PITTSBURGH — Judith Kaye waited 60 years to find the love of her life.
She’d met him once, decades earlier, when she first moved to Pittsburgh and walked into his real estate business.
Twenty years later, in 2012, Dr. Kaye and Irving Younger spotted each other in a Starbucks. Irv had lost his wife years earlier. Kaye’s parents both died the year prior. They took comfort in each other.
From then on, she said, “Anytime we went somewhere, it always felt like a first date.”
Kaye spoke lovingly about the man she called Irv as she told jurors in the case against Robert Bowers about their brief time together.
“It took me 60 years to meet him,” she said. “He was the late love of my life.”
Tuesday marked the second day of victim impact testimony in the case against Bowers, who could face the death penalty as his trial draws to a close. Jurors convicted him of all 63 federal charges against him last month. Last week, they deemed him eligible for the death penalty.
The trial is in its final phase: Prosecutors will seek to show jurors the immeasurable void left by the 11 Jewish congregants Bowers killed, while his defense attorneys will try to get them to spare his life.
Irv was among the 11 killed when Bowers stormed the Squirrel Hill synagogue on Oct. 27, 2018: Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil and David Rosenthal, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Dan Stein, Melvin Wax, and Irv Younger.
Their relationship was so special, Kaye said, and ultimately so short.
Irv was the self-appointed usher for his congregation, Tree of Life, which owned the synagogue at the corner of Shady and Wilkins avenues. The synagogue also housed the congregations Dor Hadash and New Light. He would park himself toward the back of the chapel in which Tree of Life worshipped, handing out prayer books already turned to the right page and offering help to anyone who might need it.
Kaye said she and Irv were set to go to brunch after services that morning. She’d seen him the night before when they’d gone out together and then returned to their respective apartments. A friend invited them out later that night, but they decided against going back out.
“If we’d have gotten together the night before, he might have slept over and he might have slept in,” she said, still thinking about that what-if.
She said she heard about an incident at the synagogue, but she wasn’t worried at first — Irv always turned off his phone when he was in services. When she still didn’t hear from him, she called the hospitals checking to see if he was there. She went to the Jewish Community Center where concerned families were gathering.
After roughly nine hours of waiting, she said, she was interviewed by the FBI about 10 p.m.
A photo of Irv smiling easily at the camera was shown to the jury.
“That’s Irv,” Kaye said. “Sweet face.”
One after another, the children and loved ones of the 11 victims told jurors of the unfillable void left behind in the aftermath of Oct. 27, 2018.
Amy Mallinger and her grandmother had plans. Rose Mallinger’s 100th birthday was coming up in three years, and the two talked about it often as they people-watched from Rose’s front porch.
“She loved to people-watch, so I learned to love to people-watch, too,” Mallinger told jurors.
They sat on that front porch often, she said, and they talked about everything: Squirrels, dogs, the neighbors, the future.
Mallinger called her bubbe, the Yiddish word for grandmother.
When they sat on the porch, she would hold her bubbe’s hands. She said she knew they often hurt, so she rubbed them for her.
Her bubbe loved to dance, and photos presented to jurors on Tuesday showed her in the midst of a pose at her nephew’s bar mitzvah years earlier. Another showed her at a more recent family function. She needed the help of a family member’s arm and her cane, but she was doing the Chicken Dance nonetheless.
That was her favorite dance at any celebration, Mallinger said.
Family dinners at Rose’s home always turned into game night afterward, though she had a habit of shouting out the answers regardless of whose team she was on or whose turn it was.
“Now she doesn’t get to play games, she doesn’t get to dance at my wedding,” Mallinger wept.
Her bubbe’s phone number is still programmed into her cell phone. She recounted staring at it, wanting to call it and wanting her to answer.
“But she wouldn’t.”
Mallinger took jurors through her life growing up with her bubbe: Blueberry pancakes after they would spend the night and, later in life, driving bubbe to the salon each Friday and getting lunch afterward. There were special dinners for each grandchild, watching game shows and playing games.
One of the last conversations Mallinger had with her bubbe was about the two rings she always wore. One was her wedding ring, and the other was made up of all the jewelry her family had given her over the years.
That wedding ring is now Mallinger’s engagement ring.
So many of the stories came back to that front porch. It was a long one: Rose lived in one half of the duplex and her son Alan, Mallinger’s father, lived in the other half with his family.
It was the porch Mallinger was standing on late Oct. 27, 2018, when her father walked up to it. Mallinger and her twin brother had spent the day searching hospitals and making calls. They knew Andrea Wedner, their aunt and Rose’s daughter, had survived.
If Aunt Andrea made it out, they thought, bubbe did too.
She didn’t, and her father’s words that night confirmed what she said she already knew.
“She’s gone.”
For friends and family of Jerry Rabinowitz miss his smile and his pure happiness.
A family doctor for years, he loved delivering babies, said his brother-in-law, Daniel Kramer.
He considered himself a country doctor, and he formed his own practice so he could practice medicine the way he thought it should be done. He was still making house calls right up until his death.
One of those house calls was for an older woman who lived alone and was quite lonely, Mr. Kramer said. Jerry would go over after a full day in his office, take his blood pressure, drink the tea she made for him, and hold her hand and talk.
“That’s the kind of doctor Jerry was,” he said, but noted his brother-in-law called himself “doc,” not “doctor.”
One photo he showed jurors featured Jerry smiling in his office. It was a wide smile that reached all the way up to his eyes. A stethoscope was slung around his neck.
“He was so happy to be a doctor, and he was so happy to have his patients,” Kramer said.
“That smile,” he continued. “I can’t remember a time he wasn’t smiling.”
He took on the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, Mr. Kramer said. It was a time when little was understood, and many doctors were turning away the sick young men who came to them.
“Jerry took them in, Jerry cared for them and at the end of their visits, he would hug them at a time when they were considered untouchable,” he said.
Mr. Kramer spoke of the absolute adoration Jerry felt for his wife, Miri, Kramer’s sister.
“It was profound,” he said.
He said his sister remains too devastated to speak of her loss herself, and he considers it an honor to speak on Jerry and Miri’s behalf.
“My sister wakes up in the house she lived in with Jerry for 30 years and he’s not there,” he said. “When she goes to sleep at night, he’s not there.”
Bernice and Sylvan Simon met on a blind date in 1955. They were married a year later.
“They were very much in love, and they did everything together,” said their daughter, Michelle Weis. “Right up until the end.”
The couple was married for more than 60 years. Their wedding took place in the Pervin Chapel inside the Tree of Life synagogue. They were shot and killed in their usual seats on Oct. 27, 2018.
“She was my best friend,” Weis said of her mother. “She was my person I would call, vent to, just talk to. Now I can’t do that.”
The family was supposed to celebrate Weis’ birthday later that day. Days later, when she went to her parents home, their table was all set and her gift was sitting on the table.
“It was the worst thing to see,” she said.
She said losing both of her parents at the same time and in such an unimaginable way is indescribable.
“Nothing is the same,” she said.
Her younger brother, too, spoke of the love his parents had for each other.
“They were a remarkable couple,” Michael Simon told jurors. “They were the poster people for being married and how you should treat each other.”
He said his parents were the center of the family’s universe.
“You just have a void,” he said. “It’s like you have a hole in your heart that’s never going to heal.”
Anthony Fienberg described his mother, Joyce Fienberg, as the Mary Poppins to his children.
“She meant everything to the kids,” he said. “Our kids were devastated. We always talk about her. We always make reference to the good times. We try to bring up all of those positive memories but you can’t fill the hole.”
His family has lived in France for decades, he said, but each summer his children would spend two months with his mother.
He said she was like the opposite of a hockey team: rather than spending 10 months playing and two months preparing for the next season, his mother would spend 10 months preparing for the two months she got to spend with her grandchildren.
He and his younger brother, Howard Fienberg, called their mother the central cog of their family.
“How do you go about talking about [your mother], especially in the past tense?” Anthony Fienberg said. “She was our world.”
Lisa Burns didn’t say Officer Dan Mead was a different man before he was shot Oct. 27. 2018, but she didn’t have to.
The photo she showed jurors was of a man with light in his eyes and color in his skin. The man who testified last month during the guilt phase of the trial kept his eyes low and his skin was pale. He needed a wheelchair to get into the courtroom.
Burns, Officer Mead’s girlfriend of six years, said neuropathy in his feet and legs has left him mostly unable to talk. She said doctors think it could be from shrapnel in his leg, or just his body’s reaction to more than a half dozen surgeries.
She was at home baking cookies the morning of the shooting, when his sister called to say something had happened. Later, she got a voicemail from him.
“The (expletive) shot me,” he shouted. “I think I’m going to lose my hand.”
He didn’t, but after eight surgeries, that hand still doesn’t work.
Mead was among the first officers on the scene that morning, and Bowers shot at him through the synagogue door, essentially blowing apart his hand.
Burns said doctors put plates into his hand, took plates out, tried cadaver nerves, tried implants, removed pieces of bone, and removed pieces of scar tissue. She said he still can’t fully grip with that hand, and his pinky and ring finger are “useless.”
He was a carpenter before he was an officer, she said. Now he is neither. He used to play baseball and softball.
“There’s no activity, really,” she said. “He lays on the couch and watches TV. He was really active, full of energy. He has no energy now.”
She said Officer Mead doesn’t talk about the psychological damage he might be suffering.
“He says he’s a crippled, worthless piece of (expletive).”
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