First anniversary of shooting attack on US Synagogue

A memorial outside the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on Oct. 30, 2018.

The first anniversary of the shooting that killed 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburg is Oct. 27, 2019.

The leaves were falling that Saturday in October a year ago. The Halloween skeletons dangled around the front door. Howard Fienberg and his wife, Marnie, were enjoying a lazy morning in their suburban Washington, D.C. home when the phone rang.

It was Howard’s brother, Anthony, calling to tell the couple that there’d been a shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where Anthony and Howard had attended with their parents growing up. He had just heard it on the news.

The Fienbergs had no doubt Joyce Fienberg was at services that morning. Howard and Anthony’s 75-year-old mother went to synagogue every Saturday — indeed, every day.

The Fienbergs tried Joyce’s cellphone. When she didn’t pick up, they assumed she was busy helping others.

That was typical Joyce.

A consummate volunteer, especially after her retirement and losing her husband in recent years, she cared deeply for everyone she met.

Howard and Marnie Fienberg outside their home in Vienna, Virginia.

So Howard and Marnie threw some clothes in a bag and got in the car for the four-hour drive to Pittsburgh.

“We quickly determined once we couldn’t reach my mom that we should go and just be supportive,” Howard Fienberg said. “I was under the blindly optimistic assumption that her phone was off and that she left it behind or hadn’t paid attention to it because she was focused on helping other people.”

This weekend the Fienbergs will be back in Pittsburgh to remember Joyce, as they’ve been a dozen times since that awful day of the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history. The Tree of Life shooting, which killed 11 and wounded seven, has forever changed the lives of American Jews, who were jolted to discover they were not as safe as they had long assumed.

The Anti-Defamation League reported this week that at least 12 white supremacists have been arrested for alleged roles in terrorist plots, attacks or threats against the Jewish community in the year since the massacre. That includes another shooting in April at a synagogue in Poway, California, that left one worshipper dead and others injured.

As they partake in the Tree of Life anniversary events this weekend — a private get-together with other victim families, a memorial service, Torah study sessions, a community service project — the Fienberg family will contemplate the toll of the tragedy in different ways.

More of this feature at RNS, see –

[[] https://religionnews.com/2019/10/24/one-year-after-tree-of-life-a-couple-looks-to-the-past-for-a-way-forward/ ]

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[[] https://religionnews.com/2019/10/23/tree-of-life-synagogue-pittsburgh-antisemitism-showupforshabbat/ ]