On Sunday, June 22, about 60 Jewish journalists gathered in Pittsburgh not to report, but to learn. The American Jewish Press Association annual conference got underway that afternoon with a powerful start. As the lights dimmed and the opening frames of “Repairing the World: Stories from the Tree of Life” flickered across the screen, a silence settled over the room. The film is raw and tender and holds you in its grip. But it was the panel afterward—four survivors of that tragedy seated in front of me—that reshaped how I understood what it means to survive.
What I learned
Carol Black. Andrea Mallinger Wedner. Amy Mallinger. Dan Leger. Their names aren’t just part of the story—they are the story. And what they offered wasn’t a recounting of a real-life horror story. It was a lesson in how to keep living.
Black spoke with the composed clarity of someone who had made a sacred vow: not to cede her joy. Her brother, Richard Gottfried, a 65-year-old dentist, was one of the 11 killed in the attack at the Tree of Life synagogue on Oct. 27, 2018. Black has leaned further into synagogue life since then, leading services and honoring her brother through ritual.
“I wasn’t going to stop doing the things I did before,” she said, recalling the immediate aftermath.
Wedner, who was shot and wounded inside the sanctuary that day, is the daughter of 97-year-old Rose Mallinger, the eldest of the 11 shooting victims who died. Wedner spent 10 days in the hospital recovering. “Every morning when I open my eyes and put my feet on the floor, I say, ‘thank you, God.’ That’s how I start my day,” she said. “I’m just so grateful to be alive.”
Amy Mallinger, Wedner’s daughter, carries her grandmother Rose’s memory with quiet determination. She doesn’t speak because she wants a platform—she speaks because her bubbe can’t. “People cannot forget who she was. I don’t want her remembered only for how she died,” Mallinger said. “It is not a burden. It is a mission.”
Dan Leger, a nurse, chaplain and member of Dor Hadash—one of the three congregations in the Tree of Life building that October morning—was also shot. He heard the gunfire and turned toward it. He was critically wounded. “Trauma bonds aren’t meant to last,” he said, “but relationships built out of them can be.” His healing, he explained, is rooted in community and spiritual practice.
The fragile fabric of solidarity
Trauma bonds. I’d never heard the term before, but it made instant sense. The people at that table had lived through something no one should—and somehow, they built something from it. As Leger said, those bonds aren’t meant to last, but relationships built out of them can be. What they’d formed wasn’t just resilience. It was something closer to kinship.
The survivors’ stories reminded me how much community matters. The film showed how, in the days after the shooting, Muslim and Christian neighbors brought food, prayers and presence. That solidarity felt real. It felt human.
But now in a post-Oct. 7 world, that solidarity feels harder to hold. One panelist said it plainly: groups that stood with Jewish Pittsburgh in 2018 have gone quiet. The grief of Gaza has collided with the grief of Squirrel Hill, where the Tree of Life synagogue was located.
And still, these survivors believe in connection. “Antisemitism from the left feels the same as it does from the right,” Black said. “It still hurts. But we have to keep showing up for each other.”
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