Pittsburgh synagogue shooting survivor says events in Israel feel like a ‘retraumatization’
By Sabrina Souza, CNN
(CNN) — A survivor of the 2018 Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting that left 11 worshippers dead said the attack on Israel “feels familiar,” and brought back the trauma.
Jeffrey Myers, the rabbi of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, posted Thursday on the congregation’s website in support of Israel, calling the events of the last week a “retraumatization.”
“That familiar hurt returned, the one deep in the pit of my stomach, but this time I recognized it for what it was. Trauma. I was experiencing retraumatization,” Myers wrote.
Myers narrowly escaped the gunman, Robert Bowers, who entered the synagogue armed with three handguns and an AR-15 rifle and killed 11 congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. He was sentenced to death by a federal jury in August for those murders.
“I thought about the history of my people, how we’ve been persecuted and hunted and slaughtered for centuries, and how all of them must have felt at the moments before their death,” Myers testified in the trial.
Myers attended a Sunday evening rally at the Jewish Community Center in Pittsburgh to support Israel, in the wake of the attack by Hamas terrorists that began on Saturday and have left more than 1,200 people dead.
The first person Myers saw at the rally was one of the patrolmen who responded to the synagogue shooting. “We embraced and I thanked him for being here. His response of ‘Of course I would be here,’ was so uplifting,” Myers wrote.
Myers said he recognized even more similarities in the aftermath of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting almost five years ago and the attacks over the weekend.
He was in the same room they gathered in after the shooting in 2018 and was surrounded by “some of the same people” again.
“That’s when it hit me, like a ton of bricks. Déjà vu,” he wrote. “The words that flashed through my mind were staggering: horror; shock; disbelief; anger; evil; pain.”
“Before, during, and after the rally, I recognized the signs in everyone I saw. Pittsburgh has been through this before,” he wrote.
Myers offered a prayer for the hostages and families who’ve suffered the losses of loved ones, and for peace in Israel.
“My trauma is nothing compared to my brothers and sisters in the State of Israel,” he wrote.
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