Mourners gather at first funerals for victims in Pittsburgh synagogue shooting

[Mosby]

PITTSBURGH — This city of three rivers struggled with a confluence of grief, anger and frustration Tuesday as mourners began burying their dead from Saturday’s synagogue massacre and protesters decried a presidential visit that they called untimely and unwelcome.

Mourners gathered early for the day’s two funerals, one at a synagogue and the other at a theater, with both sites struggling to accommodate the turnout. The lines included many using wheelchairs and walkers, doctors still in scrubs, Jews and non-Jews who greeted each other in the fellowship of grief.

The crowd quickly overflowed the 1,400-seat Rodef Shalom temple, leaving many to stand between pews for the combined service of David Rosenthal and Cecil Rosenthal, brothers who lay side by side in wooden caskets. The pair, lifelong members of Tree of Life synagogue who were known to greet strangers at the sanctuary door, were shot by a gunman — identified by police as Robert Bowers — when he burst into Shabbat services shouting anti-Semitic slurs.

Those who came to say goodbye to the brothers passed beneath words chiseled into the temple’s facade that read: “My house shall be called a house for all people.”

"He’d be the first person to greet me when I walked in with a ‘Good Shabbas,’?” Tree of Life Rabbi Jeffrey Myers said of Cecil Rosenthal, whom he described as the unofficial “mayor” of the Tree of Life community, inviting a wave of tears and laughter that rippled over the audience. “No matter how early you got there,” he said, “Cecil was always there.”


https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/mourners-gather-at-first-funerals-for-victims-in-pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting/2018/10/30/84bd4494-dc69-11e8-b732-3c72cbf131f2_story.html

[Behind the Aegis]

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