Carrie Mannino: Congregation Dor Hadash
Interviewed by Vivian Wang.
Carrie is a member of Dor Hadash, one of the three congregations affected by the Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting on October 27, 2018.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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Q: Tell me a little bit about yourself/your story.
My name is Carrie Mannino. I grew up in Pittsburgh, in Squirrel Hill. I’m a member of Dor Hadash, one of the congregations that was housed in the Tree of Life building. I had actually been involved with gun sense advocacy before it became quite so personal of an issue. Following the shooting in Parkland, I co-founded a March for Our Lives chapter at Yale, where I was doing advocacy at a national level. It’s an issue I’ve always cared about. Unfortunately, it’s an issue that for a large number of people in the U.S. is very personal and close to home.
Q: What do you do now?/where are you at?
I’m currently in graduate school at Columbia University Teachers College, studying education policy.
Q: How’s it going so far?
It’s been good so far! I really love it - I’m focused on the intersection between law, education, and racial justice, and working through the education system to increase equity.
Q: That’s awesome, and so important.
If you don’t mind, I’d like to hear about your experience with the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting in 2018, in whatever amount of detail you’d be comfortable sharing.
It happened when I was in college. I actually did a documentary play project about it in the aftermath. Part of why I started the project was because I wasn’t at home when it happened. I was at school, and when I did come home during break, I really felt like I wanted to reconnect and get to process with my community because it felt very difficult to do that on campus, where everyone else was continuing their normal everyday life. I was studying playwriting, and while I was home interning in Pittsburgh, I had the opportunity to interview a lot of people, and put together this documentary play focused on the aftermath. Originally it was my senior thesis, and I kept working on it and adding in more voices. I had the opportunity to have it performed at my high school (Winchester Thurston) in January 2022, which was really amazing. And I got to work with the English department there to incorporate it into the curriculum of one of their classes, as well as work with my former theater teacher, who was wonderful and instrumental in bringing the play to the stage for the first time, because I had written it right as we were going into Covid and there had only been staged readings before that. It was really incredible to be part of live theater for the first time since the pandemic, to get to bring this story back home and share it with the community that I was writing it for and writing it with.
Q: What was it like writing the play?
Can you tell me what that process was like, and whether it helped you process at all and opening up a dialogue with your community?
It was definitely a big part of my healing process. The interviews were a lot like conversations, and I tried to focus on what it means to be from Pittsburgh, to live in Squirrel Hill and be a part of the communities I grew up in. That was a really wonderful opportunity for me to get to reconnect with people, and I was really grateful to everyone who allowed me to put their voices into the play. It was a difficult process to work on it…I found myself needing to take breaks throughout -- you know, it’s a lot to be actively thinking about what had happened, all of the time. But it was definitely a big part of my own experience of healing.
Q: Is this play publicly available?
[Laughs.] It’s not publicly available, but I do have a few recordings of it…I will probably have screenings of it again. But if people are interested, there is a Zoom version that I edited during Covid, and the recording of the staged version at Winchester Thurston. I would really love, in the future, to have it produced again in Pittsburgh. I would really love that. But yeah, I could do a Zoom screening anytime for people that might be interested! Let me know and I’m happy to set that up (it runs about 1 hour 20 minutes).
Q: It seems like every week, every other day, there are reports of mass shootings and gun violence all around us. It seems like we’re constantly inundated with the drumming of the news. Even last week, there were multiple hoax calls about active shooters in our area high schools, as well as on Pitt’s campus. It really feels like across the board, students are on edge.
How do you navigate the news and how commonplace violence is nowadays?
It’s definitely difficult because there’s so little movement. It feels so frustrating, especially when measures that have huge public support are not getting passed for political reasons -- and that’s so frustrating. It’s really frustrating that Pittsburgh doesn’t have any control because there’s a state preemption in PA regarding any sort of legislation relating to guns. I think it’s very hard to deal with -- I mean, as we just saw in Tennessee, there’s a whole movement demanding common sense measures to stem gun violence since this is the only country that has this problem. Clearly there are things we can do, but there is just massive political resistance to measures that receive majority public support, even among gun owners. And that’s frustrating. But I think advocacy and voting are really the main things that people can do. We have to change who’s making the decisions, if the decisions are not being made to protect people in our communities.
I also think the news cycle is overwhelming and frustrating. On the issue of gun violence, mass shootings take the majority of the air time, even though they are not the majority of gun violence incidents. There’s a lot of life lost to gun violence that is never broadcast. And I think it’s important that the conversation around gun safety really focuses on communities that are most affected by gun violence, while also trying to prevent mass shootings,–especially targeted white supremacist attacks, which have been on the rise. I think there’s a lot of work to be done, and it’s hard to continue engaging when it feels like you’re up against a brick wall.
Q: What can members of the medical community do to support your work or causes you care about relating to resources for community gun violence?
Follow March for Our Lives, they do really great on-the-ground activism - they know who to call, have scripts, etc. I think it’s important to concentrate on what realistically can happen, while continually stating that this is not normal and it shouldn’t become normal. A couple of states actually just passed new legislation regarding guns this past week. So I think getting plugged into March for Our Lives, or other groups in your state or local area is really important. Even though federal legislation gets a lot of press, unfortunately there’s not a lot of movement there right now. There are also PA-specific groups like Pennsylvania Demands Action.
Q: How do you move forward/what gives you hope? Especially for young people, who have dealt with this their whole lives, and likely will for the rest of their lives?
I think part of why I’m recommending March for Our Lives is that it’s made up of student activist kids who are in high school and are going to their state representatives and D.C. Even though they’ve grown up in this generation where mass shootings and active shooter drills are commonplace, they’re saying that’s not acceptable and advocating and doing the work. That gives me hope, that the newest generation is not willing to believe that there’s nothing that can be done and knows this is not the way things should be. I think there will be generational change, but I also think democracy needs to work a little better for that to happen.
Q: If there was one takeaway you wanted the healthcare/medical community to know about your work, or just about violence prevention in general, what would that be?
I would just say that I really appreciate that you are recognizing gun violence as a public health crisis, and we need to be approaching it in that way. It’s not separate from every other aspect of our society - it puts a huge toll on the healthcare system and causes trauma to so many people in our country. I think that it’s really important to not accept this as part of the culture of the United States.