PITTSBURGH — Synagogue shooting victim Joyce Fienberg may have been cut down by hate, but her “beautiful soul” will live on in the hearts of…
PITTSBURGH — Synagogue shooting victim Joyce Fienberg may have been cut down by hate, but her “beautiful soul” will live on in the hearts of friends and family, mourners said during a somber funeral Wednesday.
“Sometimes I feel like I can’t bear it. I can’t bear that this beautiful neshamah — this beautiful soul — went out of the world. Evil tried to shut off the light, but the light refuses to be dimmed. The light shines brightly in our hearts,” her brother Robert Libman told the hundreds of bereaved that packed Temple Beth Shalom in Squirrel Hill.
“It can’t be fixed. My sister is dead. My sister was murdered. There was no one I know like her. Pure goodness. She was the most tolerant and gentle person that I’ve ever known.”
The globe-trotting University of Pittsburgh researcher was born in Toronto, but her true home was Pittsburgh’s heavily Jewish Squirrel Hill neighborhood and the Tree of Life Synagogue where she was brutally murdered, her son Howard said.
“For someone who had traveled all over the world and had lived in many places, she couldn’t conceive of living anywhere else. Being a Jew in Pittsburgh was a key part of her belonging here, and the Tree of Life Synagogue was the center of that,” he said.
Fienberg dedicated her working life to studying childhood development, and when she retired, the synagogue became an outlet for her altruism, the son added.
“Mom spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about other people’s needs, not hers. That was part of her reason for embracing Tree of Life over the past few years. She was needed, and she needed it,” he said.
“My mom would be very angry that her funeral wasn’t able to be at Tree of Life, and that her friends lost Saturday couldn’t be here,” Howard added.
Fienberg remained intensely dedicated to her statistician husband Stephen after he died in 2016, her other son Anthony said.
“Earlier this year, after our father’s yartzeit (the anniversary of his death), we decided it was time to dispose of his beloved red sports car,” the son recalled. “The car dealer asked, ‘Will you miss the car?’ She replied, ‘No, I will miss my husband.’”
Funerals are ongoing for the 11 killed in what has been called the worst anti-Semitic attack in U. S. history.
Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal, and Daniel Stein were all laid to rest Tuesday.
Shooter Robert Bowers is charged with 29 federal counts, including murder and hate-crime charges. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. He returns to court Thursday.
With Post wires
