New Tree of Life CEO seeks to balance joy, despair 

How can individuals experience joy in the same space where they encounter despair? 

That’s a question Carole Zawatsky has often pondered since the mass shooting at Tree of Life synagogue on Oct. 27, 2018. Now, it’s her job to find an answer.  

The longtime leader of Jewish and historical institutions was in November named the inaugural CEO of the nonprofit component of Tree of Life, which will head up the memorial and museum aspects of the Squirrel Hill synagogue rebuild. In her new role, Zawatsky must find a way to balance an active community while remembering a great atrocity that occurred on that site.  

“I believe that this can be a place where, through the synagogue, vibrant Jewish life can happen, where new babies can be named, where weddings can happen, where Sabbath services and holidays can be observed alongside remembering,” Zawatsky told the Pittsburgh Union Progress earlier this month. “And I want to be sure that we always look in our hearts, that at the core of all this is the memory of every victim.”

The position at Tree of Life is a combination of what she called her two great passions: museums/arts and culture and Jewish life. 

Her path began when she read “From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” in fifth grade. The book — a story of two children who run away from home and go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art — made Zawatsky realize she wanted to work in a museum. 

Her interest in museums and Jewish life led Zawatsky to take a job at the Skirball Museum at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati early in her career.

Since then, she has held leadership positions at a number of prominent Jewish American institutions, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Jewish Museum in New York City. She was the founding director of the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Cleveland, then went to the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco to serve as deputy director for arts, ideas and Jewish life.

She said she has spent her career “thinking deeply about how we bring people together for meaningful experiences around ideas driven by Jewish values.”

She served almost a decade as the CEO of the Edlavitch Jewish Community Center of Washington, D.C., before taking the job at Tree of Life. She was working at the Edlavitch center when, on Oct. 27, 2018, a gunman entered Tree of Life synagogue and killed 11 people from three congregations holding services there. 

Upon hearing about the worst attack on Jews in U.S. history, she said she was concerned about the safety of her own facility, and she remembers comforting a staff member who was from Squirrel Hill. 

However, she also wanted to find a way to respond to the hate that caused the attack, and when the opportunity at Tree of Life became available, she rushed to apply.      

“It was something that with every fiber of my being I wanted to be able to say in the face of the worst antisemitism, ‘What did I do? As a person with the opportunity to lead, what did I do?'” she said.

Diane Rosenthal, who was part of the CEO search committee for Tree of Life, said Zawatsky stood out from the other 15 or 20 strong candidates who applied because of her emotional intelligence and her enthusiasm for the project.

“The one thing that really, really got me was she really wanted to become a part of the community,” Rosenthal said, noting that Zawatsky moved to Pittsburgh for the job. “She seemed like the type of person who was going to dive in headfirst. Beyond what was on paper and beyond what she’s done in her career, she really looked to me like she wanted to be a part of the community.”

Of course, the professional experience was still there. And that, combined with Zawatsky’s love for Jewish life, made the decision a no-brainer for the search committee, according to Rosenthal. 

“You could be talking to her on a CEO basis and talking about strategic programming and programming initiatives, and in the next phrase she could be talking about how to bake a challah,” Rosenthal said. “She had all that wrapped in. And interviewing her for the last time, I was like, ‘If we don’t go with this woman, we’re crazy.'”

Zawatsky said she believes that Tree of Life can become a space “where school groups come and learn about the roots of antisemitism and hate in all of its forms and feel that they can be change makers. That each of us can do our small part in fixing a broken world, which is a very powerful place to be, to feel that you can be part of that.”

She said, though, that what Tree of Life becomes is not entirely up to her.

“This institution can’t be about my personal vision,” she said. “It’s a communal vision. I want to be really clear: My role is to bring forward a communal vision together.”

Still, the question remains of whether it is possible to create a space where joy and despair can intersect in a meaningful way.

For the answer, Zawatsky turns to Jewish history, specifically the Hanukkah story, in which the Hebrews rededicated their Temple after it had been defiled by the ancient Greeks.   

“This is something which has never happened before. So, what an exciting thing, that we all get to create something new,” she said. “But can it happen? Let’s bring ourselves to the miracle of the Hanukkah story, and we know that it can happen.”