creating these objects.

“When somebody makes something by hand, they are thinking about you the entire time they’re making it, and you can feel that when you look at these objects,” he said. “But the thing that you can’t forget is that they were actually meant for people. They were meant for specific people. They were meant for the people who were most directly impacted by Oct. 27, and they were meant for the larger community and for the city. And part of what we’re trying to do now is to reconnect that human bond that was intended originally.”

The panelists shared how meaningful it was for them to receive the cards and objects.

“The support that I found all around was what got me through this whole thing,” Wedner said. “Gifts, cards, notes … I felt a love and support from everywhere and I never felt alone. I appreciated everything that I got. I probably still have a lot of the things hidden in a drawer, but someone took the time to put those in the box, put them in the mail and send them to me.”

Many of the letters Wedner received came from school-aged children.

“Teachers were teaching them about the victims,” she said. “We got tons of letters — big envelopes of letters about my mother — and these children wrote beautiful things about my mother, and it was so meaningful. And I’ve kept them all.”

The items Leger received, which his wife brought to his hospital room, were part of his recovery process, he said.

“My hospital room was really decorated with lots of beautiful drawings and things that people had made to send to me that Eric[Lidji] later helped me catalog and put in order,” he said. “But, you know, she would bring in about 10 a day, and she would sit there and she would read them to me. Show them to me. Hang some of them on the wall.”

When he finally went home, he realized that for every 10 items his wife brought to the hospital, there were about 300 more.

“So I literally have thousands of these things in my home that now are part of the archives, because I didn’t feel that they just belong to me,” Leger said. “They belong to history, and Eric is really good at making sure that the history is retained and organized and ready to be shared.”

Leger stressed the importance of reaching out to others in pain.

“Everybody has an obligation to reach out to other people, to let them know that someone cares about them, because you don’t know who might not have anybody to care about them until these things happen,” he said.

What people send is less important than the fact that they took the time to send it, Gaynor said.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s a painted rock, if it’s a paper mâché flower,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how beautiful or professionally it’s done. The words don’t matter for the fact that someone cared, and this is a concrete expression of that. That’s what matters.”

In fact, Mallinger said her family received a hand-painted portrait, purportedly of her grandmother, but that really depicted someone else.

“We were a bit shocked by that,” she said. “But just to know somebody sat down and painted this decent picture of someone they thought was Rose Mallinger, it really meant so much. It wasn’t her, but that was OK.”

After Oct. 27, Gaynor said, he “was in a very dark place. I was very worried. I was very afraid. I didn’t know what was happening to my country, and I did not know whether this was still a safe place for me to be as a Jew. I didn’t know if it was time to leave, or if I would know when it was time to leave. I didn’t know how I would protect my wife if we were attacked.”

Then the notes and objects began coming in. Pittsburgh’s sports teams began showing their support, as did other community members.

“I had emails, texts, phone calls from people,” Gaynor said. “These things all made a huge difference. My faith in humanity had come close to shattering, and these restored it. It made plain to me again that the overwhelming majority of people in our country and in the world are decent, kind, caring people. … Yes, there are some people who hate, there are evil people in the world. That is a fact, but there are very few of them relative to everyone else.” PJC

Toby Tabachnick can be reached at ttabachnick@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.