Tragedy hits home for Northeast Ohioans, others

Cleveland Jewish News Staff

STEVE DETTELBACH

Steve Dettelbach, a Solon resident who attends Park Synagogue in Cleveland Heights and Pepper Pike, who has extended family in the Squirrel Hill area of Pittsburgh, said he has a cousin who attends services almost every week there, but didn’t go Oct. 27.

“He did tell me that ironically the Cleveland Browns saved his life (because he is an avid Steelers fan),” Dettelbach told the CJN. “He has tickets for the game (Oct. 28) in Pittsburgh and asked his boss to let him off on Sunday to go to the game. His boss said OK, but he had to work Saturday. So, he did not take his mother-in-law to Shabbat services like he does every week. All the people who sit in his row, including a woman in her late 90’s, were shot. Horrible.”

Dettelbach was at a political event in a gym in Martins Ferry, Ohio, when he heard the news. He is a candidate for Ohio attorney general.

“Somebody handed me a phone and they just showed me one of those alerts and I was literally speaking at the time,” he told the CJN. “It really took me a second. I couldn’t process it. I just couldn’t believe it and sadly, of course, because there’s so much anti-Semitism, but maybe not at this level, anti-Semitic violence I saw as a U.S. Attorney and I see it as a Jew, you see what’s going on, when something of this scale happens, your natural reaction is it’s hard to understand it. Then I just felt overwhelmingly sad, I felt like I wanted to cry. Throughout the day, just like everybody else, I vacillated between anger and disbelief.”

Dettelbach said he has attended family functions and religious events in the Pittsburgh area and couldn’t recall if he was inside the Tree of Life Congregation.

He said he received a call or text message from a cousin that said, “Call me immediately.”

“Of course, my heart just stopped when I got the call,” Dettelbach said.

Dettelbach said when he spoke to his cousin, he said, “They’re very concerned and scared. When one of these things happen, there’s a lot of raw emotions, more than anything else. There’s also confusion. People don’t know who’s hurt, who’s not, everybody’s just trying to understand how something like this could happen.”

Anne Heiss And Tim Litman

Anne Heiss of Orange, who belongs to B’nai Jeshurun Congregation in Pepper Pike, said her husband’s grandmother, who is in her 90’s, was heading with another couple to Tree of Life for services.

“They drove up Wilkins Avenue and the street was already blocked off,” Heiss told the CJN.

Heiss said her husband’s grandmother is a regular Shabbat shul-goer.

“When I talked to her, she was very shaken, crying,” Heiss said. “She just couldn’t believe it happened.”

Tim Litman was serving as an usher at Rodef Shalom Congregation, a historic synagogue on Fifth Avenue, in Pittsburgh about 3 miles from Tree of Life.

“We could hear the sirens going by, but didn’t know what it was about,” he said.

Once he learned of the shootings, through reports from CNN on his telephone, he and the other usher told the senior rabbi of the shootings. The executive director came to the synagogue and immediately locked down Rodef Shalom until about 12:30 p.m., when it was understood that the gunman had been apprehended.

Two police officers were stationed at Rodef Shalom, one in the building and one outside.

Litman said he was familiar with the emergency protocol for the synagogue after having been briefed by the Pittsburgh Jewish Federation.

Litman’s daughter, Marcy Lackritz, lives in Twinsburg. She said she was able to reach her mother to ascertain her father’s safety fairly quickly.

“I’m terrified to hear the names,” she said. “And if it’s not necessarily people that I know, I’m pretty sure it’ll be people my parents know or acquaintances. If you don’t know someone personally, somebody that you do, does.”

Jeff And Arlene Berg

Jeff and Arlene Berg are members of Grace Baptist Church in Monroeville, Pa., which has donated funds to causes in Israel. The Bergs met in Cleveland, where Jeff Berg grew up, and now live in Wilkins Township outside Pittsburgh.

They were in church Oct. 27 when news of the shootings reached them.

“The people that were speaking stopped and prayed for the whole situation,” Jeff Berg said. Organizers of the service immediately flashed the name and address of Tree of Life on the screen and encouraged congregants to send cards.

The Bergs feel a strong connection to Israel, where Jeff worked on a kibbutz when he was in his 20’s. And they have been to Tree of Life “several times,” Arlene Berg said, including once to hear a Holocaust survivor speak.

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