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‘There Are No Words’: Pittsburgh Paper Puts Hebrew Words of Mourning On Front Page

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November 2, 2018

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette posted the first four words to the Mourner’s Kaddish in Hebrew on the front page of their Friday newspaper and on the top of their website.

Here is a picture of it:

David M. Shribman, the executive editor of the Post-Gazette, wrote that he decided to put those words in Hebrew when he realized that when “there are no words to express a community’s feelings, then maybe you are thinking in the wrong language.”

Shribman felt that by doing so, it brought “our readers to the heart of the incident that has marked our community, and displaying the heart of this community, including of course the Post-Gazette community” on the first Shabbat since the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue.

“This week, each entire congregation — indeed all of Pittsburgh — may well stand, in spirit if not in fact, for if Pittsburgh’s passage in the past several days has shown anything, it is that these losses are all of ours, and that the solidarity of Pittsburgh’s grief is the face we have shown to those beyond the three rivers to the four corners of the earth,” Shribman wrote.

Members of the Jewish community praised the Post-Gazette:

The last of the 11 victims of the shooting was buried on Friday.

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