The Lives Lost In The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting washingtonpost.com
They were the synagogue’s most faithful.
Two brothers who’d walked to services each week since boyhood and now, in their 50s, handed out hugs and hellos at Tree of Life’s front entrance. The local doctor who helped set up Dor Hadash’s weekly meetings and led its Torah studies. An 88-year-old retired accountant known to attend New Light Congregation’s services each Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
When the gunman entered on Saturday, his bullets found members of each of the three congregations that shared this space in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill.
The names of those killed, released by authorities Sunday, amount to a roster of “the regulars.” Those slain were Tree of Life’s beating heart, as much fixtures of this synagogue as the fading pews.
Rose Mallinger, 97, was said to have barely missed a service in decades, for years volunteering to prepare breakfast for her fellow congregants. Joyce Fienberg, 75, enthusiastically took turns as the front-door greeter. Irving Younger, 69, sat in the back and handed out prayer books to those sneaking in late.
Like most houses of worship, Tree of Life kept open doors, offering shelter from the winds and the rain, refuge from perils and snares of the outside world. Within its walls, members found fellowship and built community.
All were free to join: from the weekly faithful to the long-absent family member to the unknown traveler.
But on Saturday, it was an an enemy who entered the open door.
Police have said Robert Bowers, who has been charged in the shooting, wanted “to kill Jews.” Social media postings in Bowers’s name show he feared the foreign refugees he believed these worshipers would help find safe harbor here.
So Bowers grabbed his guns and shouted in anger as he entered Tree of Life, squeezing the trigger he hoped would put out its pulse.
By the time the shooting had stopped, 11 of the faithful were dead, slaughtered in the shelter of their sanctuary.
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