April 2, 2021 | 20 Nisan 5781
Candlelighting 7:28 p.m. | Saturday 8:28 p.m. | Havdalah 8:29 p.m. | Vol. 64, No. 14 | pittsburghjewishchronicle.org
Pitt and CMU launch new center to fight hate
NOTEWORTHY LOCAL Pondering a pandemic
Rabbi Danny Schiff’s new e-book Page 2
$1.50
Pittsburgh’s Holocaust Center marks Yom HaShoah, Genocide Awareness Month By David Rullo | Staff Writer
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Meet Mark Friedman
Penguins’ new Jewish player Page 4
NATIONAL Another first for second gentleman
Emhoff hosts White House’s first virtual seder Page 8
leading the Collaboratory along with Lorrie Cranor, director and professor in security and privacy technologies in CMU’s CyLab. While Blee recognizes the enormity of the task ahead, she is optimistic. “There will definitely be challenges, but all I see right now is opportunities,” she said. “A definite challenge is the scale of the problem we’re addressing — it’s very large — but so are the ambitions of the Collaboratory.” Blee, a member of Congregation Dor Hadash — one of the three congregations attacked on Oct. 27, 2018 — has spent decades studying white supremacism, interviewing members of hate groups to determine how they came to embrace their ideologies. While Blee says her work has been “smallscale,” she hopes that by bringing in other researchers and experts, the Collaboratory can develop effective interventions. “In Pittsburgh, we know all too tragically the facts of extremist hate,” Blee said. “We have a community of people who
auren Apter Bairnsfather is not surprised that Yom HaShoah falls during Genocide Awareness Month. “We didn’t have the word genocide until the Holocaust,” said Bairnsfather, director of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. The Holocaust Center’s annual Yom HaShoah program honoring the 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust takes place April 8. It will be the first in a series of events hosted by the Center that pays tribute to Genocide Awareness Month. The Yom HaShoah event will be held virtually and will include school children participating by interviewing survivors and survivors’ children and grandchildren, Bairnsfather said. The program moved to a virtual format for the first time last year, and the Center changed its timing from evening to a lunchtime program. “People loved that,” Bairnsfather said. “We had 800 people watching in real time.” By keeping the daytime format this year, many area schools — not just those with students participating in the event — can watch the commemoration. The program will include a tribute to the late Cantor Moshe Taube, a Holocaust survivor who was a longtime participant in the Center’s Yom HaShoah event and who died last November. One of Taube’s students will chant two prayers that Taube frequently led. Both Rabbi Jeffrey Myers of the Tree of Life Congregation in Squirrel Hill and
Please see Center, page 14
Please see Genocide, page 14
Students unite at the University of Pittsburgh one week after the attack at the Tree of Life building. Photo courtesy of University of Pittsburgh By Dionna Dash | Special to the Chronicle
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wo years after the massacre at the Tree of Life building, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University have together launched a research center to study and combat extremist hate. The number of hate crimes against marginalized communities in the U.S. continues to rise. Last year, hate crimes in the U.S. rose to the highest level in more than a decade, according to a recent FBI report. In 2019, the American Jewish community experienced the highest level of anti-Semitic incidents since tracking began in 1979. The Collaboratory Against Hate Research and Action Center will bring together researchers and clinicians from both universities, as well as local community groups, to study how extremist hate is spawned and proliferates in online spaces and real-life encounters. The center’s goal is to develop interventions to inhibit extremist hate and minimize its impact. Sociologist Kathleen Blee, dean of Pitt’s Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, will be