‘We need more Squirrel Hills’

By BEN SCHMITT

Squirrel Hill, for many who grew up in Pittsburgh’s East End, conjures memories of movies at the Manor Theater and Friday night pizza in a neighborhood where diversity and acceptance have always been the norm.

Those memories remain strong even after Oct. 27, 2018, when a heavily armed man tried to tear through the fabric of that diversity.

When news of the Tree of Life synagogue attack reached Andre Perry, he immediately hearkened back to childhood Friday nights at Mineo’s Pizza House.

“I could smell the pizza. I could hear the laughter,” he said of the venerable Squirrel Hill hangout on Murray Avenue. “I remembered going there after high school track meets with my friends; many of them are Jewish.”

Growing up black in Wilkinsburg, Perry always saw Squirrel Hill as a haven for the mixing of cultures and races.

Mineo’s has thrived for decades in the primarily Jewish neighborhood. Across the street is an Indian restaurant. A Japanese dumpling restaurant is several doors down. A kosher market is a few blocks away.

“There were few places where you could go, be in an interracial space and it was normative,” said Perry, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, D.C. “You don’t see many places like Squirrel Hill with its legacy of bringing people together.”

As the one-year mark of the anti-Semitic attack grew closer, those directly affected by the shooting recall the same safe, welcoming Pittsburgh neighborhood.

Michele Rosenthal lost two brothers, Cecil and David Rosenthal. Andrea Wedner was worshipping inside when a gunman entered the Wilkins Avenue synagogue. She was injured. Her 97-year-old mother, Rose Mallinger, was killed.

Both grew up here. Both lost family here. Both still love it here.

“It was a safe community to walk around and meet your friends, and everybody was within walking distance. It was just — it was a great community to grow up in,” Rosenthal said. “It’s amazing. My husband and I live there now and he laughs because I’ll introduce him to somebody, and he’ll say, ‘I know, you went to Hebrew school with them.’ Everybody comes back.”

The scar of the massacre that left 11 dead will always remain. The victims were: the Rosenthal brothers, Mallinger, Joyce Fienberg, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Melvin Wax, Irving Younger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Daniel Stein and Richard Gottfried.

Squirrel Hill will never be the same. But the community will evolve and prevail, residents and non-residents insist.

Rosenthal maintains room in her mind and heart to remember daily childhood strolls to the Manor Theater on Murray Avenue to play video games.

Wedner remembers meeting with friends “up street” to the well-known corner of Murray and Forbes avenues.

“My parents walked to the supermarket every day,” she said. “We felt safe. We met our friends. We hung out, went to the movies. It was just a wonderful, safe place to grow up.”

The neighborhood’s sense of safety, community and love, while shaken, remains strong.

“The love and support from so many people gets me through it,” Rosenthal said.

“I don’t want to discount that.”

Neighborly love

Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto became emotional while recounting one particular moment two days after the shooting. He was visiting Jewish schools in the neighborhood, like Community Day School, to interact with children and explain why police officers would be posted outside.

As he exited a school, a minivan pulled up alongside him. A young teen got out and ran up to him. He handed the mayor a glass vase of flowers.

“What’s this for?” Peduto asked.

“Because you’re my neighbor and I love you,” the teen replied.

RELATED: A year after Tree of Life shooting, the city still grieves but remains resolute”

Peduto walked up to the minivan. The boy’s mother was behind the wheel. The vehicle was full of glass vases containing flowers.

“And they’re just driving down the street handing them out,” Peduto said. “Those parts of Pittsburgh are what hold us together.”

Those acts of kindness in the shooting’s aftermath held everyone together, Peduto said. “Constant rays of light,” he called them.

“Yeah, we’ll always be different, we’ll always have this memory of the darkest day of Pittsburgh’s history in our mind,” he said. “But we won’t let it change us.”

RELATED: One year later: The path to recovery after the Tree of Life attack

Squirrel Hill, with its towering tree-lined streets and large, old, creaky brick homes, is the center of the Jewish community in Pittsburgh dating back to the 1840s.

Pockets of the residential neighborhood are sleepy and serene. Its walkable business district bustles with restaurants, a family-owned shoe store, a public library, bars and coffee shops. The storefronts’ windows remain full of signs with the Star of David and revamped Steelers logo reading “Stronger Than Hate.”

Teenagers saunter through the streets, dipping in and out of Eat’n Park or Commonplace Coffee and devouring fresh-cut french fries in Uncle Sam’s sub shop. Port Authority buses populate the corner of Forbes and Murray, picking up and dropping off a melting pot of residents and visitors.

On weekends, people of various Jewish levels of observance — Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox — crisscross the streets on their way to various synagogues.

For many residents, the myriad synagogues serve as the neighborhood’s backbone. Members from different denominations work together in the city’s Jewish agencies, like the Jewish Community Center, the Jewish Federation, Friendship Circle and the Jewish Family and Community Services.

“Growing up in this neighborhood, whenever I slept over at a friend’s house, the rule was you go to Sunday school with that family,” said Maggie Feinstein. “There was a sense that it didn’t matter where you belonged … and my feeling of the synagogues of the neighborhood was that they were all mine. That idea is very unusual.”

Feinstein is grateful for those memories of openness. They’ll be useful in her new position as founding director of the Pittsburgh Resiliency Center. Known also as the 10.27 Healing Partnership, the center opened Oct. 1 at the Jewish Community Center in Squirrel Hill.

The job requires her to remember the Tree of Life shooting on a daily basis. Funded with federal and local money, the center is available to anyone from anywhere, free of charge. It provides therapy, education and a community space to reflect.

“I believe in post-traumatic growth,” said Feinstein, a behavioral health professional. “I believe that we all have an opportunity after a difficult time to change business as usual and to learn new ways to do things. Hopefully other people believe that.”

‘A spirit that touches anyone’

Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald has lived in Squirrel Hill for 36 years. His home is just around the corner from Tree of Life.

“It’s always been this mixed neighborhood of different religions and different ethnicities: Catholics, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and nonbelievers all living together, working together, their kids going to school with each other,” he said. “It’s not just something recent. It’s been this way for decades, a place where people felt safe. In many ways, the incident has brought a close-knit community maybe even closer.”

Justin Sigal, co-owner of Little’s Shoes, a longstanding, full-service shoe store on Forbes, said the neighborhood remained quiet for several weeks after the attack.

“It was a very surreal, somber atmosphere,” he said. “It almost didn’t sink in the first day. But you started seeing kindness come out in everyone, the signs, the vigils, the hugs. The support we received from other religious communities was overwhelming.”

He’s unsure how the one-year mark will feel.

“This is new territory for us,” he said. “The neighborhood is resilient. That’s the key: You really have all races and religions and ethnicities in this neighborhood. We’re all living together in one small area.”

RELATED: Tree of Life leaders vow to reopen synagogue

Jan Cavrak, a manager at the Squirrel Hill Café, watched ambulances and police cars race down Forbes the day of the shooting. Then came the phone calls: “Are you OK?” they asked.

She turned on the television and saw the news unfolding.

“As the day went on, a sea of people would stop in for comfort,” she said. “We all needed to be together that day.”

Once a haunt for overnight-shift steelworkers that opened at 7 a.m., the dark, smoky bar known to many as the “Squirrel Cage” now caters to regulars, college students and adventurous types. Cavrak has walked through the cage’s red door for 38 years to pour drafts and share conversation.

“The people that come in here, make this place,” she said. “I’ve watched the clothing styles change, the hair styles, the cars. But I’ve met so many great people in this bar and in Squirrel Hill.”

Dr. Jeffrey Cohen, president of Allegheny General Hospital, lives a half block away from
the Tree of Life on Wilkins Avenue. He was married in that building. His four children celebrated their bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs there. He watched in horror that rainy Saturday morning as police responded to the shooting. His hospital would end up treating the gunman.

Cohen couldn’t bring himself to walk his dog past the building for months. He’d go out of his way to avoid it.

“You know what went on and, in many ways, this is sort of like 9/11. It’s sacred ground right now,” he said. “There were 11 people executed there just for being Jewish. The idea that in sleepy Squirrel Hill this would happen, just even today … is still hard to believe.”

RELATED: Anti-Semitic action and rhetoric are pervading American public life, experts say

Andre Perry believes the attack on Squirrel Hill came “because it is a place of love. For many hate groups, it’s the kind of place they loathe and target.”

He felt that love when he returned to visit two weeks after the shooting.

“I wanted to breathe the air,” he said. “I wanted to see and talk to the people.”

He returned again a month later.

He stopped by Mineo’s to talk with the owners. He ate pancakes at Pamela’s Diner. He talked with people connected to Tree of Life.

“There is a spirit that touches anyone who spends time in Squirrel Hill,” Perry said. “We need more Squirrel Hills.”

Staff writers Paul Guggenheimer and Megan Guza contributed.