An eclectic mix of Pittsburghers packed a Squirrel Hill auditorium Tuesday night and, for the eighth time, marked the day when a gunman turned a center for Jewish life into a battleground.
The evening, thick with memory and ritual, began with a street-corner prayer outside what remains of the scene of the shooting, Tree of Life-Or L’Simcha synagogue in Squirrel Hill. It ended at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh, just a few blocks away, with seven simple words: “Make sure to be kind. Thank you.”
The hourlong ceremony aimed to preserve the memories of the 11 Jewish worshippers across three congregations murdered during Shabbat services on Oct. 27, 2018. The gunman sits today on death row in federal prison — three years after a jury found him guilty on all 63 counts against him.
But Tuesday night was about blessing the memories of those killed — not speaking the name of their killer.
“This is how Jewish people are taught: We remember the people who have come before us,” said Maggie Feinstein, director of 10.27 Healing Partnership, who helped guide the program.
“We elevate the sacredness of the ordinary lives of these 11 to the light,” she added. “We are not defined by our darkest day but by how we live our lives in the quietest of moments.”
The JCC’s Levinson Hall was filled with a mix of ordinary citizens and public servants.
Mayor Corey O’Connor was present, along with his chief of staff, Dan Gilman. Multiple members of City Council attended, as did Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato, Pittsburgh City Controller Rachael Heisler and U.S. Rep. Summer Lee, D-Swissvale.
U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, the Braddock Democrat clad in a familiar black sweatshirt, sat quietly in the room’s back row. Two men from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted the synagogue shooter, also attended to pay their respects.
Families of those killed sat among the crowd of mourners. At 6:48 p.m., as a rabbi closed with a prayer with “Amen,” Leigh Stein, daughter of victim Dan Stein, wiped her eyes with a tissue.
Some details and themes echoed ceremonies from previous years.
The victim’s names were read as survivors and family members lit memorial candles. One rabbi emotively chanted a prayer for the departed. Others prayed for peace, for healing and for the country.
But parts of the ceremony were specific to 2026.
The Gregorian and Jewish calendars line up this year, making the date of the tragic shooting fall in the same week in both timelines. Accordingly, Feinstein said, Jews will read the same passages on Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, this weekend that those who entered the synagogue in 2018 never got to finish.
Retired University of Pittsburgh Chancellor Mark Nordenberg delivered a closing speech.
He lauded the shooting’s survivors and families of the fallen. He quoted from two newspaper columns recalling the dread that spread through Pittsburgh on the day of the shooting. And he talked about the importance of the Eradicate Hate summit, which he helped form in the wake of the shooting.
But Nordenberg also looked forward.
“I can’t catalog all that’s being done in Pittsburgh,” he told a crowd of more than 300 people. “But I can affirm that the meaningful work continues to be done here.”
Nordenberg also quoted David Shapiro, head of a committee formed to determine how $6 million in donations that poured in after the shooting would be allocated. Every meeting of that committee, he said, started with the Mourner’s Kaddish prayer.
Shapiro would say, “No person, no committee can ever make things right,” Nordenberg recounted. “But we can and must respond as best we know how.”
Others marked the tragic October date on their own terms.
Around 5:30 p.m., an hour before the ceremony, Caroline Babik walked with a friend and the friend’s dog outside Tree of Life-Or L’Simcha synagogue. They paused at the chain-link fence, cloaked in green mesh, that has surrounded the site at the corner of Shady and Wilkins avenue for years — and also prayed the Mourner’s Kaddish.
“It just feels like it needs to be done,” said Babik, 50, of Morningside, who converted to Judaism after getting married in 2011. “I feel like there’s so much going on. And we’re so numb in this world. For me, I like knowing I’m taking a moment to just acknowledge it.”
Minutes before the ceremony, the family of victim Rose Mallinger paused to gather at a tree-shaded patio they cleaned up in her memory. She used to eat lunch in the space that now bears her name.
“If love alone could have spared you, you would have lived forever,” a plaque alongside a bed of white flowers read.
“This was our 10/27 community service project — and we just took hold of it,” said Lauren Mallinger, Rose’s daughter-in-law. “We wanted to make it a very welcoming place.”
“It’s been a labor of love,” added Andrea Wedner, the youngest of Rose’s three children — and a survivor of the shooting that Saturday morning.
The family posed for photographs and shared details about how Rose’s granddaughter got married this April in the space.
Then, as Lauren Mallinger went to walk into the ceremony, she paused.
“We are strong,” she said. “We show up. And that’s what’s most important.”
Before Feinstein closed with her seven-word invocation, she quoted something Wedner had told her.
“I want the world to know who my mother was,” Feinstein recalled Wedner saying. “She cared for people. She wanted to make this world a better place. And I think she’d be pleased that we’re trying to do that.”