Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro revealed on Thursday that investigators had managed to retrieve ritual Passover items from the dining room that was heavily damaged by an arsonist’s fire shortly after his family’s seder on Saturday night.
“Some just required a dusting and a cleaning,” he said outside a Harrisburg firehouse where he and his wife Lori were serving lunch to first responders who rescued his family and doused the flames early Sunday morning. “Others are destroyed.”
Shapiro, one of the most prominent Jews in politics, said he and his family had concluded the public seder around 10 p.m. and had retired to their private quarters before heading to bed around 1 a.m. It was less than an hour later that State Police officers roused them abruptly to evacuate the building, as a raging fire burned in the space they had just vacated.
He also revealed that the family had found solace when a fire chaplain recited the Jewish Priestly Blessing for them.
“It’s a prayer we recite in Hebrew for our kids. It’s from the Book of Numbers: ‘The Lord bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make his face shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee. The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee and give thee peace.’ That’s a prayer and a hope that we have for our kids every day, that they have peace in their lives,” Shapiro said. “Obviously, that peace was shattered on Sunday morning, but it is a hope and a prayer that we have, not just for our kids, but every child across Pennsylvania that they live in a society that’s free and peaceful where they are protected and they are watched over by God.”
Police say Cory Balmer started the blaze in part because of his opposition to “what Shapiro wants to do to the Palestinian people.” The revelation of his motive on Wednesday confirmed for some that the attack was antisemitic in nature. Shapiro’s comments came shortly after Sen. Chuck Schumer called for a federal hate crime investigation.
“While the local district attorney has not yet filed hate-crime charges, he acknowledged that Governor Shapiro’s religion appears to have factored into the suspect’s decisions,” Schumer wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi. “Our federal authorities must bring the full weight of our civil-rights laws to bear in examining this matter.”
Shapiro declined to back Schumer’s call, saying he was confident in Dauphin County District Attorney Fran Chardo to handle the case.
“As to Senator Schumer or anybody else, I don’t think it’s helpful for people on the outside who haven’t seen the evidence, who don’t know what occurred, who are applying their own viewpoints to the situation, to weigh in in that manner,” he said. “My trust is with the prosecutor to make the decision. He’ll make the right decisions and I will be fully supportive of whatever decision he makes.”
Shapiro said his return to the dining room for the first time on Thursday had been jarring — and had redoubled his commitment to making Pennsylvania safe for people of all backgrounds.
“At one point today when we stopped to see the chandelier that had come down from the ceiling and was kind of partly melted and partly covered, you know, in soot, what have you, from the fire — it was resting on a place on the floor where just the night before, we had celebrated our Passover Seder, where two or three weeks earlier, we had celebrated an Iftar dinner at the conclusion of Ramadan, and about a year before that, where kids danced and played at our son Ruben’s Bar Mitzvah, and right where the Christmas tree stands every December in the governor’s residence,” he recounted, standing with his wife Lori.
“We really believe that Pennsylvania and this residence should be a place where people of all faiths are welcome and all faiths are comforted and feel as though they can celebrate openly and proudly who they are,” he said. “And we’re going to get that room back to being a place that’s warm and welcoming for all.”
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