Our hearts ache and our minds reel. Innocent lives have been lost at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh where a celebration of life was taking place. Now is a time to mourn those who have been wrenched away from their families at a time that should have been filled with joy. It’s a time to grieve for their families and friends who will forever struggle to understand what happened.

BY STEPHEN SMITH. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in Poland, is the first person I have spoken to since the mass shooting which left eleven dead at the Tree of Life synagogue. She does not waste time greeting me in the doorway of her home in London. “So what are we going to do Stephen? We are not making progress!”

The history of antisemitism is strewn with the corpses of Jews who could not get out of the way when words turned to violence. The slaying of innocent Jewish lives by Pittsburgh gunman Robert Bowers, who this weekend turned his rhetoric about killing Jews into the actual killing of Jewish people, is the latest example. We need laws to allow intervention much earlier, or this will not be the last time we see Jewish people die in America because they are Jews.