Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting Shakes Close-knit Jewish Community

'Utter Shock and Disbelief': Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting Shakes Close-knit Jewish Community

About 40 percent of Squirrel Hill’s 15,000 residents are Jewish. On Saturday, they found themselves on lockdown, wondering which of their friends or relatives were alive

Dina Kraft 

In the immediate hours after the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood on Saturday, residents were on lockdown in their homes, wondering which of their friends or relatives were dead or alive.

Squirrel Hill's residents describe it as a beloved neighborhood, considered a peaceful place – before an attack on one of the area's four synagogues marked it as the site of the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in U.S. history.

Squirrel Hill is a quiet neighborhood, full of walkable streets lined with large old oak and elm trees, a mix of Tudor homes, rambling brick houses and apartment buildings. Some 40 percent of its residents are Jewish. It is a rare phenomenon: an urban American neighborhood that has maintained the Jewish heart of its city for over a century.