September 12, 2025 | 19 Elul 5785
Candlelighting 7:15 p.m. | Havdalah 8:12 p.m. | Vol. 68, No. 37 | pittsburghjewishchronicle.org
Eradicate Hate Global Summit continues for fifth year
Tree of Life unveils new building design
NOTEWORTHY LOCAL Offerings of grief and rage
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By David Rullo | Senior Staff Writer
R sanctuary/theater that will provide space for both religious and cultural programming, and will feature the Tree of Life Congregation’s stained glass windows. “There’s certainly going to be speaker, film and performance series,” Bernstein said. “We did not have that in the smaller sanctuary.” Inspiration for the combined space, he said, comes from Sixth and I in Washington, D.C., a historic synagogue that now functions as both a synagogue and a space for cultural events. While the classrooms and social hall will be about the same size as they were in the original design, Bernstein said the exhibition space is about 4,000 feet smaller than initially planned. That diminution won’t come at the expense of the organization’s goal, he said. “We worked with our exhibition team — we have an academic advisory committee that we really challenged. We asked, ‘Can you tell the story in a smaller space?’ and the feeling was, overwhelmingly, yes.” A prominent feature of the previous design, the path of light, has been eliminated. Instead, there will be an entrance atrium connecting the new building with the existing building that will be functional space, something that was limited with the path of light.
esilience. Intervention. Partnership. According to Brette Steele, president of the Eradicate Hate Global Summit, those three themes will be explored at this year’s conference, Sept. 15-17 at the David Lawrence Convention Center. Billed as a “unique, multidisciplinary forum to share ideas and build working relationships to drive the development and deployment of effective solutions to reduce hate-fueled violence,” the summit was created in 2021 by Laura Ellsworth and Mark Nordenberg in response to the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. “Day 1 is all about the resilience of targeted communities,” Steele said. “Day 2 is levels of intervention and recognizing that there are many different ways we can approach preventing violence … Day 3 is building impactful partnerships.” Sept. 15, she said, will include a panel featuring eight survivors of different types of hate-fueled violence, “including, of course, the Tree of Life.” All the panelists, Steele said, will talk of their experience with hate-fueled violence and how it has motivated them to prevent future acts of similar violence. The day will also include various breakout sessions and an announcement from the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate Extremism and Radicalization. “I’m not allowed to say much about it now,” Steele said, “but what I can say is that it is going to be taking place in the house of the former commandant of Auschwitz, located on the outer wall of Auschwitz, and it is an exciting announcement about the future use of that house.” Day 2 will focus on intervention from several different aspects, Steele said, including the role of states, corporations and international partnerships in light of an apparent withdrawal by the federal government in that sphere.
Please see Tree of Life, page 10
Please see Summit, page 10
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allow since a June 2024 groundbreaking, the land housing the Tree of Life building will soon be busy with activity. And while the official ceremony was thick with pomp and circumstance, Michael Bernstein said that, in its aftermath, the organization’s leaders thought there was a window of opportunity to reevaluate everything “before we truly put shovels in the ground.” Bernstein is the board chair of the Tree of Life organization. He wanted to ensure the new building would be right, he said, not only for today but for decades into the future. To do that, the Tree of Life examined three criteria, Bernstein said: cost, sustainability and how the new building will fit within the neighborhood. Tree of Life, he explained, went back to Studio Libeskind and its principal architect, Daniel Libeskind, and began a new relationship with local architect IKM. “We took a solid six months and reviewed a number of different options,” Bernstein said. “The long and the short of it is, we’re very excited to have a design that meets all the requirements that we are now pushing quite aggressively into construction drawings and permits.” Besides a reimagined facade, the building will include a 300-seat state-of-the-art
Image courtesy of Studio Libeskind
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