'A very long chapter': Loved ones of synagogue shooting victims react to jury's death penalty vote

Nearly five years ago they gathered in a room at the Jewish Community Center in Squirrel Hill, the bloodshed and horror still fresh, to await information about their loved ones — who lived, who died, who was wounded.

The Tree of Life synagogue shooting had just happened, and family members of the victims congregated at this hub and haven on Forbes Avenue, a half-mile from the worst incident of antisemitic violence in the country’s history.

They were desperate for news. Terrified of news.

On Wednesday, nearly three dozen spouses, children, siblings and survivors returned to that very same room mere hours after a jury condemned the killer, Robert Bowers, to death after a grueling, two-month trial.

“We had a horrible start in that room almost five years ago,” said Margaret “Peg” Durachko, whose husband of 38 years, Richard Gottfried, was one of the 11 worshippers from three congregations to be murdered on Oct. 27, 2018. “Actually hard to be back here.”

Hard, yes, but with a sense of justice served.

After weeks of absorbing riveting testimony, listening to prosecutors present horrific evidence, suffering through the sounds of gunfire and death that echoed in the courtroom as audio from the massacre was played from 911 tapes, the jury had spoken.

It took them 10 hours of deliberations to condemn Bowers to death, a sentence that most of the families sought.

“I feel relief,” said Howard Fienberg, son of victim Joyce Fienberg. “The jury sat through months of horror and delivered justice to my mom and everyone that was killed and everyone injured.”

It had been an excruciating journey for Fienberg and his fellow mourners, bonded together by grief, religion and a shared experience and molded into a family.

As cameras and roughly 50 journalists waited, they filed into the conference room, some wearing yarmulkes, in a long procession of survival and defiance. They lined up against a bare, white wall, waiting for their turn to speak. Sometimes alone, sometimes in small groups, they stepped forward to a microphone and shared their thoughts.

They did not utter the killer’s name.

“Today marks the end of a very long chapter,” said Michele Rosenthal, whose brothers, Cecil and David, universally referred to as “the boys,” were killed.

Audrey Glickman, a Tree of Life congregant who survived by covering herself with a prayer shawl, called it a “long slog.”

Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, whose picture of being whisked to safety, a prayer shawl draped around his shoulders, became one of the most indelible images of that dark day, likened the passage of time to emerging from an extended episode of the TV show “The Twilight Zone.”

“It’s been quite an ordeal,” said the rabbi, who had joined the Tree of Life congregation just a year before the shooting.

Now that he can get on with the rest of his life, Myers said, he asked rhetorically what that means.

“That’s what keeps me awake at night,” Myers said. “How do you heal afterwards? Because we’ve been stuck in neutral for five years.”

During the trial, Myers testified that when the gunfire began, he told his congregants to drop to the floor or lie flat on the pews. He fled, hid and called 911, hearing gunshots and screams all the while, until the police rescued him.

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Before the news conference began, Myers spotted a familiar face in the community center’s hallway — Bradley Orsini, a retired FBI agent who was head of security for the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh in 2018.

The men embraced.

“I’m here because of you,” Myers told Orsini.

“You’re here because you listened,” Orsini replied.

The rabbi’s narrow escape was aided by Orsini’s training. Myers had the presence of mind to run, hide and summon help.

Now Orsini works for the Secure Community Network, a nonprofit dedicated to the safety of America’s Jews, and trains people nationally in what has been dubbed the “Pittsburgh model.”

While the past several years has focused on the killer, his defense team, the death penalty, legal strategies, the slow pace of justice, Wednesday afternoon belonged — finally — to the survivors, their families and their voices.

For so long they had been forced to tiptoe silently around, keeping their thoughts largely to themselves for fear that any statement, any misstep, could be pounced on by defense attorneys.

“Just sit around and shut up,” Durachko recalled the directive from the government. “Don’t say anything because the defense is watching you. So we didn’t talk. As much as we could avoid talking, we did.”

But on Wednesday they talked. The bottle had been uncorked.

They expressed gratitude — for the federal prosecutors who shepherded the case through the complexities of death penalty litigation. For the jurors who gave up months of their lives to enter a terrifying world of murder and hatred. For the support they received from around the world and right at home in Pittsburgh through the 10.27 Healing Partnership.

Rabbi Myers was the first to speak. He noted that the date was significant on the Jewish calendar, explaining that it was celebrated as “a day of love” for thousands of years.

“I don’t believe in coincidences. It was meant to be today,” he said, referring to the jury’s decision. “Why today? Because today we received an immense embrace from the halls of justice.”

Myers and other speakers saw the death sentence, the government’s support for it and the meticulous preparation by the prosecution as sending a critical message: that antisemitism will not be tolerated.

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Fienberg called the attack a “frontal assault on the Constitutional freedom of religion and the freedom to be Jewish and practice Judaism in the United States.”

Glickman, too, reflected on the difficulty of being silent about the case for years even as pundits were “debating each other without all the facts.”

“Had we not had this trial, the deeds of this criminal would have been glossed over in the annals of history,” Glickman said. “We now know, almost, the full story.”

Indeed, had the U.S. attorney general not approved seeking the death penalty after a laborious and painstaking review process, a plea deal would have been the likely outcome.

And without a trial, family members said, the snippets of information they had about the events of Oct. 27, 2018, would have remained just that — bits and pieces, instead of a coherent story woven together by prosecutors.

The death penalty itself proved to be a thorny topic over the years as the case wound its way through the court. While many family members approved of it, that feeling wasn’t universal among the relatives or the three congregations: Tree of Life, New Light and Dor Hadash.

Durachko, 69, of Ross, said she was the only non-Jew among the family members. A Roman Catholic, she said that she and Gottfried, her husband, had many conversations about the major differences between their religions, including the stance on the death penalty.

“He would never say he was against the death penalty. He always said that he was in favor of it,” Durachko said. “Being Roman Catholic, the way I’m supposed to be is opposed to it. But when he was the one who was murdered by this hate crime, of course, I’m going to support the death penalty for his justice.”

Durachko, a retired dentist, recalled how her husband’s death left her bereft. The pandemic followed, she closed her dental practice.

“It was hard to bury him that horrible October,” she said. “I was totally alone. It was just awful. To have him ripped away from me.”

There is healing, though. Accompanying Durachko to the news conference was her fiance, Ken Maleski. They met on Catholicmatch.com and plan to be married in the spring.

To Jews in Pittsburgh, 10-27 has become freighted with meaning just like 9-11.

The man who unleashed terror at the Tree of Life synagogue now joins other Pennsylvania mass murderers sitting on death row in eternal notoriety. And the victims of his rampage — Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil and David Rosenthal, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Dan Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger — will forever be enshrined in the hearts of Pittsburgh.

Rabbi Myers opened the press conference and also had the final words.

To begin, he offered a benediction, first in Hebrew, then in English.

“Praised are you, oh God, sovereign of the universe, who has kept us alive and sustained us and enabled us to reach this day.”

To close, Myers noted that Jews have been on America’s shores since 1654. Until the synagogue massacre, they had never been subjected to violence on such an unprecedented scale in the United States.

“May the memories of all 11 always be for a blessing,” Myers said.

“Amen,” murmured the families behind him.