A Prayer for Squirrel Hill—And for American Jewry
The Pittsburgh synagogue killings show that dormant hatreds have reawakened.
When Rabbi Joseph Miller learned of the Squirrel Hill massacre, less than a mile from his own pulpit, he ordered the doors of his synagogue locked. Despite his congregants’ terror that they would be next, they recited the mi sheberach. They didn’t pray for their own protection; they prayed for the healing of others.
An ancestor of mine died in synagogue. He lived in western Ukraine, where the Holocaust arrived suddenly in the form of , death squads pushing ever east, traversing dirt roads and deep forest
