Aryeh-Leib Thorne

Center for Humanity — Tree of Life, High Holidays, and a City That Remembers

28 Elul 5786 · 10 September 2026 · Israel–Diaspora / Pittsburgh

Rosh Hashanah arrives in Pittsburgh this year with two quiet signals, not one. On Wednesday the institution that grew from the Oct. 27, 2018 synagogue attack announced a new name: the Tree of Life Center for Humanity. A day earlier, the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh set out an expanded High Holiday security posture—months of planning with local police and the FBI, grant-funded upgrades, and a deliberate public message: preparedness, not panic. [VERIFY: WPXI 9 Sep rename coverage; Federation release 8 Sep.] Read together in RH week, they rhyme. Memorial is becoming civic education. Guarding is becoming ordinary covenantal work. A city that remembers is also a city that keeps watch so that gathering, prayer, and return remain possible.

This is not a sensational file. It is a local essay about what Diaspora communities do when memory and vigilance have to share the same calendar.

From massacre site to teaching house

The Oct. 27 attack remains, as WPXI and communal memory both state, the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history. Eleven worshippers murdered in a synagogue building that held three congregations. That fact does not need amplification. It needs fidelity.

What the Center for Humanity naming does—if the organization’s own framing holds—is refuse to leave fidelity as grief alone. Officials describe an education-centered mission: counter antisemitism, hate, and division through community building and shared values. CEO Carole Zawatsky, as quoted by WPXI, called the Center “a beacon of Jewish life here in Pittsburgh” and “a national model for bridge building and education,” saying the new name “codifies the shared humanity central to our mission of uprooting antisemitism and hate.” Board chair Michael Bernstein spoke of opening doors to students and families, “remembering those taken from us and building relationships across difference to repair our world.” [VERIFY exact quotes against WPXI primary / organizational release.]

The unveiling video featured a Tom Hanks voiceover; Hanks had served on the honorary cabinet when the rebuild campaign began. Construction continues on a Daniel Libeskind–designed memorial and building that will house a museum on U.S. antisemitism, the attack, and the communal response; the 10/27 Memorial; and programming tied to the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh and the LIGHT Initiative. The Tree of Life Congregation is to return when the site reopens. More than $51.5 million has been raised—among named supporters the Richard King Mellon Foundation, the Henry Hillman Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, the PNC Foundation, and the Ford Foundation—plus federal grants and Commonwealth Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program funding. [VERIFY donor list, dollar total, and program names against WPXI / Tree of Life primary materials.]

Name-change coverage can become branding noise. The covenantal read is narrower. A people that buries its dead and then builds a teaching house is doing something older than nonprofit strategy. It is converting zakhor—remember—into a public grammar: antisemitism has a history; Oct. 27 has a record; Pittsburgh’s answer was not only mourning but institutions that refuse to let hate become ambient weather. Shared humanity here is not a solvent for Jewish particularity. It is the claim that Jewish memory, properly taught, equips a wider civic public to recognize domination when it arrives dressed as grievance.

Preparedness, not panic

The Federation’s High Holiday announcement lands on the same RH-week table for a reason.

Rosh Hashanah begins the evening of September 11. For about two months the Federation has been coordinating security planning, asking local police departments across Greater Pittsburgh to rotate additional patrols near roughly thirty Jewish community locations observing the holidays. State grant funding is supporting private contract security and off-duty officers. Information-sharing with the FBI is part of the posture. Shawn Brokos, the Federation’s Director of Community Security, put the tone in one clean sentence: “This is not a response to a heightened threat. It is a heightened level of preparedness… Pittsburgh’s Jewish community should feel free to gather, pray and celebrate this season.” [VERIFY Brokos quote and coordination details against jewishpgh.org primary.]

The numbers, as the Federation publishes them, are concrete and should stay attributed. The Federation reports spending $450,000 directly on security in fiscal year 2026. Separately, thirty local institutions received a combined $1.7 million from Pennsylvania’s Nonprofit Security Grant Fund Program this year (of thirty-two that applied). Of seven faith-based organizations the Federation supported through a related state grant application earlier in 2026, three received funding. Thirty-six locations now carry the Bluepoint system for immediate law-enforcement communication in an emergency. National context, as cited via Jewish Federations of North America data: Jewish institutions across the country now spend more than $1 billion annually on security. The most recent FBI figures the Federation cites show anti-Jewish hate crimes as 64 percent of religiously motivated hate crimes in 2025, though Jews are roughly 2 percent of the U.S. population. [VERIFY FY2026 Federation spend, PA grant totals, Bluepoint site count, JFNA $1B figure, and FBI 2025 percentages against primary Federation release / FBI tables—do not round upward in social drafts.]

David Knoll, Associate Vice President of Public Affairs, named the opportunity cost without melodrama: every dollar for guards, cameras, and training is a dollar that could have gone to day schools, camps, or need. Safety comes first. That is not panic. That is stewardship.

Covenantal communities have always known the difference. Guarding the gate so the congregation can hear the shofar is not the same as living as if the gate is already broken. Brokos’s line—“confidence, not concern”—is the moral temperature this essay wants to keep. Soft ask, not scare copy. Vigilance that points people to 911 and to Federation channels when something looks wrong, then returns them to prayer.

Memorial → civic education; peoplehood that guards

Why braid these two stories in one RH-week column?

Because Diaspora life fails in two opposite ways. One failure is amnesia: treat Oct. 27 as a closed local tragedy and move on without building the educational muscle that makes antisemitism legible to neighbors who were not in the room. The other failure is permanent emergency: so flood the public square with threat language that ordinary Jews stop showing up, and High Holidays become an exercise in dread rather than return.

Pittsburgh this week is modeling a third path—imperfect, expensive, unfinished, and still worth naming. The Center for Humanity naming pushes memory toward teaching. The Federation’s security posture pushes teaching’s precondition: a community that can still assemble. Non-domination, in the civic sense used elsewhere in this writing project, is not only about distant regimes. It is about whether a minority can enter shul on Rosh Hashanah without being dominated by fear—and whether the majority culture will help build the institutions that make that standing durable.

Israel–Diaspora texture belongs here lightly, without forcing a Jerusalem brief into Squirrel Hill. Jewish peoplehood after Oct. 7, 2023, and after Oct. 27, 2018, knows that antisemitic violence travels as a pattern even when each city keeps its own police, grants, and architecture. Pittsburgh’s answer has been stubbornly local: raise the money, coordinate the watch, name the Center, invite students through the doors, and still tell the congregation—come pray; we prepared.

G-d’s name does not rubber-stamp any budget line or museum wall text. Covenant does ask something plainer: remember the dead without consuming the living; educate without erasing Jewish particularity; guard without teaching children that Jewish life is only a security problem. Tikkun—repair—shows up here as Libeskind drawings and Bluepoint panels and Federation briefings to congregations. Unromantic. Necessary.

Soft ask before the emotional post

Tree of Life material invites maximal emotion. Maximal emotion on social, rushed, becomes spectacle. Spectacle is the opposite of what Brokos and Zawatsky are trying to do. Soft ask first: if and when Aryeh clears a memorial-adjacent post, lead with preparedness and civic education, not with gore or score-settling. Attribute WPXI and jewishpgh.org. Keep the FBI and JFNA figures hedged to the Federation’s citation until primary tables are checked. Do not invent threat levels the Federation expressly declined to claim. The dead are not content.

For Pittsburgh readers, the ask is almost pastoral. Show up. Take security seriously enough to notice something odd, lightly enough not to let it own the holiday. Support the institutions that convert memory into teaching. For Diaspora readers elsewhere: what would it mean for your city to move from memorial anniversary to a teaching center—and from seasonal anxiety to funded preparedness that still says come gather?

Rosh Hashanah is judgment and return. Pittsburgh’s Jewish community is doing both in public: judging hate by building against it, and returning to seats that security work makes it possible to fill. A city that remembers. A people that guards. Softly, on purpose.

Sources (VERIFY before publish):