Karen Brooks was one of more than 100 people gathered Tuesday night at the Chabad Jewish Center of Pierce County, a small synagogue in West Tacoma shaken by the senseless massacre last Saturday. It was her first time inside the synagogue.
Eleven candles burned at the front of the synagogue, each representing a victim at the Tree of Life.
At the back corner of the room, Karen Brooks wept.
Wearing a Pittsburgh T-shirt, Brooks dabbed her eyes with Kleenex. Sometimes, it seemed like all she could do to hold back heaving sobs.
Brooks was one of more than 100 people shaken by the senseless massacre in Pittsburgh last Saturday who gathered Tuesday night at the Chabad Jewish Center of Pierce County, a small synagogue down a residential road in West Tacoma.
The vigil — similar to one held Sunday at the Temple Beth El — was designed as a show of unity and grief.
It was also, according to the rabbi who presided over it, a response to unfathomable hate.
“The killer was aiming bullets at all of us,” Rabbi Zalman Heber told me earlier in the day, echoing sentiments he’d focus on during Tuesday night’s vigil.
“He said, ‘All Jews must die,’” the Rabbi explained. “He saw no difference between Jews, and neither should we. This is an attack on all of us.”
Tuesday night marked Brooks’ first time at the Tacoma synagogue. She moved to Tacoma four years ago, after spending the previous 14 in Pittsburgh, where her family is from.
She attended Tuesday night’s vigil, she told me, because she didn’t know what else to do.
Brooks felt lost.
“Just being with people who are also grieving is important,” Brooks told me, again fighting back tears.
As we talked, I learned Brooks’ grandparents lived in Squirrel Hill, the Pittsburgh neighborhood where the Tree of Life is located.
Her mother walked by the synagogue every day on her way to high school.
“I just wanted to figure out a way to process and be around people who might be feeling the same grief that my family there is feeling,” Brooks explained. “Pittsburgh is a city that has the biggest heart and the biggest sense of community that I’ve ever been a part of, and knowing that the entire city is broken right now breaks me.
“And being on the other side of the country from that, it felt like there wasn’t really anyone else around who got it.”
Person for person — whether it was the men in traditional black hats and tzitzit, the fidgeting children or visitors like Brooks, seeking shelter in a storm — those gathered at the synagogue understood exactly what Brooks was feeling.
“There are 11 victims, and so it is important that the community grieves their loss and prays for a complete recovery of the people who are injured,” said Earl Vernon, who has worshiped at the Chabad Jewish Center for 13 years and lives a block away.
“I’m hoping to get some sort of healing, some sort of closure,” Vernon explained.
In a telling moment, Vernon also said he “wasn’t surprised” by Saturday’s attack at the Tree of Life.
“Historically, the Jews have been the canary in the coal mine,” Vernon said, pointing to an increase in similar hatred across the country.
Like Brooks, Jim Walton, Tacoma’s first black city manager, stepped foot in the West Tacoma synagogue for the first time Tuesday night.
Walton came, he said, “Just to show my respect and concern for what happened back in Pittsburgh and generally for what’s happened throughout our country.”
I asked Walton, a veteran of the civil rights movement, how he makes sense of a crime like this and the hatred that fuels it.
“I can’t make sense of any of it,” Walton said before filing into the synagogue. “Sometimes I stop trying. It’s just so crazy, I don’t understand it.”
Brooks was grappling with the same question.
“I don’t know if I am processing it, I guess. I think I’m still trying to figure that out,” Brooks told me, wrapping her arms around her midsection like a hug. “That’s why I’m here.”
At the very least, for a little over an hour Tuesday night, she wasn’t alone.
