How tragedy connects Pittsburgh and Rhodes, an entire world apart

Open this photo in gallery:

David Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.

This is a tale of two cities, but it is not about the best of times.

One of those cities is Rhodes, on the Dodecanese island of the same name in the Greek corner of the Mediterranean. The other is Pittsburgh, one of the settings of the 18th-century struggle between the British and French for control of colonial North America. They are separated by 8,759 kilometres, seven time zones – and two modern moments that define the worst of times.

This month, small clutches of visitors strolled through pebbled streets of the old Jewish Quarter of Rhodes, recalling how some 1,650 Jews were rounded up in 1944, herded onto crowded ships, and sent on the longest Second World War deportation to Nazi death camps; only 150 survived. And this month, the trial of Robert Bowers, accused of killing 11 Jews at prayer in the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, grinds on in Pittsburgh, the final chapter in the tragedy that represents the gravest episode of antisemitism in North American history.

Today, the Tree of Life sanctuary is empty. No congregants’ Sabbath prayers have echoed off its walls since the gunman sprayed his bullets. The pews at the sanctuary at Rhodes’s Kahal Kadosh Shalom are empty, too. There are seats for 112 worshippers. Only 20 Jews remain on the island.

The Jewish community of Rhodes is a rump, a vestige, an echo; the youngest member is 60. Its Pittsburgh analogue is vibrant; the storefronts of Squirrel Hill, the centre of Jewish life in the city, are inviting, with the sidewalks of Murray and Forbes avenues choked with strollers and shoppers. Just a minute’s walk from Tree of Life, the Jewish community teems with life.

For Jews, the two cities offered special sanctuary – in a sense that goes beyond its definition as a place of worship.

The lives of Rhodes’s Jews were remarkable in that they were largely unremarkable: bicycle trips, automobile excursions, ladies’ coffee klatches, a football team known as the Maccabi. And the lives of Jews in Pittsburgh were extraordinary in that they were thoroughly ordinary: a welcoming public high school, afternoons watching the Pirates at Forbes Field, pizza at Mineo’s, desserts at Gullifty’s.

The Bowers trial began with chilling audio of the tragedy, the heart-wrenching testimony of Rabbi Jeffrey Myers (“I expected to die”), and the continuing debate, among congregants and those affected by the shooting, over the morality, or the necessity, of the death penalty. This episode has haunted the Jewish community, transformed its many synagogues into security zones, and prompted waves of anxiety during jury selection that only became more dramatic as the trial opened in earnest.

In Rhodes, the magnitude of loss is greater, yet more remote. None of the Jews here witnessed the way first the men and then, a day later, the women and children, were assembled and marched to the port outside the city walls.

“We left behind our fair island of Rhodes, our beautiful sea, our homes, our friends, our dead and all of our belongings,” remembered one of those damned to depart. “Our grief was infinite.”

So, too, is the grief of Pittsburgh. The stories of that October day have been seeping out, one by one. Historians may distrust recollections, but they possess a special power. The same is true in Rhodes.

Buffalo and Pittsburgh share grief as Tree of Life trial to be held in spring

For that brings us to the moment when the worst of times is paired – not matched, for that is impossible – with moments of hope for the best of times.

They can be found in the recollection of the late Seyh Suleyman Kaslioglu, the grand mufti of Rhodes at the time of the Jews’ expulsion, who hid the Torah, the sacred scrolls holding the five books of Moses. “One of the greatest moments of my life,” he recalled in 1971, “was when I was able to embrace the Torah, and carry it, and put it in the pulpit of the mosque – because we knew no German would ever think that the Torahs were preserved in the pulpit of the mosque.”

And they can be found in a story that David Zubik, the bishop of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, told me last month. It was the morning the bullets disrupted the morning prayers at Tree of Life, and the bishop was celebrating Mass for 600 women when, after Holy Communion, he learned there was a shooting at a city synagogue. He found Peg Durashko, who had a Jewish husband who was a Tree of Life congregant. Together they prayed. Then they learned her husband was one of the victims.

That hiding place in a mosque, and the solace of that joint prayer after Mass so shortly after tragedy, stand as durable symbols. But perhaps they are also guideposts for the way we can all help ourselves move forward, from great tragedy to gestures of great compassion.