After mass shooting, they found fortitude and friendship
By MARYLYNNE PITZ, Pittsburgh Post-GazetteJune 26, 2021 GMT
PITTSBURGH (AP)
Dan Leger and Tim Matson started their lives over in a hospital, slowly rebuilding their physical strength and finding the fortitude to learn how to walk again after both were seriously wounded during the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in 2018 that left 11 people dead.
As they healed, they formed a friendship.
Mr. Leger, 73, is a third-generation nurse and hospital chaplain who was at the Squirrel Hill synagogue to worship on that Oct. 27. As he lay in intensive care after being shot in the torso, his wife, Ellen, told him Officer Matson, the Pittsburgh SWAT officer who saved his life, was recuperating on the same floor, just down the hall.
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By Justin Vellucci January 25, 2021, 2:36 pm Edit
Marilyn Weinblum stands next to the case displaying Jakob s Torah at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh in 2001. (Photo provided by Marilyn Weinblum)
It was the evening of Nov. 9, 1938, and throughout Nazi-controlled Germany, government-sanctioned violence was leading to destroyed synagogues, social unrest and the arrest of thousands of Jewish citizens. That night would become known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass.
Jakob Weinblum, a Jewish teenager born in Forst (Lausitz), Germany, risked his life that night to flee to his shul, where he managed to save its cherished Torah scroll before the building was burned. In 1939, the Torah accompanied him and his family to the only country taking Jews without passports China. After eight years in a makeshift Shanghai synagogue, the Torah traveled, along with Jakob, to the U.S. and eventually found a home at Tree of Life-Sf