The Philadelphia Synagogue Shooting at the Squirrel Hill Stand Against Gun Violence, Incident 23-year-old Jean Clickner and her husband Jon Pushinksy
Squirrel Hill Stand Against Gun Violence said in a statement on Wednesday that it was the responsibility of politicians and legislators to fight against common-sense gun laws.
Others were not good. Abraham Bonowitz, the executive director of Death Penalty Action, which opposes capital punishment and has written about his opposition to the death penalty in the Pittsburgh case from a Jewish perspective, noted that appeals were likely to drag the case on for years, “reopening wounds repeatedly.”
Some organizations praised the verdict. Michael Masters, the national director and chief executive of the Secure Community Network, which provides security training for American Jewish institutions, said that the sentence “sends a message to violent extremists, terrorists, and antisemites everywhere that the United States will not tolerate hate and violence against the Jewish people, nor any people of faith.”
Jean Clickner, a congregant from the Tree of Life synagogue, said she was against the death penalty in general but did not fault jurors for unanimously recommending that the gunman be sentenced to death.
Jean Clickner and her husband, Jon Pushinksy, who are members of the Dor Hadash congregation, one of three that was attacked inside the synagogue, kissed each other on Wednesday as they left the courthouse following the verdict.
They said they took this position because they believed that the shooter crossed a line. “Too often in the past — and not just the recent past — governments and religious authorities have looked away when murder and mayhem occurred against Jews.”
“Many of our members prefer that the shooter spend the rest of his life in prison, questioning whether we should seek vengeance or revenge against him,” Stephen Cohen and Barbara Caplan wrote in the statement.
The co-presidents of the New Light congregation, which lost three members in the attack, issued a statement acknowledging the wrenching debate that had preceded the trial.
The family of a 97-year-old member of the Tree of Life congregation who was killed in the attack, and her daughter, feel that the sentence is proof that this type of heinous act will not be accepted.
The family of a couple killed in their 80’s expressed their gratitude to the jury and said they respected their decision.
Nor did relatives and friends of the victims or members of the wider Jewish community all react the same way when the jury delivered its verdict. Some expressed firm approval of the death sentence or acceptance that the jury had reached the right decision, while others were disappointed at the outcome.
Mr. Bowers will very likely spend years, if not decades, on death row as his case makes its way through the appeals process — something that some of those who had opposed the pursuit of the death penalty have spoken of with dread. The announcement of the verdict did, at least temporarily, bring to a close one question that had loomed over the congregations for years. Many others were unanswered.
After a jury determined on Wednesday that Robert Bowers, the gunman who killed 11 worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue, should face the death penalty, loud sobbing could be heard in a hallway of the courthouse and several relatives of victims of the shooting could be seen crying as they walked out of the courtroom.
Judgment Votes for the Death Penalty in Antisemitic Attack by Rabbi Doris Dyen, of Pittsburgh, Va
“There’s no going back to the way things were — that’s not going to happen,” said Rabbi Doris Dyen, who had been in the parking lot that October morning to attend services with Dor Hadash, but stopped when she saw the shattered glass of the windows. A worship routine that feels right to her has been difficult to find. She said she looks forward to that changing, someday.
The jury, apparently, agreed. In the middle of July, the jury took two hours to decide that Mr. Bowers’s mental health problems were not severe enough to make him ineligible for the death penalty.
Eric Olshan, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, said that the person doesn’t have a mental illness. He told the jury that he knew what was in his mind. It’s full of hate, antisemitic and extreme white supremacists.
But experts called by the government disputed many of these diagnoses, and argued that the virulently bigoted views that Mr. Bowers expressed about Jewish people and immigrants were not just products of his own delusional thinking but rather views shared by thousands of others on extremist websites. Prosecutors described the months of planning that he undertook, the studying of different potential targets, and the hundreds of antisemitic posts Mr. Pittsburgh had made.
His lawyers argued during the penalty phase that Mr. Bowers had suffered from severe mental illness, and that he was damaged by a chaotic and unstable childhood. He had been committed to psychiatric hospitals multiple times during his life and tried to kill himself more than once.
Several experts called by the defense diagnosed him with schizophrenia, and one psychiatrist, who had interviewed him for nearly 40 hours, said he had become obsessed with delusions about his duty to fight the forces of Satan before the approaching apocalypse.
Source: Jury Votes for Death Penalty in Antisemitic Attack
The Pittsburgh synagogue shooting of Howard Fienberg killed on a morning before he stormed in the building of the Tree of Life, New Light and Dor Hadash
Mr. Bowers’s defense team, which included Judy Clarke, a lawyer with a long record of defending people accused of capital crimes, had repeatedly offered to have Mr. Bowers plead guilty in exchange for life in prison without the possibility of release, but the government rejected these offer
After declaring online that he needed to act to protect the white race, Mr. Bowers, armed with an AR-15 rifle and three handguns, stormed the synagogue shortly after the congregations — Tree of Life, New Light and Dor Hadash — had begun gathering in separate parts of the building for morning worship.
He killed Rose Mallinger, 97, as she huddled under a pew with her daughter, whom he also shot and wounded. He killed Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, 66, of Dor Hadash, who had heard gunshots and run down the hallway to offer help. In the downstairs kitchen, he killed two members of New Light and shot another man, who was hiding in a closet.
He stalked the hallways and chapels, murdering members of all three congregations. He shot and killed David Rosenthal and Cecil Rosenthal while they were greeting worshipers at the door. He killed Ms. Fienberg in the entrance to the chapel before entering among the pews and killing Mr. Simon and his wife.
The “lengthy but fair judicial process,” said Howard Fienberg, whose mother, Joyce Fienberg, was killed in the attack, was “a marker and a reminder that we belong here. This is where we are and where we have been throughout our life in this country. We remain a part of it and we always will.”
Some said that as raw and painful as the trial was at moments, it was the first time that they had truly learned what happened that day. The break with the long history of governments looking away when Jewish people were targets of violence signifies a break with that history.
The members of the three congregations that had been meeting for services in the Tree of Life synagogue on that gray and drizzly Sabbath morning in Pittsburgh have never come to a consensus about whether a death sentence would be a just outcome. But many had come to appreciate the trial itself.
Robert Colville, the US district judge, will formally impose the death sentence that the jury recommended.
Source: Jury Votes for Death Penalty in Antisemitic Attack
An anti-semitic hate crime in U.S. history, and the fate of a man killed in a synagogue
Nearly every morning for three months, family members and survivors quietly gathered in a federal courtroom in Pittsburgh. They listened to witnesses recount the terror of the morning nearly five years ago when a gunman murdered 11 worshipers in their synagogue, and to witnesses who tried to explain what drove the man to commit such horror.
The survivors and families of those killed received a mix of solemnity, gratitude, and relief after the verdict was rendered.
The family of Dan Stein said that justice had been served after his death in the attack. Even though I won’t see my dad, I think a weight has been lifted.
The October 27, 2018, massacre is considered to be the greatest antisemitic attack in U.S. history and the death sentence is the first handed down in federal court during the Biden administration.
He said that a hate crime like this one can cause pain to individual victims and their loved ones and lead entire communities to question their very belonging. “All Americans deserve to live free from the fear of hate-fueled violence, and the Justice Department will hold accountable those who perpetrate such acts.”