In PITTSBURGH
For several days, a team of archivists gathered at the Tree of Life synagogue to conduct a sensitive excavation.
They sought to preserve artifacts pockmarked with bullet holes and other residue caused by the mass killing that left 11 people dead five years ago, on Oct. 27, 2018.
Moving from a windowless basement to the synagogue’s Pervin Chapel on the main level to a children’s classroom on the top floor where the gunman was apprehended, the archivists carefully packaged each item, from the sacred to the mundane:
The large wooden ark that held several Torahs, handwritten scrolls containing the text of the five books of Moses. It had been built into the rear of the chapel stage. Bullets had punctured one of its doors and the marble base.
The central lectern in the synagogue — known as the shulchan, the Hebrew word for table — through which investigators had stuck a pink rod to determine a bullet’s trajectory.
Framed historical synagogue photographs from hallways, where gunfire had knocked some off the walls.
Sections of bloodstained carpets from the hallway — littered with bullet casings — in a classroom area where police officers were wounded in a shootout.
Children’s books and artwork from a classroom where the gunman dropped his AR-15 semiautomatic rifle when he ran out of ammunition and surrendered.
A section of drywall, pockmarked by bullet holes.
A blue-and-red rug spattered with blood stains over the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
A memorial board that featured the names of congregants who had passed away and lit up on the anniversaries of their deaths, marked with yellow police tape after the shooting.
In all, 31 items damaged in the attack were transported during a two-week period in mid-June to storage at the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives, housed about five miles away at Pittsburgh’s Heinz History Center.
If all goes as planned, synagogue leaders said, many of the artifacts will be returned to Tree of Life for public exhibition after the building undergoes a multiyear transformation into a museum and educational center dedicated to combating antisemitism and a memorial to the victims, as well as a synagogue space.
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The work in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood represents the most extensive attempt ever by a local community to document the grim legacy of a deadly mass killing through the preservation of damaged artifacts. It is happening at a time when such attacks, particularly shootings, have become an increasing threat to American life.
Over the past two decades, civic leaders in Las Vegas; Orlando; Charleston, S.C.; Parkland, Fla.; Newtown, Conn.; Blacksburg, Va., and other places have undertaken painstaking efforts to collect and preserve materials connected to attacks in their cities. Most have concentrated on documenting the outpouring of public grief left at makeshift memorials — crosses, Stars of David, stuffed animals, postcards, framed photos, letters, handicrafts, prayer blankets, candles, artwork, painted stones and other items.
In Pittsburgh, synagogue leaders hope that preserving the physical scars from the scene of the nation’s deadliest antisemitic attack will help animate the story of the assault on Tree of Life and provoke a more visceral reaction from those who hear it.
“As things came out and were packed away, the energy of the building changed,” said Eric Lidji, director of the Rauh archives. “What occurred to me was that the criminal brought energy into the space through what he did. It was captured in those objects. If used correctly, we have the potential to take the emotional energy and convert it in a way that is beneficial to society.”
On Friday, the synagogue honored the shooting victims at an annual commemoration ceremony, one darkened this year by the specter of increasing anti-Jewish attacks at home and abroad.
In 2022, there were 1,124 antisemitic hate crimes in the United States, up 26 percent, the FBI announced this month. The slaughter of more than 1,400 people in Israel, including some Americans, by Hamas militants three weeks ago provided a fresh jolt of fear and outrage in Pittsburgh.
“We have even greater resolve that what we’re doing is critical for the entire nation and the world,” Carole Zawatsky, chief executive of a new national Tree of Life organization dedicated to uprooting antisemitism, said in an interview after the Hamas attack. “It’s that much more important.”
A few weeks before the archivists began removing the items, Zawatsky guided a Washington Post reporter on a tour of the building, providing a sense of the magnitude of the preservation effort.
Off limits to the public since the shooting, the building had remained in a state of disrepair for more than 4½ years as synagogue leaders focused on assisting investigators preparing for the gunman’s federal trial this year and raising money for the renovation project.
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Wooden panels covered the front entrance, whose glass doors were shattered when the gunman fired at police. Inside, on a ceiling leading to the synagogue’s basement, under a sign for the New Light congregation, police initially scrawled “2 Vic,” indicating the number of victims found there. At some point, an officer had crossed out the number two and replaced it with a three.
Bullet holes were visible in the door to a storage room, where several congregants hid during the attack. One of them, Melvin Wax, 87, was hard of hearing and opened the door, mistakenly believing the attack was over. The gunman fatally shot him with an AR-15 assault rifle.
In the kitchen, a steel table was pierced with three bullet holes. That’s where Richard Gottfried, 65, and Dan Stein, 71, had taken cover before being shot and killed.
“For me, a synagogue is a home,” Zawatsky said. “And to think that a kitchen island was a place where you can imagine generations of people joyfully preparing meals for bar mitzvah celebrations and after Sabbath services — and people were shot there.”
Synagogue officials worked with a team of museum consultants to carefully package and transport the artifacts, including a large section of the bullet-hole-ridden wall from the third-floor classroom.
Pittsburgh SWAT officers Timothy Matson and Anthony Burke were shot and severely wounded in that classroom area. Matson was wounded in the head and a leg, while Burke was struck in the arm.
Matson testified at the gunman’s trial that he spent 16 weeks in the hospital and underwent 25 surgeries. He said he felt suicidal while trying to recover.
The synagogue housed three congregations — the Tree of Life, New Light and Dor Hadash — and members of each were killed in the attack.
The gunman, Robert G. Bowers of Baldwin, Pa., killed several congregants in the Tree of Life’s Pervin Chapel, including Bernice Simon, 84, and her husband, Sylvan Simon, 86, and Rose Mallinger, 97, whose daughter Andrea Wedner was wounded.
During the synagogue tour, yellow police tape circled an area in the chapel where pews and floor tiles, covered with blood, hair and skin, had been removed. The tiles were buried with the victims, per Jewish custom that all human remains are laid to rest.
During the gunman’s trial, Rabbi Jeffrey Myers showed jurors a blue prayer book that had been ripped open by a bullet. The book stands “as a witness to the horror of the day,” Myers, who survived by hiding in a bathroom, told the jury. “One day when I’m not there, this book tells a story that needs to be told.”
Bowers was convicted in June and sentenced to death in August after a trial that began in late April. He is currently on death row in federal prison in Indiana.
In the small community of museum archivists across the country, an informal network has developed to offer guidance on “crisis collecting” in the face of mass shootings, natural disasters or other deadly events.
The archivists point to the pioneering efforts of Tamara Kennelly, who oversaw the collection of items left by mourners at makeshift memorials after a Virginia Tech student fatally shot 32 people on campus in April 2007.
Yet their efforts have butted up against the searing real-time anger and pain in each community, raising thorny debates over whom the materials belong to and when is an appropriate time to remove and store them.
Kathy Craughwell-Varda, a museum curator in Newtown, helped lead collection efforts after the December 2012 shooting in which 20 first-graders and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. She recalled a “turf war” breaking out as local residents argued over what to do with the overwhelming amount of items left at makeshift memorials.
“The town was just scooping things up — they wanted to remove the constant reminders,” she said. “I said, ‘Let’s create a collection.’”
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The town held a community meeting with a state library official to solicit public input and developed guidelines: Any materials left for specific families were first offered to them, Craughwell-Varda said, while curators took possession of items sent to the town or left unclaimed.
Newtown has not displayed the artifacts, Craughwell-Varda said, but the public can access an online database of what is in storage. It is a fraction of the amount of items sent by well-wishers: The town incinerated truckloads of stuffed animals, and the ashes were used as “sacred soil” at a memorial park dedicated to the Sandy Hook victims last year.
Public disagreement over how to memorialize a mass killing has been pronounced in Orlando, where a gunman killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a 2016 attack at Pulse, a nightclub that catered to the LGBTQ+ community.
Barbara Poma, owner of the club, created a foundation to raise money for a memorial and museum filled with artifacts from the building, some damaged in the attack. She arranged to remove items from the nightclub and store them at the Orange County Regional History Center in Orlando.
Among the artifacts were a shattered window, a cabinet with bullet holes where survivors took cover and a bathroom sink dented as clubgoers escaped through a window, local officials said.
But the museum project, which foundation officials said would cost $49 million, has been beset by rising costs and engulfed in controversy. Some local activists called the effort insensitive to survivors of the shooting and family members of the victims who remain in need of financial assistance.
Poma resigned as executive director last year and quit the foundation in April. She did not respond to requests for comment. This week, the city of Orlando purchased the nightclub site for $2 million and announced plans to build a memorial for the victims.
Zachary Blair, a former Pulse patron who is assisting survivors, cited the atomic bomb museum in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park and the 9/11 museum in New York as worthwhile reflections on catastrophic acts of violence.
The rush to memorialize mass shootings, he said, is different.
“Mass shootings are happening every day. It’s not history; it’s ongoing,” Blair said. “Are we supposed to build museums everywhere there is a mass shooting? Are we going to be a nation of death museums?”
Lidji, the Rauh archives director in Pittsburgh, was meeting with his team to discuss how to begin documenting the Tree of Life shooting in the days after the attack when he received an unexpected phone call.
On the line was Pamela Schwartz, executive director of the county history center in Orlando. Separate from Poma’s foundation, Schwartz had staged an exhibit at the history center featuring artifacts collected from memorials for the Pulse victims and an oral history of 200 people.
She offered Lidji two pieces of advice, he said: Focus on items that are emotionally moving, and keep the public informed about plans to collect and preserve materials to avoid misunderstandings.
Since 2018, Lidji’s staff has been working to preserve some of the thousands of items left at memorials outside the synagogue or sent to the community.
On a recent day, archivist Claire Moclock helped measure, photograph and catalogue items in an online public database.
So far, 176 of these items have been uploaded.
In doing so, Lidji said, the staff has waded through sensitivities over whether to redact names on letters or to obscure images of children who send in photos with their messages.
The artifacts from inside the synagogue present another challenge because they evoke violence and bloodshed.
“One thing I’ve learned over the past few years is that the thing that’s healing to one person is hurtful to another,” Lidji said.
“That’s what makes this very different from a private tragedy,” he said.
The synagogue’s efforts reflect a broader “memory boom” in which societies have felt compelled to confront past injustices with museums examining genocides, terrorist attacks, war and other acts of mass violence, said Amy Sodaro, author of “Exhibiting Atrocity” and an associate professor at the City University of New York.
The goal, she said, is a “form of truth-telling that can serve the purpose of education with the goal of prevention of future violence.” But Sodaro said such efforts are fraught with difficult questions about how much to show the public.
“What is going to move people emotionally?” she said. “But where do we cross the line into turning audiences into voyeurs consuming the trauma and tragedy of others?”
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Zawatsky said she is developing an educational curriculum to place the attack in the broader context of global antisemitism, which has spiked in recent years, according to annual reports published by Tel Aviv University. Some artifacts will be used in the museum, she said, while others could be used in a touring exhibit or reserved in the Rauh archives for study by historians.
“You cannot go back in time and say we should have saved things,” Zawatsky said. “We’re making a choice to say, ‘As gruesome as this is, as awful as this is, this is our history.’ It’s forever a part of Jewish American history. We have an obligation to save this.”
For the museum archivists at the Tree of Life, the trauma was felt personally as they removed the Torah ark, standing nearly 11 feet tall, 7 feet wide and 2½ feet deep.
The ark featured a carving of a tree on its doors, and a bullet hole was visible below it. The curation team determined that the ark’s face would be removed at a depth of about 11 inches, which would allow them to include the interior cabinetry and the marble base, also punctured by a bullet.
“In addition to the logistic concerns, it was just very emotionally complicated,” Lidji said. “An ark is designed to be permanent. It did not feel right to take an ark out of a sanctuary. There was some sadness that day. We were happy we were preserving it, but everybody felt it.”
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