As Kanye West has made apparent over the past two weeks, antisemitism is alive and well in contemporary America, where Jews make up only 3 percent of the population and yet are the victims of more than 50 percent of all religious-based hate crimes. None of those was deadlier than the shooting on Oct. 27, 2018, at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life—or L’Simcha Congregation synagogue—which took the lives of 11 innocent worshippers and wounded six others, and A Tree of Life: The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting revisits that massacre with intense sorrow and compassion. While it’s less concerned about the causes than the effects of that attack, its anguish is overpowering, and it serves as a familiar warning to Jews—and all other ethnic and religious minorities—about the mounting threats posed by domestic terrorists.
Directed by Trish Adlesic, A Tree of Life: The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting (Oct. 26 on HBO) is an examination of an open wound, as well as a portrait of a community simultaneously shattered and bolstered by tragedy. Its focus is on the testimonials of those who made it out of Tree of Life on that fateful Saturday morning, when Shabbat services were fatally interrupted by rapid-fire blasts from the semi-automatic assault rifle of Robert Bowers, a 46-year-old man who had come to the synagogue to kill due to his apparent fury over its association with HIAS, a Jewish organization dedicated to helping refugees. Avoiding dramatic recreations, Adlesic lets her speakers describe their unique (if intertwined) experiences during the siege, their recollections—about hiding in closets, fleeing through exit doors, and clinging to life as their friends and loved ones perished beside them—proving as vivid as they are heartbreaking.
For Audrey Glickman, survival involved fleeing to a rear-building room where she and Joe Charny tried to make themselves appear like bags of clothing donations. Andrea Wedner wasn’t as fortunate, suffering bullet wounds in a rear synagogue seat with her 97-year-old mother Rose Mallinger, who perished from her injuries. Upon hearing the first shots, nurse Dan Leger and Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz automatically ran toward the chaos in an effort to help those in need—a decision that cost the latter his life and resulted in the former being gravely hurt. Leger was fortunately rescued by paramedics, although no such luck was afforded to the likes of Joyce Fienberg or David and Cecil Rosenthal, whose relatives relay hearing reports that something was amiss at Tree of Life and knowing, instinctively, that their worst fears had been realized.
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To be a Jew in 2022 America is to understand that there’s a perpetual target on your back, and A Tree of Life: The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting thus feels—even to some of its subjects—like the story of an inevitability. Agonized grief is the order of the day, and yet there’s nonetheless resiliency in the way that those interviewed refuse to simply succumb to desolation, telling their tales with sober, clear-sighted lucidity, as well as expressing their feelings about whether Bowers—who will face prosecution in 2023—should receive the death penalty or life in prison. Bowers’ name is only uttered twice and his face is glimpsed once, as Adlesic refuses to expend any energy on the man himself lest it further his notorious reputation. It’s censure via omission, and moreover, a tactic that speaks to the fact that he’s less important than the vile movement which enabled and emboldened him.
Though Secure Community Network national security adviser Brad Orsini won’t literally articulate the source of Bowers’ fanaticism, A Tree of Life: The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting draws sharp, conclusive lines between Bowers and the homegrown white nationalists who are embraced and encouraged by former President Donald Trump, whose visit to the Tree of Life memorial is met with outraged protests. Director Adlesic assembles a montage of TV clips, news reports and online posts of past and present antisemitic ugliness, ranging from the American Nazi Party’s 1939 rally in Madison Square Garden to a YouTube video of the January 6 insurrection set to a woman singing repugnant alternate lyrics to U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” When it comes to despising—and blaming the world’s ills on—Jews, what’s old is always new again.
That, in the aftermath of this murder, Pittsburgh Jews felt compelled to take active shooter training courses is a stirring reminder—like all similar atrocities, which occur on a near-daily basis—that, with regard to guns, America is fundamentally broken. Additional proof of that reality comes via a 62-year-old Pittsburgh resident who’s set up a gun store in an abandoned synagogue only one hour away from Tree of Life, and who proposes that the solution to this national problem is to arm everyone. In his comments, as well as a discussion about the bonds that have formed between survivors of Tree of Life and those from Parkland and Charleston, A Tree of Life: The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting becomes a snapshot of a society hopelessly warped by detestable, unnecessary, and preventable violence.
In a late passage, composer and jazz trumpeter Hannibal Lokumbe recalls the excitement he felt when Audrey agreed to play the shofar (a traditional Jewish musical horn) on his composition “Healing Tones,” and A Tree of Life: The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting locates other heartening moments of people using this calamity to come together and strengthen communal bonds. Still, any sense of hopefulness is overwhelmed by crushing despair over the lives lost in this assault, and the scars it’s left on those who made it out alive. To see Audrey and Joe get startled by rumbling motorcycles (“It’s scary”) is to comprehend, via an everyday urban incident, the profound impact of such a crime, whose legacy lives on long after the media cameras have departed and the protests have faded into memory.
In that respect, A Tree of Life: The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting is a vital act of remembrance about men and women who were killed simply because of who they were—and, also, about the ubiquity, and ramifications, of an age-old intolerance that, as recently illustrated by Kanye West, refuses to die.
