From a distance, the Tree of Life Synagogue now looks like another American crime scene. Police tape blocks off the Wilkins Avenue entrance of the temple, and patrol cars guard the perimeter with flashing lights.

But just at the yellow-tape barrier, the closest spot to the horror of what happened here Saturday, people have left hundreds of bouquets of flowers, cards and posters with a repeated message: We come in grief and solidarity; we speak for a community that will resist the hatred that killed these victims.

I happened to be in Pittsburgh on other business, so I had a chance to pay my respects at this defiled holy place in Squirrel Hill on a rainy Sunday night. I used to live a few miles from here, when I started my career as a journalist, and Pittsburgh is one of those places that never entirely leaves you, even when you go away.

Here are the words I read on a hand-lettered poster, drawn on white cardboard moist with raindrops: “My tears flow for the Tree of Life Congregation. My heart aches for the city I love. I mourn for my city whose haven of love and possibility is being extinguished by the hate of a few.”

Nestled among the flowers are different versions of this same message: “Hate has no home here.” “This heinous act does not represent us.” A pumpkin has been decorated with the word “love” written around the orange skin. A flag of Israel has been draped with a rosary and the words: “We Christians love the Jews.”

This city and its neighborhoods display a solidarity that comes from another time. Squirrel Hill has been described as an American shtetl, but there is a similar sense of pride, at once inward-looking but outwardly confident, in the African-American Hill District, or the partly Italian-American neighborhood of Mt. Washington, where I lived, or the neighborhoods where Catholic parishes were understood to be Polish, or German, or Croatian, or Irish -- but always part of the Pittsburgh family.

David Shribman, the brilliant editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, whose writings helped make this America’s city the past few days, told me once that when he took the job running the paper, rather than haggling over salary he asked for tickets to the Pirates, Steelers and the symphony. It’s that kind of town. As of Monday morning, the sympathy notes sent to the Post-Gazette by readers and published online stretched to 57 screens.

One of the ways to understand the sense of community that animated the Tree of Life is to read the synagogue’s website, which hadn’t been updated Sunday night. It was like a time capsule from the world just before Robert Bowers, the accused murderer who proclaimed that he wanted “to kill Jews,” opened fire with his AR-15. The temple described itself online this way: “Where a 3,000-year-old tradition meets a 5-year-old’s curiosity.”

A “Family Program” had been scheduled for Sunday in nearby Frick Park. Members of the congregation were asked to contribute $18 each to sponsor participants in a 5.8-kilometer run-walk. The money would be shared between the Humane Animal Rescue Shelter and Clinic and Jewish Family and Community Services.

On the Tree of Life website, a message from Rabbi Jeffrey Myers had been posted on July 19, and it was still there Sunday night. The title was “We deserve better.”

Here’s what Myers wrote four months ago, when Bowers’ anti-Semitism was building toward its gruesome climax. It reads almost like a premonition about our national inability to stop the next horror before it happens.

“Current news recycles at a dizzying pace, with the important topic of yesterday buried beneath the freshest catch of the day,” wrote Myers. “The television talking heads pick over each and every juicy bit like vultures over carrion.”

And yet, the rabbi noted, after Parkland and so many other mass shootings, America’s political leaders seem unable to stop the violence: “Despite continuous calls for sensible gun control and mental health care, our elected leaders in Washington knew that it would fade away. ... Unless there is a dramatic turnaround in the midterm elections, I fear that the status quo will remain unchanged.”

Rabbi Myers wrote that in July. At a memorial here Sunday night, Myers, who had lost 11 worshipers a day before, put it simply: “My words are not intended as political fodder. I address all equally. Stop the words of hate.”

It sounds impossible, but let’s say it: Never again.


David Ignatius
David Ignatius can be reached via Twitter: @IgnatiusPost. -- Ed.

(Washington Post Writers Group)