Murders at a Synagogue

I’m sure you’ve heard, this coming Shabbat has been designated One World, One Shabbat. All Jews worldwide are being asked to join a formal minyan to demonstrate strength of community spirit, familial bonds and strength in prayer and study. 


dave said:
I can't believe Trump is going to actually visit Pittsburgh.   I hope people block streets and he's forced to retreat.

 Yesterday, thousands of protesters gathered.

https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2018/10/30/squirrel-hill-protests-president-trump-tree-of-life-synagogue/ 

This morning, Trump tweeted that reports of the protests were Fake News. 




joanne said:
I’m sure you’ve heard, this coming Shabbat has been designated One World, One Shabbat. All Jews worldwide are being asked to join a formal minyan to demonstrate strength of community spirit, familial bonds and strength in prayer and study. 

 In the US we are calling it #ShowUpForShabbat.  There will be special services at all local congregations.  If you need help finding a service pm me.


paulsurovell said:
Dr. Jeff Cohen, president Allegheny Hospital where the shooter is being treated:
https://twitter.com/Channel4News/status/1057010272836247552

Today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has an article about Dr. Cohen. It's a must read as is viewing the video. An incredible person.  . 

(I was born at Allegheny General.)  

https://www.post-gazette.com/business/healthcare-business/2018/11/01/Allegheny-General-Hospital-Cohen-synagogue-mass-shooting-Tree-of-Life-doctor-pittsburgh-squirrel-hill/stories/201810310163


in Judaism, there are two important events that are held by families with public announcement of the event rather than invitations. For all intents and purposes, people who attend these events are judged to be there to show their support/respect. These two events are the bris and the funeral. I do not know of any law in Judaism that allows a family to say someone “isn’t invited” or should not come. That is all. I am glad there is an outpouring of support by everyone, not just Jews, over these senseless murders. That is all. 


A Jewish funeral is a holy event. The prayers help the soul to be released. It is antithetical to bring politics into such a holy event. Under Jewish law, if one is invited to a wedding but there is a funeral that winds up on the same day, Jewish law prescribes we must go to the funeral. We can make it up to the wedding couple but it is a way to show respect for the family who lost a loved one and way to help, through prayer, to release the soul of the dead, in other words, to free the soul. 


max_weisenfeld said:


joanne said:
I’m sure you’ve heard, this coming Shabbat has been designated One World, One Shabbat. All Jews worldwide are being asked to join a formal minyan to demonstrate strength of community spirit, familial bonds and strength in prayer and study. 
 In the US we are calling it #ShowUpForShabbat.  There will be special services at all local congregations.  If you need help finding a service pm me.

 Max:  Considering that there are some who are unable to leave the house to attend services this Shabbat due to issues such as illness, lack of transportation, physical disability, or child care problems, will  any of these services be streamed so these persons can participate?  If so, what link can such persons use?


joan_crystal said:


 Max:  Considering that there are some who are unable to leave the house to attend services this Shabbat due to issues such as illness, lack of transportation, physical disability, or child care problems, will  any of these services be streamed so these persons can participate?  If so, what link can such persons use?

 Google and you shall find:

https://www.centralsynagogue.org/worship/live_streaming

http://emanuelnyc.org/simple.php/TEEbroadcast


joan_crystal said:


max_weisenfeld said:

joanne said:
I’m sure you’ve heard, this coming Shabbat has been designated One World, One Shabbat. All Jews worldwide are being asked to join a formal minyan to demonstrate strength of community spirit, familial bonds and strength in prayer and study. 
 In the US we are calling it #ShowUpForShabbat.  There will be special services at all local congregations.  If you need help finding a service pm me.
 Max:  Considering that there are some who are unable to leave the house to attend services this Shabbat due to issues such as illness, lack of transportation, physical disability, or child care problems, will  any of these services be streamed so these persons can participate?  If so, what link can such persons use?

 Or ask a Temple president: https://www.tsti.org/watch-from-home

Our service starts at 6:00 pm tomorrow evening, and all are welcome.



joan_crystal said:
Thank you!

 Thank the generous donor who makes it possible to stream all our services, and the wonderful volunteer who makes sure it is working each week.


max_weisenfeld said:


joan_crystal said:
Thank you!
 Thank the generous donor who makes it possible to stream all our services, and the wonderful volunteer who makes sure it is working each week.

 Max - We have a good friend at the shore who had shingles and wasn't able to attend services Erev Rosh Hashanah. We told her to watch the live stream from TSTI. She was so grateful and loved the service. 


slight detour:

I would so like to read the Post-Gazette piece on Dr. Cohen, at cramer's(?) recommendation.     But to save my life i can't figure out how to defeat my ad blocker for them.  Tech ideas?  Quotes or gist from article?  Workaround??

The video clip at the twitter link was very moving.  Dr. Cohen seems to be a light in the world.  So grateful there are such.


@mjc, read the article in an "incognito tab" in your browser. With chrome or most other browsers, use shift-control-n (shift-command-n on a Mac) to open such a window. With Firefox, it's shift-control-P.


mjc - Here's the full article. "Light in the world" is a wonderful description of Dr. Cohn. 

"He insisted on searching for the face of evil, but didn’t find it.

The image of Allegheny General Hospital president Jeffrey Cohen talking to Robert Bowers on Sunday — a Jewish doctor asking the man accused of killing 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue if he were in pain — has circulated widely. It’s a powerful story: Jewish doctors and nurses helping a man shouting anti-Semitic slurs while being unloaded from an ambulance.

Along the way, this fireplug of a doctor used his calling as a healer to make sense of the senseless, in a way that a suit-and-tie hospital administrator couldn’t do.

And, 28 months into his job as hospital president, Dr. Cohen is modeling what it means to be a physician-led health care organization — a corporate goal for Allegheny Health Network — by wearing the lab coat while serving as the face of AGH. 

“I was just curious about the shooter,” Dr. Cohen, 63, said about his meeting with Mr. Bowers. “I wanted to find out for myself. I just wanted to see him. I look for causation: how did we get here?”

Dr. Cohen — who is blunt and outspoken with an irreverent sense of humor — calls his executive office just off the hospital’s main entrance the “finest prison cell at Allegheny General.”

“I spend as little time in here as I can,” he said, kicking off slip-on leather shoes and sinking into a stuffed chair, wearing neither a tie nor a sport coat.

In 2016, he was among three doctors named hospital presidents at Allegheny Health Network as part of the Pittsburgh-based system’s plans to put front-line physicians in the executive suite. Big changes were needed in a health system whose future was less than assured.

Who better than doctors to champion the transformation?

AHN is not alone in this approach to management: top-rated Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic are among the health systems nationwide led by people who wear both white coats and suits.

Dr. Cohen is a urologist specializing in robotic surgery. He was a partner at Triangle Urological Group for many years before the practice was sold to Allegheny Health Network in 2013 when the reorganized system was launched. (Triangle, which traces its roots to the 1920s, was almost called Golden Triangle Urological Group. Dr. Cohen nixed the idea, saying that it sounded too much like the name of a Chinese restaurant.)

The native of Port Jervis, N.Y., population 9,000, had an early curiosity about medicine, perplexing his father — the Orange County district attorney. “Very powerful,” Dr. Cohen said. The father preferred a law career for his son.

But, in a concession, the father arranged for the oldest of his three children to work summers at a 70-bed Catholic hospital under the watchful eye of administrator Mary Jean Ferrier, a religious Sister of Mercy. The Catholic nun and the 17-year-old Jewish boy clicked.

“She believed the message,” Dr. Cohen recalled. “In the eyes of Christ, we’re all the same.”

Beaming, Sister Ferrier sat in the front row at Dr. Cohen’s 1985 wedding at the Tree of Life synagogue, the Squirrel Hill temple where the Cohens’ four children were bat and bar mitzvahed years later. And where Saturday’s killings took place.

That Dr. Cohen would be drawn to see Mr. Bowers — to introduce himself, to ask about the man’s pain in his role of a healer — didn’t surprise Marge DiCuccio, chief nursing officer at Allegheny General.

“He would want to understand why a human being would take the lives of 11 other human beings,” she said. “He’s just insatiable when it comes to being inquisitive. Jeff doesn’t stop until he understands.”

Curiosity has served Dr. Cohen well in overseeing an urban, 576-bed hospital that, like every hospital, is rife with competing agendas and boxcar-sized egos. “If you don’t understand the present, you can’t fix the future,” Ms. DiCuccio said.

Fixing the future was exactly what AHN wanted to do when Tony Farah, interventional cardiologist and now Highmark executive vice president, approached him about becoming president of the hospital.

Dr. Cohen was part of the core group of physicians at Allegheny General, including heart surgeon George McGovern, cancer specialist David Parda and Dr. Farah, who had weathered the system’s wrenching bankruptcy in 1998 while other doctors left for more stable jobs. The core group banded together to save the system.

Dr. Cohen’s answer to Dr. Farah’s first request is not fit for publication in a family newspaper.

“Then, I thought about what this place means to me,” Dr. Cohen said. “Because I think I have to.”

He relented.

Dr. Cohen’s wife, retired ob/gyn doctor Ellen, was surprised by his decision.

“You’re crazy,” she said.

“Yes, dear, but you knew that a long time ago,” Dr. Cohen answered.

“Crazy” wasn’t what Dr. Cohen said he saw in the face of Mr. Bowers, whose victims included two men with intellectual disabilities and a 97-year-old woman. Rather, the doctor saw someone he perceived as dull, someone incapable of generating his own hate and so absorbing it from others.

Dr. Cohen also saw something more troubling in the face of the 46-year-old high school dropout who worked as a truck driver: social isolation.

“He’s a guy. He’s not the face of evil. He was a baby once. He was a toddler once. And people were looking at him with all the hope in the world,” Dr. Cohen said.

While not excusing Mr. Bowers, Dr. Cohen said, “Here’s someone all alone and all he hears is the noise in his head all the time.”

What Dr. Cohen said he saw in his brief conversation with Mr. Bowers sparked a wall of media requests: “Good Morning America,” Fox News, the Washington Post. On Tuesday, he decided he couldn’t do any more.

“He’s not a celebrity seeker at all,” his wife said. That wasn’t why he visited Mr. Bowers. “He did this because he was doing his job. This is him.”

It has been an intense week, but Dr. Cohen said he has learned to tame his stronger emotions over the years. “I’m much calmer than I used to be,” he said.

“Maybe,” his wife said.

Dr. Cohen, who said he is not “very religious,” reached for the Bible on Sunday morning to “bring some understanding” to what he saw and heard at the Squirrel Hill temple on Saturday and before meeting Mr. Bowers.

“The first chapter of the Bible, Genesis, talks about light and dark, which to me is a metaphor for life,” he wrote in a memo that was distributed Tuesday to Allegheny General’s 5,000 employees.

“Good and evil, order and chaos, life and death — the yin and yang of existence. I saw it on Saturday — all of it. I saw evil up front and bravery to counterbalance it.”

His diagnosis: The incendiary tone of public life in America must stop, said Dr. Cohen, who lives across the street from the Tree of Life synagogue and a few blocks from the one-time home of children’s TV personality Fred Rogers — a touchstone in Pittsburgh for preaching calm and neighborliness.

In the voice of a doctor who has discovered causation for a disease, Dr. Cohen said, “it’s not just Republicans. It’s Democrats. It’s everybody.”










Thanks, Tom.  Thanks, cramer.


Max, this is a little off topic but just so you know, anybody with a smartphone can livestream for free on various services. I like u-stream but haven’t run a livestream in years. As long as you can get a signal, you can livestream. If there’s WiFi it works even better!  Technology is advancing swiftly!  


Just learned of significant vandalism yesterday at the Synagogue I attended growing up. We need to stand together to stop the hate.  Please go to a Shabbat service this evening if you can or attend a service on line (see above links) if you cannot be there in person.


This is so shameful.  LOL 


Lovesagoodsale said:
Max, this is a little off topic but just so you know, anybody with a smartphone can livestream for free on various services. I like u-stream but haven’t run a livestream in years. As long as you can get a signal, you can livestream. If there’s WiFi it works even better!  Technology is advancing swiftly!  

 When people are depending on you every week multiple times to make worship and family events available to members of families and members of the community who cannot attend in person, it is worth the extra effort to do things reliably and professionally.


max_weisenfeld said:


Lovesagoodsale said:
Max, this is a little off topic but just so you know, anybody with a smartphone can livestream for free on various services. I like u-stream but haven’t run a livestream in years. As long as you can get a signal, you can livestream. If there’s WiFi it works even better!  Technology is advancing swiftly!  
 When people are depending on you every week multiple times to make worship and family events available to members of families and members of the community who cannot attend in person, it is worth the extra effort to do things reliably and professionally.

Thank you to Max and everyone at TSTI for streaming such a touching and fitting Shabbat service this evening, thus making it available to a far wider community than could fit in a single sanctuary.


1200 people of various faiths Showed Up for Shabbat services at Rodef Shalom in Shadyside last night. 

Since Fred Rodgers' real neighborhood was Squirrel Hill, the rabbi put on a sweater and asked Fred Rodgers' widow, Joanne, to say a few words. 

https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2018/11/02/pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting-show-up-for-shabbat/

eta - My wife just watched the video and teared-up, as did I. We knew Lady Aberlin and my wife's dissertation adviser lived next door to Fred Rodgers. 


until we address mental health neglect in America, we can expect more carnage and vandalism. 

Here, one man used a magic marker, not a gun, to express rage. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/nyregion/anti-semitic-hate-crime-vandalism.html


mtierney said:
until we address mental health neglect in America, we can expect more carnage and vandalism. 

 We have tried with Obamacare, but you and your peers are actively undermining it. Thanks. 


mtierney said:
until we address mental health neglect in America, we can expect more carnage and vandalism. 
Here, one man used a magic marker, not a gun, to express rage. 
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/nyregion/anti-semitic-hate-crime-vandalism.html

 Yes, but magic markers don't kill; guns do. 


Steve said:


mtierney said:
until we address mental health neglect in America, we can expect more carnage and vandalism. 
Here, one man used a magic marker, not a gun, to express rage. 
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/nyregion/anti-semitic-hate-crime-vandalism.html
 Yes, but magic markers don't kill; guns do. 

 One could ask, "Why don't these people use nuclear weapons instead of guns?"  And then I realize that nuclear weapons are not as easy to obtain as guns are.


nohero said:


 One could ask, "Why don't these people use nuclear weapons instead of guns?"  And then I realize that nuclear weapons are not as easy to obtain as guns are.

 Maybe they should be.


mtierney said:
until we address mental health neglect in America, we can expect more carnage and vandalism. 
Here, one man used a magic marker, not a gun, to express rage. 
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/nyregion/anti-semitic-hate-crime-vandalism.html

are you so lacking in self-awareness that you don't see that:

  • the party you support, particularly the president you support, is promoting the kind of hate that spurs all kinds of terrible violence
  • the party you support is actively working to take away health insurance for people with pre-existing conditions
  • the party you support actively opposes any legislation that will make firearms any more difficult for people to acquire.

In sum, you actively support a whole host of policies and people who are both the root and proximate causes of violence against minorities of all kinds.  


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