A Year After Oct. 7 Massacre, Jewish Anxiety Peaks in Pennsylvania

Jewish voters in Pittsburgh feel squeezed by intolerance on the left and the right, and torn by presidential candidates seeking their support in a vital battleground state.

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Rabbi Daniel Fellman of Temple Sinai in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. With more than 434,000 members, the Jewish community in Pennsylvania is larger and stronger than those in any of the six other battleground states.

On Wednesday evening, as Rosh Hashana began in Pittsburgh’s heavily Jewish neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, Rabbi Daniel Fellman stepped up to the pulpit of Temple Sinai and lamented: “Our American Jewish community cries out in despair.”

“A person seeking the highest office in the land can utter the most base, crass, hate-filled language, day in and day out,” he told his congregation. No names were necessary.

Then he turned to the rise in antisemitism on the pro-Palestinian left, and to the two assaults within the past month on Jewish students at the University of Pittsburgh. “Students, misguided in their pursuit of real freedom for those in harm’s way, can utter phrases once deemed abhorrent and beyond the pale,” Rabbi Fellman said.

It has been a year now since Hamas terrorists from Gaza stormed into Israel and massacred an estimated 1,200 people, most of them Jewish civilians in their homes or at a music festival, and took hundreds hostage. The ensuing, escalating regional war has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, expanded to Lebanon and prompted a barrage of Iranian missiles aimed at Israel.

It has also kept Jewish communities across the United States gripped by an enduring state of anguish — divided, doubtful, and feeling betrayed from within and without.

“There is apprehension,” Bob Bernstein, 70, said Friday night as he strolled with his wife down Murray Avenue. “and it’s increasing.” His wife, Ellie, also 70, chimed in: “But we can’t live in fear.”

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