Nearly a yr after 11 folks had been murdered within the Pittsburgh synagogue the place he worshiped, Stephen Cohen wrote a letter to the U.S. lawyer normal. The Justice Department had not but declared its intent to hunt a dying sentence within the case, and Mr. Cohen, the co-president of New Light, one of many three congregations that met within the Tree of Life synagogue, wished to weigh in.
“In consideration of the significant injury to our congregation,” he wrote, “I request that the parties agree to a plea deal in which the perpetrator would accept a sentence of life imprisonment.”
The situation for Mr. Cohen was that pursing a dying sentence, quite than taking a plea, would imply a trial and an excruciating revival of the trauma that his fellow congregants had been struggling to beat. Weeks later, the Justice Department introduced it will search the dying penalty, and the trial that has unfolded in a federal courthouse over the previous three months has been much more harrowing than he anticipated.
But his view of the problem has modified. “I was wrong,” he mentioned final week. “Whether he gets put to death or not, I leave in the hands of 12 men and women who will make that decision, and God bless them for whatever decision they make. But we have the facts now.”
Over the almost 5 years for the reason that deadliest antisemitic assault within the nation’s historical past, the query of justice has loomed, unresolved. Within days, the jury within the federal trial will decide that’s central to that query of justice: whether or not Robert Bowers, the person who carried out the assault, must be condemned to dying.
Most of the households of those that had been killed have maintained {that a} dying sentence could be the simply final result, even when it meant an extended and presumably extra agonizing authorized course of. It is important, the households of 9 victims mentioned in a letter printed final fall in The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, to point out that “such violent hatred will not be tolerated on this earth.”
But others have strongly disagreed. Around the time that Mr. Cohen wrote to the lawyer normal, his rabbi, Jonathan Perlman, despatched his personal letter, citing passages from the Talmud and urging the federal government to not pursue “this cruel form of justice.” Miri Rabinowitz, the widow of Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, who was killed within the taking pictures, wrote that in search of dying could be a “bitter irony” given her husband’s devotion to “the sanctity of life.” Moreover, these and different letters argued, the trial and appeals course of would solely torment the survivors and draw consideration to the killer.
In Jewish legislation and custom, “there is no straightforward, single, unequivocal straightforward answer” about capital punishment, mentioned Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky, who analyzed the problem for the worldwide meeting of Conservative Jewish rabbis. Talmudic jurisprudence is strongly averse to the dying penalty, mentioned Rabbi Kalmanofsky, who in his evaluation wrote that American Jews ought to “should favor a policy preferring imprisonment to execution in virtually all cases.”
But, he mentioned, Jewish residents ought to perceive that is finally a call within the arms of a secular justice system. And whereas rabbinical custom holds that the dying penalty must be extraordinarily uncommon, he mentioned, it acknowledges “that sometimes there are incredibly exigent circumstances.”
In 1962, Israel did perform the dying sentence of Adolf Eichmann, one of many planners of the Holocaust. But nobody has been sentenced to dying in Israel since. A central query within the Pittsburgh case is whether or not Mr. Bowers, whose social media posts had been stuffed with genocidal hatred towards Jews — however who, his legal professionals argue, has extreme psychological sickness — is one among these excessive circumstances.
Many in Pittsburgh, even those that sometimes oppose the dying penalty, consider he’s.
“I’m actually quite struck by the number of people who have classically taken a fairly liberal approach who have said, ‘But in this case —,’” mentioned Rabbi Danny Schiff, a scholar of Jewish ethics with the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. People could also be against the dying penalty intellectually, he mentioned, however Pittsburgh’s Jewish group has a familial closeness and the response to the assault was visceral. Seeking the gunman’s dying is probably not the proper judgment underneath Jewish legislation, he mentioned, however it’s “the correct emotional response.”
For a long time, Linda Hurwitz was a member of Tree of Life, worshiping alongside those that could be killed within the assault. Though she had left the congregation by 2018, she briefly thought of returning on the morning of Oct. 27 to listen to the Kaddish, the prayer for the lifeless. On that date, 29 years earlier, her 17-year-old daughter was strangled and stabbed to dying by a teenage boy she had befriended. Ms. Hurwitz sat by two trials and plenty of hearings because the killer, now 51 and nonetheless in jail, made his journey by the justice system. It was agonizing, she mentioned.
But a dying sentence was by no means a chance and was not one thing that Ms. Hurwitz would have sought. The assassin was not but 18, she defined and appeared to have killed out of some tragically misdirected rage. She mentioned the killer at Tree of Life, who was 46 on the time, appeared to behave out of a chilly, impersonal hatred — extra like that of the functionaries within the Nazi dying camps the place Ms. Hurwitz’s mom and father had been held and the place members of their household had been murdered.
“Someone who has so little value for life is antithetical to Judaism,” she mentioned of Mr. Bowers. “You don’t have a right to live.”
For months now, those that have known as for a dying sentence and people who have opposed it have sat quietly collectively within the courtroom gallery, day after day, watching their fellow congregants describe the horror that they endured and studying extra in regards to the man who brought on it. Many have given their very own accounts from the witness stand.
Even for some, like Mr. Cohen, who had been in opposition to the trial, the gradual however regular functioning of the authorized system has been a public validation of personal struggling, mentioned Maggie Feinstein, the director of 10.27 Healing Partnership, which offers psychological well being providers to folks affected by the assault. “It’s important to know that we are pursuing justice in the way in which the rules were written,” she mentioned. “Justice, justice shalt thou pursue,” she mentioned, quoting the Torah.
But there stays no consensus about the place that pursuit of justice ought to lead.
At sabbath providers this month, Rabbi Perlman of New Light preached on the subject of vengeance.
“Does vengeance taste good to one who has been left behind?” he requested. No, he mentioned, we are going to nonetheless grieve the 11 who had been killed within the assault, together with the three who had been worshiping with the rabbi that morning 4 and a half years earlier. They are actually in heaven, he mentioned, and can achieve nothing from an act of earthly retribution.
As for the person who had brought on all this grief, the rabbi advised his congregation, citing the inscription on the graves of Jewish martyrs, “the ever-Present One will avenge their deaths.”
Jon Moss contributed reporting.
Source: www.nytimes.com