Describes the murder of Rabbi Morris Adler, in Congregation Shaarey Zedek.

A piercing portrait of the struggles and triumphs of one of America's renowned Jewish neighborhoods in the wake of unspeakable tragedy that highlights the hopes, fears, and tensions all Americans must confront on the road to healing. Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, is one of the oldest Jewish neighborhoods in the country, known for its tight-knit community and the profusion of multigenerational families. On October 27, 2018, a gunman killed eleven Jews who were worshipping at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill--the most deadly anti-Semitic attack in American history. Many neighborhoods would be understandably subsumed by despair and recrimination after such an event, but not this one. Mark Oppenheimer poignantly shifts the focus away from the criminal and his crime, and instead presents the historic, spirited community at the center of this heartbreak. He speaks with residents and nonresidents, Jews and gentiles, survivors and witnesses, teenagers and seniors, activists and historians. Together, these stories provide a kaleidoscopic and nuanced account of collective grief, love, support, and revival. But Oppenheimer also details the difficult dialogue and messy confrontations that Squirrel Hill had to face in the process of healing, and that are a necessary part of true growth and understanding in any community. He has reverently captured the vibrancy and caring that still characterize Squirrel Hill, and it is this phenomenal resilience that can provide inspiration to any place burdened with discrimination and hate.

The year is 1992. A very respected Rabbi is found murdered in his synagogue located in a wealthy suburb on Long Island. Deborah Katzman is the first woman to become president of the synagogue. She is a child survivor of the Holocaust and a successful bankruptcy attorney. The synagogue's lay leaders had hoped that a woman with her background would be able to reduce the growing friction within their walls. The Rabbi had been growing more and more traditional at the same time as his congregants were becoming more liberal. Younger women were clamoring for equal participation in religious services; older congregants were opposed to the Rabbi's newly heightened religious practices. Emotions were exploding . . . but is all of this enough to cause someone to murder a man of God? The Temple leaders, each an interesting character in their own right, are trying to achieve some modicum of harmony within this once peaceful house of worship. The search for the killer is the plot that is carried forward until the murderer is uncovered in a surprise ending.

Edgy and controversial, this fascinating true crime narrative recounts the tale of the first rabbi ever accused of murder--and explores what the case says about the role of clergy in America today.

How could a Jew kill a Jew for religious and political reasons? Many people asked this question after an Orthodox Jew assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Itshak Rabin in 1995. But historian Michael Stanislawski couldn't forget it, and he decided to find out everything he could about an obscure and much earlier event that was uncannily similar to Rabin's murder: the 1848 killing--by an Orthodox Jew--of the Reform rabbi of Lemberg (now L'viv, Ukraine). Eventually, Stanislawski concluded that this was the first murder of a Jewish leader by a Jew since antiquity, a prelude to twentieth-century assassinations of Jews by Jews, and a turning point in Jewish history. Based on records unavailable for decades, A Murder in Lemberg is the first book about this fascinating case. On September 6, 1848, Abraham Ber Pilpel entered the kitchen of Rabbi Abraham Kohn and his family and poured arsenic in the soup that was being prepared for their dinner. Within hours, the rabbi and his infant daughter were dead. Was Kohn's murder part of a conservative Jewish backlash to Jewish reform and liberalization in a year of European revolution? Or was he killed simply because he threatened taxes that enriched Lemberg's Orthodox leaders? Vividly recreating the dramatic story of the murder, the trial that followed, and the political and religious fallout of both, Stanislawski tries to answer these questions and others. In the process, he reveals the surprising diversity of Jewish life in mid-nineteenth-century eastern Europe. Far from being uniformly Orthodox, as is often assumed, there was a struggle between Orthodox and Reform Jews that was so intense that it might have led to murder.

Meet Aimée Leduc, the smart, stylish Parisian private investigator, in her bestselling first investigation Aimée Leduc has always sworn she would stick to tech investigation—no criminal cases for her. Especially since her father, the late police detective, was killed in the line of duty. But when an elderly Jewish man approaches Aimée with a top-secret decoding job on behalf of a woman in his synagogue, Aimée unwittingly takes on more than she is expecting. She drops off her findings at her client’s house in the Marais, Paris’s historic Jewish quarter, and finds the woman strangled, a swastika carved on her forehead. With the help of her partner, René, Aimée sets out to solve this horrendous murder, but finds herself in an increasingly dangerous web of ancient secrets and buried war crimes.

Congregation Beth Abraham expected their newest rabbi to "sing some songs and go to an environmental rally." But Vivian Green has other ideas. She wants her flock to engage meaningfully with their city-special mayoral elections, interfaith breakfasts, fights for affordable housing and all. Also, she would like just one night off to go dancing in the leather boots that make her look like her finest gay self. Taking on the city's old boys' club is already proving difficult...but then Beth Abraham bursts into flames. Fingers get pointed, and everyone's biases rise to the surface. It turns out that wasn't the only fire burning in town. Vivian sticks to her instincts, raising tensions with her boss, her community, and a certain hottie in a power suit. And she learns that knowing whodunnit is only half the battle.