It felt like only a matter a time before “The Pitt” tackled the Tree of Life synagogue shooting.
Somehow, it’s been over seven years since an antisemitic gunman murderered 11 Shabbat worshippers at Or L’Simcha congregation and wounded six others. But “The Pitt” is set in a Pittsburgh hospital, starring a Jewish actor as a Jewish emergency medicine doctor. It would be unrealistic for the Tree of Life shooting to not have had a personal and professional effect on our beloved Dr. Robby.
So it’s not surprising that this week’s episode of “The Pitt” features a character who survived the Tree of Life shooting. What is remarkable, however, is just how heartening and bittersweet the moment is.
In the third hour of Dr. Robby’s July 4 ER shift, he meets Yana Kovalenko (Irina Dubova), an older woman who dropped the boiling hot contents of a samovar on herself. Despite being upset that kids with firecrackers startled her, causing the accident, Yana immediately perks up when she hears Robby’s name. “Robinavitch?” She asks, excitedly. “Jewish?!” Robby confirms that he is and Yana immediately plies him with questions about whether or not he’s married (he is not), if he goes to synagogue (only on the High Holidays) and where (congratulations to Pittsburgh’s Rodef Shalom, you can use this in your marketing in perpetuity).
In turn, Robby asks Yana where she goes and she reveals that she attends Tree of Life. “They’re rebuilding,” Robby says after pausing to absorb the information. “Yes,” Yana replies. “Something new. Remember. Rebuild. Renew. That’s the slogan.”
In another scene, Yana recounts to Robby that she was entering the synagogue on October 27, 2018 just as the shooting began. You can watch the moment for yourself in this clip shared by TVLine ahead of the episode’s airing:
“I wanted to pick up the thread of Robby’s Judaism in season two, and I didn’t know quite how to do it. We initiated it in season one, and it seemed appropriate to touch on it either in terms of his upbringing or in terms of his present faith or lack thereof,” Noah Wyle, who wrote the episode, explained to TVLine. That the show had not yet addressed the Tree of Life shooting provided the opportunity to do that. Crucially, it also plants the seed for Robby that he ought to finally deal with his own trauma.
By itself, this part of Yana’s storyline is already compelling. But later she shares a moment of Jewish-Muslim solidarity with nurse Perlah (Amielynn Abellera) that makes the episode all the more touching. Noticing Perlah’s hijab, Yana tells her, “After the shooting, it was the Muslims that came together for us in support and walked with us.”
“You raised money. You paid for all the funerals,” She adds. “Thank you.”
While it’s unclear whether Yana Kovalenko is based upon a real person, her claim that the Muslim community rallied around the Pittsburgh Jewish community is true. (A week after the shooting, the New York Times reported that Muslim organizations CelebrateMercy and MPower Change raised nearly $200,000 for victims and their families.) “When I started researching it, the aspects of it that moved me the most were the community outcry afterward from the Muslim community and the solidarity with the Jewish community of Pittsburgh working together to grieve and mourn the loss,” Noah Wyle explained in an interview with Variety. “It was the most underreported aspect of the story, and perhaps the most hopeful moving forward.”
At the end of the episode, Yana provides some much-needed comic relief by sharing her harsh distaste for Robby’s plan to go on a motorcycle trip during his sabbatical, calling it a “mid-life crisis” and “sad.” This could very well mark the end of Yana’s stay at “The Pitt.” But in her one episode arc, Yana serves as a tender reminder that the interfaith unity we saw in Pittsburgh in 2018 is among the best humanity has to offer. With its trademark empathy and progressive ethos, there’s little else we could expect from “The Pitt.”
