Judah Samet, a Holocaust survivor who narrowly escaped the shooting rampage at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, died Tuesday at the age of 84, The Associated Press reported Thursday.
Samet, who survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in World War II, was running a few minutes late for services and was just arriving at the building when a man told him there was gunfire inside. Samet saw an officer exchange fire with the assailant, who killed 11 people in the massacre.
Afterward, he said he was surprised something like this hadn’t happened sooner.
“I didn’t lose the faith in humanity,” he told AP two days after the shooting. “I know not to depend on humanity.”
Born in Hungary on Feb. 5, 1938, Samet was six years old when the Nazis came to his house and told them to pack. His family spent 10 months at Bergen-Belsen in Germany before being liberated in 1945. His father died of typhus a few days later.
After the war, Samet went to Israel, where he served as a paratrooper. He relocated to Pittsburgh in the 1960s. Samet worked at his father-in-law’s jewelry shop and later owned it.
“Judah leaves an unparalleled legacy to the world, of a man who survived not one, but two horrors committed by humanity against the Jews,” Rabbi Jeffrey Myers of Tree of Life said in a written statement to AP. “He taught us how to respond with controlled fervor, grace and strength.”
In 2019, then-US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump invited Samet to the President’s State of the Union speech. Also invited to the speech was a police officer who was shot several times battling the gunman, Robert Bowers.
Samet sat with the First Lady during the speech, where lawmakers jumped to their feet and applauded as the president told Samet's story and broke into a spontaneous rendition of “Happy Birthday.” Samet smiled and shouted “thank you.”