Squirrel Hill. Just mentioning the name warms me on a chilly fall Sunday morning. Only this one feels far chillier than usual.

I haven’t been there in many years, so that warm feeling is more impressionistic than concrete, rooted in some long-ago memories and a few points of connection to the place. For one, I once lived there for about two years, not that I would remember — it’s there that I grew from newborn infant to terrible-twos toddler.

Our family arrived in town from Rochester, New York, when I was six weeks old. My father a”h had spent some very successful years building up Rochester’s Hillel School, and had now come to give of his talents to Pittsburgh’s Hillel Academy. We shared a house with the Twerskis, and on Shabbos afternoons, my father would take me with him to visit his friend Reb Sheya (a.k.a. Rabbi Dr. Abraham J.), who got a kick out of the precocious little tyrant who, in classic ben zekunim form, had his folks wrapped around his finger. Supposedly — so family legend has it, though I remember none of it and deny all culpability — I couldn’t resist the temptation to give the good doctor’s long, luxuriant beard a yank (for which, he’d remind me in later years, he has yet to forgive me).

Circumstances required our family to pull up stakes and leave for New York City after only two short years. It would be several decades before our ties were reestablished, when my sister and her family moved to Squirrel Hill for a number of years and my parents and I began joining them each Pesach and for some holiday weekends in between.

The memories are good ones, heartwarming ones: of davening at Poalei Tzedek, the kollel and Chabad, of a neighborhood of old-time homes in which lived people with old-time values, where the pace and temperament were as even-keeled as the streets were hilly. Of an out-of-town community that displayed all of the attributes that make “out of town” not merely a geographic descriptor, but a concept — the simplicity, the warmth, the way in which every Jew is made to feel significant, the abundant chesed for the unending stream of Jews seeking a yeshuah at the city’s world-renowned medical centers.

Years ago, when I learned that Fred Rogers — the legendary host of a much-beloved public television show for young children — had called Squirrel Hill home (three blocks from the scene), it made perfect sense to me. He was, after all, the person who, as his biographer Maxwell King wrote, “for the millions of adults who grew up watching him… represent[ed] the most important human values: respect, compassion, kindness, integrity, humility.”

And now, this.

The massacre occurred at a non-Orthodox house of worship that houses three congregations under one roof, none of which draw large weekly attendance. Not unlike many Jewish communities around the country, the non-Orthodox one here has had to merge its institutions to remain viable.

After Shabbos I spoke with a good friend who lives four blocks from the scene. He related that when the shooting began, the spiritual leader of the congregation under attack had pushed an elderly congregant into a closet, telling him to remain there until it was all over. Hard of hearing, the gentleman failed to understand and left the closet, only to be tragically cut down by the killer’s bullet.

How did my friend know the story? The clergyman’s wife told it to him. She and her husband have been Shabbos guests at my friend’s home. But that’s Squirrel Hill. It’s this little neighborhood where half of all of Pittsburgh’s Jews reside, cheek by jowl.

He also told me that on the spur of the moment, a hundred Jews had gathered behind the yellow crime-scene tape to say Tehillim. And I wonder: If it had been, lo aleinu, New York City and a Reform congregation there, would that have happened? I’m not saying it wouldn’t have — I really don’t know.

What I do know is that 300 miles to the east in New York City, as I walk the street heading to shul, I pull my jacket tighter around myself. Amidst this mild autumn, it has suddenly turned bitingly, unbearably cold.

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 733. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com