Today is the third anniversary of the attack at the Tree of Life synagogue, in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh.
At the time of the murders, in 2018, three separate Jewish congregations had a home in the synagogue: the Tree of Life Congregation, the New Light Congregation, and Congregation Dor Hadash (Dor Hadash means "new generation," in Hebrew). The attack occurred as Saturday morning Sabbath services were taking place.
Eleven congregants were shot and killed, during the approximately twenty-minute attack. Several other people were wounded, including four Pittsburgh police officers.
The individual arrested for the killings--virulently anti-Semitic, virulently hostile to immigrants--has not yet gone to trial. He had frequently expressed, online,
his hatred of Jews. Days before the killings, he had written of what he called (I
am not reproducing, here, the entire word) the "k*** infestation" in
the United States. After he was shot by police, at the synagogue, he surrendered--and said, according to a police officer, that "all these Jews need to die."
A book about the 2018 tragedy and its aftermath was
published this month. It is by journalist
Mark Oppenheimer, and is titled Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue
Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood.
Here is the link for the book, on amazon.com:
https://www.amazon.com/Squirrel-Hill-Synagogue-Shooting-Neighborhood/dp/0525657193/ref
