Tree of Life launches traveling exhibition
‘Lessons from the Tree of Life: Lighting the Path Forward’ opens March 27
Carole Zawatsky recalled the words America’s first president, George Washington, wrote to the Jewish community at Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island: “Let bigotry know no sanction.”
“What have we done with that promise?” she asked. “Have we delivered on that? How can we become a nation who works to eliminate antisemitism and identity-based hate in all forms?”
Zawatsky is the chief executive officer of the Tree of Life, the organization created after the most violent antisemitic attack in American history. She hopes “Lessons from the Tree of Life: Lighting the Path Forward” will begin to answer those questions.
The new traveling exhibition opens at The University Club Library at the University of Pittsburgh on March 27. It offers glimpses into the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and its impact on the three congregations attacked — Dor Hadash, New Light Congregation and Tree of Life — as well as the community at large.
It also points to the future.
“The first chapter looks at what happened on 10/27 and how this community responded so beautifully with an embrace of love,” Zawatsky said at a press event on March 21.
Told through four double screens, the first chapter pays homage to the victims of the shooting and tells the story of the attack; the remaining screens offer a glimpse into the future of the organization and site, and a look at antisemitism in America.
One screen offers a peek at a new design for the building to be constructed on the site of the attack, created by renowned architect Daniel Libeskind. The new design is markedly different from the one presented more than a year ago. The plan now is for the building to occupy a smaller footprint and to rise just one story, not two.
The exhibit also provides a first look and information about the memorial, which will flank the main façade of the building on Shady and Wilkins avenues.
In the center of the exhibition are several items from the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives at the Heinz History Center that, according to archive director Eric Lidji, are just a few of the approximately 10,000 items left outside the Tree of Life building or mailed to Pittsburgh in the months and years following the attack.
“We’re very pleased to be able to bring them to a larger group of people and to show what’s possible when people interact with a sense of loving-kindness that’s coming from total strangers,” he said.
Tree of Life Board Chair Michael Bernstein said the exhibit is the first step in telling the story of the Tree of Life.
“We feel a responsibility to honor the memory of those taken from us, to ensure the continuity of Jewish life and culture on the corner of Shady and Wilkins,” he said, and “to tell the story of resilience in the face of hate.”
Maggie Feinstein, director of the 10.27 Healing Partnership, called the exhibition an opportunity to learn about “the 11 amazing people who opened services and cared so much about their congregations, about the danger of hate speech, about the fact that we have to protect the freedom to worship and about the fact that we can raise up the voices and the stories that we believe — that more people will be able to love each other, to stand up, to find their voices.”
Helping to tell those stories is Amy Mallinger, a granddaughter of one of the victims, Rose Mallinger, and a representative of REACH, the speakers bureau for family members and survivors.
The exhibition, she said, represents all the stages of the journey she has been on since the attack.
“Seeing pictures of the Pervin Chapel, and all the memories I have with my grandma there, with my bat mitzvah being there, and looking at those windows and wondering when the service is going to be over, but also all the items in the middle that represent all of the people who reached out to us and the communities who were there for us in the days after,” she said. “It just all comes together in this room.”
Following its Pittsburgh run, the exhibit will head to Cleveland, New York and Miami.
In conjunction with the exhibit, Tree of Life will present “Songs of Resilience: Music for Lighting the Path Forward,” a concert of hope and remembrance featuring six cantors presenting traditional and contemporary Jewish music.
The April 3 performance will take place at the Heinz History Center and feature Tree of Life Rabbi and Cantor Jeffrey Myers; Temple Sinai Cantor David Reinwald; Cantor Emerita at B’nai Abraham of Butler County Michal Gray-Schaffer; Parkway Jewish Center Cantor Laura Berman; Cantor Emeritus at United Hebrew Congregation in St. Louis Ronald Eichaker; and Temple Emanuel Cantor Kalix Jacobson, who coordinated the concert, selecting both the performers and songs.
Jacobson said the intent was to ensure the concert felt intimate and would recognize the solemnity of the moment.
Often, Jacobson said, concerts featuring cantors can be big and boisterous, which didn’t seem appropriate. Instead, Jacobson listened as people shared their memories and stories from the day and the weeks that followed to help inform the music that would be performed.
“This is something that impacted everyone in Pittsburgh, whether you’re Jewish or not,” Jacobson said. “I didn’t want to pick pieces that were old school chazanut.”
In the end, Jacobson said, one need look no further than Psalms to understand the relationship between sorrow and hope in the Jewish faith.
“The Psalmists say, ‘Sow in tears and reap in joy,’” Jacobson said. “That doesn’t mean what happened was OK, but the community is brought together by tragedy. Pittsburgh is a microcosm of that.”
“Lessons from the Tree of Life: Lighting the Path Forward,” is available to view through April 25. PJC
David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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