(JTA) — Earlier this month, as the jury in Pittsburgh handed down the verdict in the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in American history, I found myself walking into Shabbat services at a Berlin synagogue that had been destroyed on Kristallnacht.

Despite the odds, the Fraenkelufer Synagogue reopened in time for the High Holidays in September 1945, turning the former youth sanctuary into its main prayer space for the small number of Jews that remained. The community never rebuilt the original main sanctuary that had been destroyed by the Nazis.

I sat there on that Friday evening,...