Eight years ago today, Rose Mallinger, 97, was among the first through the doors of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha Synagogue. She nearly always was. Brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal sat in the back and greeted everyone who came in. Bernice and Sylvan Simon, married in that building by candlelight in 1956, came to pray.
Within minutes, they and six others were dead.
The killer chose them deliberately. His target was the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, more commonly known as HIAS, a Jewish charity that resettles refugees. That morning he posted that HIAS “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people.” Then: “Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
HIAS has a history, and the history explains the hatred.
In 1881, after Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, mobs tore through hundreds of Jewish communities in the Russian Empire. The government investigated. It concluded that the Jews had brought the violence on themselves by exploiting the peasants, who were merely protesting. The pogrom became a grievance. The victims became the cause. In 1882, the May Laws stripped Jews of the right to live and work freely.
Some 2 million Jews fled to America. HIAS was founded to help them.
In 2018, a Pittsburgh gunman decided that Jews who helped refugees deserved to die. He was repeating 1881. The Jews are harming us. Violence against them is self-defense.
The most dangerous antisemite is not the one who knows he hates Jews. It is the one who is certain he is doing some good. Hatred that knows itself can be shamed. Hatred that believes it is justice cannot.
I lead the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation in Oświęcim, the Polish town the Germans renamed Auschwitz. Before the war, Jews were more than half its population, a community four centuries old. Its last Jewish resident, Holocaust survivor Szymon Kluger, died in 2000.
Four centuries of Jewish life ended because a nation was convinced that destroying Jews was self-defense. We do not teach that history as a memorial. We teach it as a warning system.
The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks spent his life studying this pattern. Antisemitism, he observed, always justifies itself by appealing to the highest moral authority a culture recognizes. In medieval Europe, that was religion. In the modern era, science, in the form of racial theory.
Nazi signs outside Jewish shops told Germans to “defend yourselves.” Today, Sacks warned, the highest authority is human rights.
Four centuries of Jewish life ended because a nation was convinced that destroying Jews was self-defense.
The newest version speaks the language of justice. The chant on New York’s streets and campuses is “Globalize the intifada.” Its defenders call it resistance. The last intifada meant suicide bombings on buses and in cafes across Israel.
In June 2025, a man firebombed Jews marching for hostages in Boulder, Colo. In May of that year, two young embassy staffers were shot dead in Washington. In both cases, according to witnesses and prosecutors, the attacker shouted “Free Palestine.” Palestinian statehood is a legitimate cause. It does not make an 82-year-old woman in Boulder a legitimate target.
Sacks also cautioned that “the hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.”
In 2015, a young man joined a Bible study at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church. He sat with the worshippers. Then he killed nine of them, including the church’s pastor, Clementa Pinckney. A survivor said he told them they were taking over the country.
Two houses of prayer. Two congregations that opened their doors. One lie: We are being replaced, so killing them is self-defense.
Every community this lie has haunted has a stake in defeating it. Condemning hatred in your opponents’ ranks costs nothing. Condemning it among your allies is the test.
This week, Pittsburgh reads 11 names aloud. Not one of them was a cause. Every one of them was a person.
