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