The City That Wrote the Platform and Then Rewrote It

The platform of 1885 did not survive contact with the twentieth century intact. The Columbus Platform of 1937 restored the language of peoplehood and, against the explicit refusal of the earlier text, affirmed an obligation to help build a Jewish homeland. A centenary perspective adopted at San Francisco in 1976 went further in restoring the vocabulary of mitzvah, of commandment, that 1885 had set aside. Then in 1999 the Central Conference of American Rabbis came back to Pittsburgh and adopted a statement of principles that spoke of ongoing revelation, of the mitzvot as claims upon Reform Jews, and of a bond to the land and the state of Israel. The reversal was deliberate, and the choice of city was part of the point.

The Jewish community of Pittsburgh is older than any of these documents and is concentrated in Squirrel Hill, one of the few American urban Jewish neighbourhoods never to have dispersed to the suburbs, with Orthodox, Conservative and Reform congregations within a few streets of one another. On 27 October 2018 a gunman entered the Tree of Life building in that neighbourhood during Shabbat morning services and killed eleven worshippers drawn from three congregations sharing the premises. It was the deadliest antisemitic attack in the history of the United States. The city that Reform Judaism used twice to say what it believed became, in the same century, the site of the worst answer given to that belief from outside it.