On Squirrel Hill: Ep. 156

Tablet Studios

Tablet Magazine

Judaism, Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2018

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On Saturday morning, 11 Jews were murdered in a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Like Jews and their friends everywhere, we were heartbroken by this heinous anti-Semitic massacre, the first-ever large-scale attack against Jews on American soil. To grieve with our brothers and sisters in Pittsburgh and hear their stories, We traveled to Squirrel Hill, the city's Jewish enclave, along with a team from Tablet. What we found was a unique and committed Jewish community, where congregations are intertwined and neighbors check in on each other and young adults return to raise their families. A close-knit community, within a larger city, now reeling from the weekend's senseless horror. In this special episode, we bring you the voices we captured, from the French family who fled violence in Paris only to meet it again in Pennsylvania, to the rabbis whose congregations were targeted, to the neighbors and community members who now face the daunting task of mourning the dead and rebuilding all that was destroyed. If you want to share thoughts or stories about Pittsburgh's Jewish community, email us at Unorthodox@tabletmag.com or leave a message at our new listener line: 914-570-4869. Unorthodox is a smart, fresh, fun weekly take on Jewish news and culture hosted by Mark Oppenheimer, Stephanie Butnick, and Liel Leibovitz and brought to you by Tablet Studios.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Mark Oppenheimer and this is unorthodox.
0:03.0	My name is Barb Fyke. I'm an almost lifelong resident of Squirrel Hill.
0:09.0	It really is a unique place within the Jewish community.
0:14.8	Unlike other large cities, the core and the bulk and the majority of the Jews
0:20.6	still live in a neighborhood inside the city limits.
0:24.8	It has been the Jewish community that has kept it a vital neighborhood, has kept the merchants
0:30.4	going there.
0:31.6	It has been, not that we have to get along because we're on top of each other,
0:35.3	but we get along and we're on top of each other. You see each other on the street. People wish each other
0:40.7	a good job as whether they're coming out of the grocery store
0:43.4	coming out of the synagogue. You know there's that six degrees of separation that
0:48.1	people talk about between one person and another. Pittsburgh Jewish community
0:51.8	one and a half tops.
0:54.3	Hi I'm from Pittsburgh and I actually happened to be at home.
0:58.6	I wasn't at services yesterday morning.
1:01.1	I received a text message from my boss that just said please tell me you're at
1:07.2	home today and it just kind of all unfolded from there whose Whose number do I have? Who can I text? And what about a lot of the
1:17.3	older families that I know and I go in and I see them and I know them by name or I know their
1:21.4	face? But I don't have a phone number like
1:25.7	who's okay who is accounted for what is going on
1:29.7	so I had a friend come to pick me up and and they had a gathering of the JCC where I think
1:35.1	you've been now and they had grief counselors and all these people.
	...

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