Pittsburgh Rabbi’s Wife Opposes Death Penalty for Tree of Life Synagogue Killings

Beth Kissileff (pic­tured), a writer and the wife of a rab­bi who sur­vived the shoot­ing ram­page that killed eleven wor­ship­pers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life syn­a­gogue, has asked the U.S. Department of Justice not to seek the death penal­ty against the man charged with com­mit­ting those mur­ders. In an opin­ion arti­cle for the Religion News Service, Kissileff wrote that she and her hus­band, Rabbi Jonathan Perlman of Pittsburgh’s New Light Congregation, engaged fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors and a social work­er who had come to dis­cuss the tri­al of the white suprema­cist accused of the act of domes­tic ter­ror­ism in ​“a dis­cus­sion of Jewish con­cepts of jus­tice.” Three mem­bers of the New Light Congregation were among those mur­dered in the syn­a­gogue. Rabbi Perlman, Kissileff wrote, told the pros­e­cu­tion team: ​“Our Bible has many laws about why peo­ple should be put to death. … But our sages and rab­bis decid­ed that after bib­li­cal times these deaths mean death at the hands of heav­en, not a human court.” She writes, ​“if as reli­gious peo­ple we believe that life is sacred, how can we be per­mit­ted to take a life, even the life of some­one who has com­mit­ted horrible actions?”

Kissileff bases her con­clu­sion that a sen­tence of life with­out parole for the syn­a­gogue shoot­ing is more appro­pri­ate than death both on Jewish teach­ings against the death penal­ty and on her hope that the killer might yet change his white suprema­cist beliefs. She wrote in an arti­cle for The Jerusalem Post that “[w]hen Jews are killed just for being Jewish, we com­mem­o­rate them with the words ​‘Hashem yikom damam,’ may God avenge their blood. This for­mu­la­tion absents us from the equa­tion since it express­es that it is God’s respon­si­bil­i­ty, not ours, to seek ulti­mate jus­tice. As humans, we are inca­pable of met­ing out true jus­tice when a mon­strous crime has been com­mit­ted.” She explains that, although the Torah calls for a death sen­tence for some crimes, Jewish tra­di­tion teach­es that death sen­tences should be very rare, if they are allowed at all. She writes that ​“a Jewish court is con­sid­ered blood­thirsty if it allows the death penal­ty to be car­ried out [even] once every 70 years.”

Though rec­og­niz­ing that repen­tance is rare, Kissileff said nonethe­less “[t]here is always a chance for redemp­tion. Calling for the death penal­ty means there is no pos­si­bil­i­ty for the shoot­er to repent, to change or to improve. I would rather not fore­close that pos­si­bil­i­ty of change, slim as it may be, by putting some­one to death.” She recount­ed the cas­es of white nation­al­ists Derek Black, who renounced his hatred of Jews after being invit­ed to Shabbat din­ners by Jewish stu­dents at his col­lege, and Arno Michaelis, a for­mer skin­head leader who lat­er co-authored a book on for­give­ness with a man whose father was among the sev­en con­gre­gants mur­dered in a hate attack on a Sikh tem­ple in Wisconsin. Referring to these exam­ples, Kissileff said “[n]either [man] might have been expect­ed to change their beliefs, and yet they have.”

Kissileff’s arti­cles describe the lega­cy of those who were killed in the Pittsburgh attack and how the shoot­ing has inspired oth­ers to become more involved in the syn­a­gogue and to learn more about their Jewish faith: ​“Creating more knowl­edge of what Judaism and Jewish val­ues are, and encour­ag­ing more Jews to com­mit to them, is the most pro­found way to avenge their blood.” She writes that, ​“rather than seek­ing the shooter’s death,” a bet­ter response for Jews would be ​“strength­en­ing oth­er Jews and Jewish life in Pittsburgh and around the world. Doing so will mean that Jews, not forces of evil, have the ulti­mate vic­to­ry.” She con­cludes: ​“The most impor­tant vengeance for the mur­der of 11 Jews or 6 mil­lion is for the Jewish peo­ple to live and the Torah to live, not for their killer to die.”

(Beth Kissileff, WIFE OF PITTSBURGH RABBI: NO DEATH PENALTY FOR ANTISEMITIC SHOOTER, The Jerusalem Post, February 20, 2019; Bob Bauder, Wife of rab­bi who sur­vived Tree of Life shoot­ing oppos­es death penal­ty, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, February 20, 2019; Beth Kissileff, The Jewish answer to how to pun­ish the Pittsburgh syn­a­gogue shoot­er, Religion News Service, February 27, 2019.) See Religion, Victims, and Federal Death Penalty.