Will Anyone Remember 11 Dead Jews?

Eric Lidji is a man who cares deeply about modest ambitions. He has lived in Pittsburgh on and off for 20 years. It is a city perfectly sized to his sensibility, neither very small nor very large—a place known to but mostly ignored by those who do not live there. Lidji, 36, has held many jobs; most recently, in late 2017, he became the director and only permanent staff member of the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives, a repository of early-20th-century local Yiddish-theater posters as well as records from dozens of small-town synagogues in western Pennsylvania. But even before he became an archivist, Lidji’s work has always been the same: He is a diarist of small delights, a chronicler of curios, an ardent psalmist of Pittsburgh’s quirky charms.

Like many of the 49,000 other Jews in the Pittsburgh area, Lidji was socializing at a local synagogue on the final Saturday in October last year when he heard the first rumors of a shooting at the nearby Tree of Life synagogue. The news was soon confirmed: Eleven Jewish worshippers had been murdered. Lidji felt paralyzed: Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, was still ongoing, and he wasn’t sure what to do. It wasn’t until a few hours later that something clicked, and Lidji felt a certain desperation stirring alongside his sorrow. Already, people were laying artwork and stones, which Jews customarily place on graves, on the sidewalk around the synagogue where the shooting had taken place. Many of the accumulating objects were fragile and homemade, with no clear owner or steward, left outside without protection against Pittsburgh’s notoriously wet weather. This was not just an outpouring of grief, but a proliferation of artifacts—artifacts that, in Lidji’s view, should be preserved.

On the Monday morning after the shooting, Lidji met with half a dozen colleagues who work in other divisions of Pittsburgh’s Heinz History Center, where the Jewish archives are housed. Together they formed a task force, fanning out to as many vigils, funerals, and religious services as they could. They filled their bags with copies of programs and approached speakers after public events, asking them for their notes. Whenever Lidji spotted someone carrying a sign, he would hurry over and hand them a business card, hoping they would call him when the card reappeared at the bottom of a purse or in a pocket emptied for laundry and offer to donate what they had made. Sometimes he felt overwhelmed. On the Tuesday after the shooting, he showed up at a protest against President Donald Trump in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh’s historic Jewish neighborhood, to find thousands of people gathered in the streets carrying signs and banners. “It felt like … archiving the ocean,” he told me.

The grim reality of Jewish history is that Lidji is not the first archivist of his kind. Medieval Jews buried family heirlooms in the walls of their houses in times of plague, fearing that they might be blamed for the disease. Scholars founded the Yiddish institute YIVO in the early 20th century, recruiting ordinary Eastern European villagers to collect photographs and folktales of a culture threatened by pogroms and mass migration. Emanuel Ringelblum led a covert effort to collect and bury artifacts documenting life in the Warsaw Ghetto in the early years of the Holocaust, before its inhabitants were murdered and its remaining structures burned to the ground.

Archives neither predict nor prevent atrocities. They document what has happened, but remain neutral about what is to come. Their purpose is to endure as a monument to smallness, a reminder that history is in part a composite of stories about little lives. The purpose of Lidji’s archive is to keep what happened at Tree of Life from being reduced to “Pittsburgh, synagogue shooting, 11 dead,” and nothing more.

Every morning, Lidji rises in the 4 o’clock hour, when it is still dark. He was in the midst of renovations on his house in the Garfield neighborhood when he got the job at the archives, and now lives spartanly in three semi-habitable rooms upstairs. His morning ritual begins with grinding coffee beans from Zeke’s, the shop beloved by locals in East Liberty, the next neighborhood over. Then he puts on a pot of beans and rice or something similar for breakfast. He glances at The New York Times and local Pittsburgh papers to read the headlines and, only a little jokingly, to make sure Jews are still allowed in this country. He finally takes his place at his desk and begins to write.

Lidji started keeping a new kind of diary on October 27: notes about what he’s collected, whom he’s talked to, what the community seems to be feeling. He types quickly, with no poetry or flourish—the goal is to export as much as he can from memory to paper. After a couple of hours, he packs up his things and leaves for the next stop in his day: morning minyan, a gathering of 10 or more Jews for prayer.

[Read: The fight to make meaning out of a massacre]

Since the attack, Lidji has experienced a personal religious transformation: After nearly 15 years of haphazard Jewish observance, he started attending services every day. But there were other reasons to show up for prayer: It has proved a useful venue for winning people over to the cause of archival collection.

Documenting history is often the last task on any community’s mind, all the more so during a time of grief. Prior to the shooting, the archives mainly served as a repository for records from at least three dozen local synagogues, each with its own distinct religious identity or immigrant population; for miscellanea, such as World War II–era correspondence and photographs of big groups at synagogue anniversary dinners and holiday events; and for files from 75 small-town Jewish communities scattered across western Pennsylvania. It holds at least one item from nearly every Jewish organization that has ever existed in Pittsburgh, Lidji told me.

And yet, that work was largely hidden to all but the city’s biggest history buffs. After the attack, Lidji’s first big challenge was becoming more visible to the community: being unobtrusively, insistently present at memorial events, and building relationships with community leaders. His second big challenge was convincing the Pittsburgh Jewish community that its history is worth preserving.

The first time Lidji felt “any sense of accomplishment,” he told me, was when a man who had been “polite but reticent” about the archival project came over during morning minyan one day and announced that he had found “the perfect object.” On the day of the shooting, a boy had been celebrating his bar mitzvah at an Orthodox synagogue about a mile away from Tree of Life, and continued the service even as news of the shooting reached the community. The bentscher, or book containing the prayers said after meals, captured the moment perfectly, the man told Lidji: It featured the boy’s name and the starry Pittsburgh Steelers logo wrapped around the date, 10.27.18. Lidji eventually got hold of one of the bentschers.

The most significant items Lidji has collected have what he calls “the shine,” a certain raw, emotional quality that indicates an object’s clear connection to the past. In the week after the attack, students at the Hillel Jewish University Center of Pittsburgh gathered and expressed their feelings on Post-its. “My childhood illusion of security as a Jew was shattered,” one student wrote. Lidji and his colleagues collected programs from memorial events, some more pointed than others: A community with a large Bhutanese population hosted a vigil, where attendees seemed to feel acutely the dangers of being an ethnic minority. A large Reform Jewish congregation, Rodef Shalom, hosted a small event where the preschool director reported that ever since the attack, the children had been obsessed with building elaborate protective structures out of blocks.

For whatever reason, people donated stacks upon stacks of I voted stickers from the November 6, 2018, election printed with the “Stronger than hate” logo designed to commemorate the attack. Lidji also collected bags of black paper strips, which protesters had torn, mimicking a Jewish funeral custom, during the Trump protest to symbolize their grief over the shooting and their dismay at the president’s arrival. Eighteen days after the shooting, the impromptu memorial that had covered the sidewalks, fences, and bushes around the Tree of Life synagogue finally came down; it took roughly a dozen people nine hours to take it apart. They laid everything out on paper, and a local business owner agreed to take the flowers for composting. Some of the volunteers, however, felt too pained to throw the stems away, so they made bundles to dry and preserve. Once summer arrived, the dried bouquets threatened to start decomposing in the business owner’s un-air-conditioned house, so he asked Lidji to come get them. Lidji now has crates of these flowers in his house.