I've never known a terror victim before, or even somebody murdered on the street. Along the way patients, mostly minorities from the cities, have related a child or other relative who had been murdered, though I never knew one personally. Shootings are common, appearing in the news pretty much every day. Terrorist explosions have become all too common. But those are other people with names, with families, but known personally to other people.
An old friend from college, however, became the first for me, a victim of a mass shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue where he attened Dor Hadash, a Reconstructionist congregation that rented space in the building. I suspected it might be him as soon as the names with ages were released the day after the assault, confirmed within an hour or two. Jerry Rabinowitz, UPenn C'73/M'77 had been my friend in college for four years. We served together on the freshman rowing team, both as coxswains, he departing wisely at mid-year when the coach had a hissy-fit and made us all run beyond our reasonable capacity. Jerry went on to excel at his studies, gaining admission to UPenn medical school and then settling in Pittsburgh as a primary care physician. I would learn from the tributes and more formal obituaries that he got in on the ground floor of managing AIDS, being among the first to introduce anti-retroviral medicine as it became available to those with low CD4 counts. We lost contact, and when the photographs appeared in public media, I probably would not have recognized him in a social situation but the identity would click in a minute or two with name tags at a UPenn event. I remember Jerry as kindly and maybe somewhat direct in our conversations. I do not recall him going to shul or having a girlfriend. I cannot even remember for sure his major, though I think it was biochemistry as we shared classes into our junior or maybe even senior years.
Forty years of separation can be reconnected up to a point in an obituary. He had only been married 21 years, he served as a pillar of the Reconstructive synagogue that rented space where the massacre occurred during shabbat morning worship. In doctor fashion, his first inclination was to attend to the wounded in his presence. His mother and his in-laws survive, though he had no children. Some relatives, likely on his wife's side, had made Aliyah with many characteristic Israeli names among the survivors.
For a while, I considered driving to Pittsburgh for the funeral. That was not to be, as I had a deadline project that would delay travel and unknown to me, the funeral took place this morning, the first set of funerals for four of the eleven murdered. I just could not have gotten there.
Does knowing a victim change how a mass murder of this type registers? I do not know yet. There is the function brain part of me that is well aware of targeting of Jews through history, whether by spontaneous pogroms, pre-meditated Holocausts or inquisitions, assassinations targeting individuals, or terror attacks where randomness that creates a who's next is integral to the plan. The hatred that drives this is never rational, but there is usually an agenda from not allowing Jews who Islamists regard as dhimis from owning land to diffusing perceived economic power, to keeping the Church free of non-believers. While murder usually gets condemnation, at least in America, the underlying desire to identify an external target to avenge one's social travails, often does not. That's where we seem to be now. Prosecution of perpetrators does not stop this. Elections sometimes do. We have an opportunity for this in just a couple of weeks. My friend Jerry's shooting was random, but indirectly enabled. It has to be disabled and I am optimistic that enough people will have connected to this to make for a return to some of the decency that America's electoral leadership has not seen as important enough to protect.
