יתגדל ויתקדש שמה רבא

911 call taker Bruce Carlton could sense the urgency in Rabbi Myers’ voice and in his labored breathing, but the rabbi identified himself fully and clearly described the situation, saying he heard 20 to 30 shots in the lobby and that he didn’t see the gunman.

Mr. Carlton recommended that the rabbi find a more secure place, which he did, moving to a bathroom, Mr. Carlton said.

“After that, there was really no talking, because we could hear movement in the hallway, movement coming up the stairs. I told him best to stay silent.

“Occasionally, I would ask him if he was still with me,” Mr. Carlton recalled. “I would get a quiet whisper, ‘yes.’

“He would tell me, ‘I’m hearing additional shots.’ A volley here. A volley there, which I was documenting the whole time,” Mr. Carlton said.

The lock on the bathroom didn’t work, so Rabbi Myers held the door with all his might.

Ms. Glickman and Dr. Charny found an office on the third floor filled with boxes and black trash bags of clothes. They sank down amid the jumble and tried to blend in, crouched with their backs to the door, prayer shawls draped over their bodies.

In the basement closet, Mr. Werber and the others heard a pause in the gunfire. Mr. Wax opened the sanctuary door. He was shot and fell back by the storeroom where Mr. Werber and Ms. Black hid. A moment later, the gunman stepped into the room.

“I’m pressed up against the wall, Carol is kneeling on the floor to my right, and the gentleman walks in with a long gun,” Mr. Werber said. “I could see the jacket he was wearing and a pair of pants. ... He didn’t see us; thank God.”

The shooter walked away.

Zone 4 Pittsburgh police Officers Daniel Mead and Michael Smidga arrived at the synagogue, which sits just blocks from the zone police station, to find the shooter in the doorway.

He fired at the officers with the AR-15 rifle.

Officer Mead was hit in the hand. Officer Smidga was grazed or hit by shrapnel and cut on his face. At least one officer shot back, and Mr. Bowers retreated into the synagogue.

Mr. Siriano made it to an exit door and kicked it open. He encountered four or five police officers, one with blood running down his face. He got down on his knees and put his hands up, worried they’d mistake him for the shooter.

Another congregant who’d run from the building, Stephen Weiss, recognized him and called out to police, “That’s Augie!” Together they hurried away from the building.

Ms. Glickman and Dr. Charny made it out too, rushing to a side exit during a lull in the shooting. Police met them and helped them get away.

Officers took cover behind cars and called for reinforcements and paramedics. They set up a command post and a staging area, blocked streets and formed a perimeter. Small groups of officers — eight here, 10 there — formed and reported that they were ready to go in.

The shooter went quiet.

Officers and supervisors debated whether they should try again to go into the synagogue; they knew there were victims hiding inside but felt the shooter could pop up at any window and start firing at any time.

“There’s a police car with officers behind it, right on Wilkins,” one officer said. “Can you see them, and can we evac them? If they take fire it’s going to go right through their police car.”

“Yeah, I’m working on that right now,” another man responded. “I believe they thought there was a rescue to be made, but there is not on the front side, so they should retreat back.”

The officers behind the car used the vehicle as a shield and cautiously retreated.

They’d wait for SWAT.

The first SWAT team entered the synagogue at about 10:29 a.m. and went room by room, searching for survivors and for the shooter. They called for patrol to meet hostages at the door as they were evacuated.

As SWAT teams moved closer to apprehend the gunman and rescue those inside, Rabbi Myers, still hidden in the bathroom, asked the 911 call taker at several points if he should emerge from hiding.

“I distinctly recall him asking me at least five or six times, ‘Should I open my door?’ I kept telling him, ‘No,’” Mr. Carlton said.

“Even when he heard the police, he asked me once or twice,” he said.

“I told him, ‘No. Police are in a heightened state. Guns are drawn. They’re looking for an active shooter,’” Mr. Carlton said.

Finally, an officer discovered the rabbi, got him out of the building and sent him running across the street. He ended his 911 call; he’d been on the line with Mr. Carlton for 56 minutes.

Another SWAT officer found Mr. Werber and Ms. Black, escorted them up the steps and out of the building. They sat in the back of a police car, listening to the police radio as the officers carried on in the building.

“I can’t praise them enough,” Mr. Werber said. “They put their lives on the line. They kept us safe. They were very cordial and respectful. I mean, I was wearing a yarmulke, and they ran us down to the car so fast it flew off my head. One of the young officers was kind enough to find it and give it back to me.”

Pittsburgh tactical paramedic Eric Barazotto, 39, kept his firearm holstered as he entered the synagogue with four other paramedics, some who had their guns drawn.

"No one knew where this guy was, and there was a lot of area to cover,” Mr. Barazotto said. He stepped through the door and almost immediately encountered victims, five people down on the stairs to the left.

“We started triaging,” he said, “but pretty much we were just pronouncing people dead.”

Four dead.

But then, one man still alive.

Mr. Barazotto and his partner, tactical paramedic Justin Sypolt, 34, pulled the wounded man out of the building, took cover behind a brick wall, checked his injuries and carried him to an ambulance.

Then they ran back in.

Mr. Barazotto, part of the second team, climbed the stairs to the main level and walked into the Pervin Chapel, where Tree of Life Congregation met that morning. A man lay dead in the doorway, a woman dead between the pews.

He passed the victims, and he stayed focused on the job. It didn’t feel real.

Then he saw an elderly couple, together, both gone. In a split second, the horror of it all hit Mr. Barazotto.

“I’m married; I have children,” he said. “You care more about them than anything else in the world. To be with your best friend and suffer such a horrific event that was unnecessary — you’re out living your lives together, you’re partaking in something you feel is completely safe, and you both suffer a horrible tragedy ... that made it real; it was personal. When you make it personal, then it becomes real.”

While Mr. Barazotto was in the chapel, Mr. Sypolt discovered another survivor, a woman shot in the arm, and brought her outside. He loaded her into the SWAT team’s armored vehicle, which had just pulled up out front.

Mr. Barazotto left the chapel and went back down the stairs to the area by the entrance. He met up with Mr. Sypolt, and together they descended the stairs into the basement, where New Light Congregation met.

There they found three more victims.

All were beyond help.

Mr. Barazotto left and climbed the stairs, passing the entrance level and the main level and then stopping on a sort of half-level, beside the synagogue’s nursery. The walls were covered with children’s drawings; a toy box sat on the floor.

Thank God there were no children here, Mr. Barazotto thought. They’d have been fish in a barrel.

Above him, farther up the steps, the first SWAT team into the building encountered a locked door. They called for a ram so they could break it down and get through.

Mr. Barazotto heard bangs, and he thought it was the ram smashing into the door.

But it was gunfire.

“At that point my gut fell to the floor,” Mr. Barazotto said. He and others charged up the stairwell, a narrow, cramped space full of people and guns.

They grabbed Officer Timothy Matson and carried him down the steps, rushing.

“I dropped him down the steps twice,” Mr. Barazotto said. “He’s a big boy ... I dropped him on his head; I felt bad.”

They got Officer Matson to the landing with the nursery, pushed chairs out of the way and put him on the floor, assessed his injuries. They threw him on a mover — a big piece of fabric with handles — and hustled him down the stairs.

Pittsburgh paramedic Nicolas D’Ambrosio, 36, ran with police officers along Wilkins Avenue, half-crouched for cover and wearing his ballistic vest. He followed the officers through the doors of the synagogue.

Straight ahead sat a table with snacks. To his right, a large open hall. And to his left, a staircase, and tactical paramedics, carrying down a gravely wounded Officer Matson.

Mr. Sypolt passed Officer Matson to Mr. D’Ambrosio’s team.

“I gave a face-to-face report with one of the guys there so they knew exactly what we saw and what we did so they could pick off exactly where we left off,” Mr. Sypolt said.

Mr. D’Ambrosio helped transfer the officer onto a stretcher and then tried to get an IV started while they waited for the ambulance. He didn’t hear the next volley of gunshots, just an officer’s scream.

“Shots fired!” the officer shouted and pushed Mr. D’Ambrosio against a wall, where he and an EMT crouched for cover. The other paramedics rushed the officer’s stretcher out the front door to a waiting ambulance.

For a few moments, Mr. D’Ambrosio and the EMT were separated from the rest of the paramedics. Then, his division chief came back in. He told them they needed to move forward, to be ready in case more people were wounded.

The three grabbed their gear: a bag, a stretcher, an oxygen tank. They moved into the stairwell.

It was filled with bodies.

“I’d never seen anything that horrific,” Mr. D’Ambrosio said softly. “In 14 years I’ve seen my fair share of gruesome events, but the only word to define that is evil. You could almost look at the scene and it would talk to you and tell you what he did. He just — dismembered these people.”

Mr. D’Ambrosio waited there for five minutes, maybe, on high alert, struggling to process the carnage but bracing for the next patient, wanting to be ready, wanting to help his team, his friends.

“I’ve never in my life been in a situation like that, and it feels like you’re watching an ’80s action movie where there is gunfire and people yelling and screaming and radio traffic and so much noise it almost becomes quiet because there is so much going on,” he said. “It was really overwhelming to take all that in.”

Mr. Barazotto returned to the landing after he passed Officer Matson to the paramedics downstairs. Then the SWAT operators on the third level called that another officer had been shot.

Officer Anthony Burke came down, hit in the wrist, bleeding profusely from a small but serious wound. Mr. Barazotto and the paramedics with him had to use multiple tourniquets to stop the bleeding. They walked the officer out and passed him off to the crew downstairs.

Upstairs, the shooter showed police his hands.

Mr. Bowers told the SWAT team he was carrying an AR-15 and a Glock. He told them his name, his age and his date of birth. The SWAT team ordered Mr. Bowers to crawl toward them. Wounded, he did so.

Worried he might be carrying explosives or the surrender might be a trap, the team painstakingly ordered Mr. Bowers’ every move. The process stretched on for several long minutes.

Mr. D’Ambrosio’s team got word that the shooter was cornered, that it was only a matter of time before SWAT had him in custody. Mr. D’Ambrosio’s division chief moved the group to the back of the synagogue. They rolled the stretcher down a small alley behind the building and waited to treat the shooter.

He was unclothed but covered when SWAT brought him out — that’s standard procedure when treating trauma patients, get rid of the clothes to be sure no wounds are missed. They applied a tourniquet and put dressings on his wounds, preparing him for transport.

Mr. Bowers did not speak.

“He had this sinister grin that was almost sickening,” Mr. D’Ambrosio said. “I remember him having this look of satisfaction on his face that was haunting. It was disturbing.”

Still, Mr. D’Ambrosio didn’t hesitate to treat him.

“It’s my job,” he said. “You do what needs to be done.”

Later, when things calmed down, Mr. Sypolt leaned against a car window outside the synagogue, talking to another guy on the team, when the man shushed him and reached for the car radio.

“He turned up the radio, and the president of the United States is talking about what happened in Pittsburgh,” Mr. Sypolt said. “And at that moment I was like, ‘This is a big deal.’ It didn’t hit me [until then] that what we were part of on Saturday is an event the whole world is looking at.”

Accused of carrying out one of the deadliest anti-Semitic attacks in U.S. history, Mr. Bowers spent a day recovering at Allegheny General Hospital before he was brought to federal court Monday in a wheelchair to face initial charges, and walked in again on Thursday to face additional charges.

He is charged with 44 federal counts in the attack, which authorities have designated a hate crime, as well as crimes in the state court system.

Before Mr. Bowers was released from the hospital — he’s now being held in the Butler County Prison — hospital president and doctor Jeffrey Cohen paid him a visit.

Dr. Cohen, who is Jewish, wanted to see for himself the man accused in the massacre. When they met, he perceived Mr. Bowers as dull, incapable of generating his own hate and so absorbing it from others, someone isolated from society.

“He’s a guy. He’s not the face of evil. He was a baby once. He was a toddler once. And people were looking at him with all the hope in the world,” Dr. Cohen said, adding that his actions are inexcusable. “Here’s someone all alone and all he hears is the noise in his head all the time.”

Mr. Bowers’ mother, Barbara Bolt, 67, of New Eagle, said through her pastor at First Baptist Church in Monongahela that she is “heartbroken for the families and what her son did and where and how he did it.” She’s grief-stricken, he said.

Mr. Bowers did not leave strong impressions on those who encountered him as he passed through suburban South Hills communities and odd jobs — baker, sound man, trucker. But his electronic activities seem to reveal a person who went from secretive to conspiratorial.

Mr. Bowers left Baldwin High School in 1989, some six months before he could have graduated, and worked as a baker from the mid-1990s until around 2002. But while he toiled in a Dormont bakery, he also developed enough technological savvy to open two encrypted communications accounts, in 1998 and 2000. He became involved with a conservative radio show.

And while he talked little with neighbors as he cared for his aging grandfather, and perhaps other relatives, in Whitehall, his online persona became steadily louder.

He traded notes on secure messaging services, for instance, with Jared Wyand, viewed as one of the most vocal members of the modern American anti-Semitic movement, according to an analysis by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The shock and horror that swelled up in the hours after the massacre gave way to sorrow and resolve as the world’s attention landed on Pittsburgh.

“Pittsburgh is a strong town,” Mayor Bill Peduto said. “We are a resilient city. We have been knocked down, and we have found ways to stand back up, and we’ve always done it in one way: by working together.”

A street-side memorial grew from 13 bouquets to thousands of flowers, candles, notes, balloons and posters on the sidewalk outside the synagogue as Pittsburgh’s Jewish community reeled, came together and rebounded with renewed resolve, calling for an end to hate and racism and violence, grieving deeply for the lost lives and lost sanctity.

“We were all under attack last Saturday,” said Rabbi Daniel Yolkut of the Poale Zedeck Congregation. “It happened to be that the murderer walked into one of the synagogues in Squirrel Hill, but it could have just as easily been any of one us. The mourning is really a communal mourning. Obviously it does not compare to the pain the family is going through, but we are, in concentric circles, feeling the same suffering.”

Those killed were stalwarts of their congregations, and thousands attended their funerals. Mourners remembered small things: a penchant for bow ties, jokes so bad you had to laugh, a love of classical music.

Mr. Siriano carried a casket at the funeral for Cecil and David Rosenthal. They were buried together, in unmarked closed caskets.

“It’s going to be really tough going back and not having them anymore,” Mr. Siriano said. “It was really hard watching them be buried.”

President Donald Trump called the attack a “wicked act of mass murder” and “pure evil, hard to believe and frankly something that is unimaginable.” He visited Pittsburgh Tuesday, stopped by the synagogue and spent time with the officers wounded in the attack. Thousands protested his presence; local elected officials did not join the president during his trip.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he and his country stand with Pittsburgh and the United States.

“I was heartbroken and appalled,” he said of the attack. “The entire people of Israel grieve with the families of the dead.”

Mr. Barazotto and Mr. D’Ambrosio relied on colleagues, family and friends in the days after the shooting. The city held a debriefing for those involved in the response; it was an opportunity to come together and process what had happened with others who experienced it.

“As awful of a tragedy as it is, you do everything you can to take positive out of it,” Mr. D’Ambrosio said. “People have come up to the station. They don’t know me, they don’t know us, but they’ve stopped and brought food and given support.”

For Mr. Barazotto, the focus is on getting back to business as usual, on taking the next call. It’s not healthy to dwell on the horror, he said. It won’t do any good, won’t change anything. It will just dissolve you. Instead, he focuses on the injured people whom he helped save.

“The world is evil,” he said. “I understand that. … My part in this place is to try to help.”

Auditoriums overflowed with thousands during vigils and interfaith services.

People cried and sang, held each other and prayed, shuddered at the attack and remembered those killed for how they lived, not how they died.

Rabbi Perlman, who pushed Mr. Werber and Ms. Black into the storage closet, made an emotional plea during a vigil attended by more than 2,000 people inside Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museum in Oakland the day after the attack. He spoke about Mr. Gottfried, Mr. Stein and Mr. Wax.