Opinion | American Jews Know How This Story Goes

When I told my children what had happened, they didn’t ask why; they knew. “Because some people hate Jews,” they said. How did these American children know that? They shrugged. “It’s like the Passover story,” my 9-year-old told me. “And the Hanukkah story. And the Purim story. And the Babylonians, and the Romans.” My children are descendants of Holocaust survivors, but they didn’t go that far forward in history. The words were already there.

The people murdered in Pittsburgh were mostly old, because the old are the pillars of Jewish life, full of days and memories. They are the ones who come to synagogue first, the ones who know the words by heart. The oldest victim was Rose Mallinger, 97.

The year Ms. Mallinger was born was the tail end of the mass migration of more than two million Eastern European Jews to America between 1881 and 1924. Many brought with them memories of pogroms, of men invading synagogues with weapons, of blood on holy books. This wasn’t shocking, because it was already described in those books. On Yom Kippur in synagogue, these Jews read the stories of rabbis murdered by the Romans, including Rabbi Hanina ben Tradyon, who was wrapped in a Torah scroll set aflame. Before dying, he told his students, “The parchment is burning, but the letters are flying free!”