I
t is rare that one can say attending a
funeral was an uplifting experience.
Yet the funeral last month for Judah
Samet — teacher of Torah at his Tree of
Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, possessor of
a unique and vigorous voice
and sense of humor, veteran
of the paratroop division
of the Israeli army, lover of
Golden Grahams, generous
tipper and possessor of what
he termed a “Bergen-Belsen
stomach” — was exactly
that, because remembering
Judah can bring only positive feelings.
Samet, a longtime pillar of Pittsburgh’s
Jewish community who spoke frequently
about his experience during the Holocaust,
vaulted onto the national stage on Oct.
27, 2018, when a gunman entered his
synagogue and murdered 11 Jews during
Shabbat services. Samet, whom I and oth-
ers in the community knew as Judah, had
arrived a few minutes late and was warned
away, remaining in his car outside the syn-
agogue as gunshots sounded. The following
February, Judah was a guest of President
Donald Trump during the State of the Union
address.
“I’m going to say a Jewish blessing that
you say only when you meet a head of state,
”
he told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review at the
time. “I have permission to do it.
”
The State of the Union was a far cry from
Judah’s childhood in Hungary, where he was
born in February 1938. As a young child,
he was forced by the Nazis from his home
and shipped with his family first to a labor
camp in Austria and then to the Bergen-
Belsen concentration camp. His father died
of typhus three days after liberation, but the
rest of the family made their way to prestate
Israel. He moved to Pittsburgh in the 1950s,
ultimately joining his father-in-law’s jewelry
business there and remaining a commit-
ted community member until his death at
84 last month on the second day of Rosh
Hashanah.
At his funeral, Judah’s son-in-law, the
playwright David Winitsky, spoke of a
time they went out to the casual restaurant
Eat N’Park together and his father-in-law
praised the service the waitress gave the
table. Yet, he wasn’t content just with com-
plimenting her — he told her that he would
let her manager know what a good job she
was doing. He said to his son-in-law that
it is important to make someone else’s day
better whenever you can.
This simple message seems uncompli-
cated enough, but then one thinks about
the occasions when Judah was on his own
— the years he was in a labor camp and
in Bergen-Belsen, in the Israeli army, and
the terrifying moments he spent in his car
parked outside the door of the Tree of Life,
the synagogue he attended for over 40 years
while a police detective and the man who
shot 11 Jews inside the building trad-
ed gunfire.
Judah’s drive to inspire others to
better their lives and the lives of those
around him was most evident in his
tireless efforts to educate young peo-
ple in Pittsburgh and beyond about
the Holocaust. After not speaking
about his experience for many years,
he began sharing just over a decade
ago, and he ultimately delivered hun-
dreds of talks that reached the ears of
tens of thousands of people, accord-
ing to Lauren Bairnsfeather, executive
director of the Holocaust Center of
Pittsburgh.
Judah knew his words had an
impact because of the countless let-
ters he received from students over
the years about what his story meant
to them.
Judah’s sister Miriam Cohen, born
in Israel when their mother remarried after
the war, recounted at the funeral that one
time at the Pittsburgh community Yom
HaShoah commemoration, a family arrived
that looked out of place. At the end of the
service, the teenage daughter came up to
Judah and gave him a big hug. She said she
wanted her parents to meet him after he
had spoken at her school.
Another eulogist talked about what
Judah said to students, that he knew teen
girls did not like their mothers but that
their mothers were the only ones who
would do anything and go through any-
thing to care for them. As he said about
his mother in a 2012 Holocaust Center
interview, “She was a tower of strength …
Her mind was dedicated 24 hours a day to
saving her family.” After hearing how his
own mother told him and his siblings to
eat lice to sustain themselves in the camps
and how she foraged food for them, many
students did what he said and went home
64 | OCTOBER 27 • 2022
OBITUARIES
REMEMBRANCE
Judah Samet Was a Mensch
Well Before He Survived the
Tree of Life Shooting
Beth Kissileff
JTA
Judah Samet stands next to his
portrait, part of Luigi Toscano’s
“Lest We Forget” project at the
University of Pittsburgh in 2019.
PHOTO BY HECTOR CORANTE, COURTESY OF HOLOCAUST CENTER OF PITTSBURGH