Since the morning in October 2018 when a gunman killed 11 worshipers on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the somber constructing complicated has been by turns a criminal offense scene, a place of mourning and the topic of lengthy, emotional discussions about its future.

Slowly, over months of deliberation, the Tree of Life congregation determined that the constructing could be each its home for worship again as well as a commemorative site, a middle for communal occasions and a spot for individuals from everywhere in the world to learn about confronting hatred.

Daniel Libeskind, the architect recognized for memorializing historic trauma and a son of Holocaust survivors, was chosen to assist flip that imaginative and prescient into construction.

Mr. Libeskind, who in 2003 received the competitors to design the World Trade Center site after the Sept. 11 assaults, had been in New York when the assault at Tree of Life occurred. It rattled him deeply, he mentioned, that such an eruption of violent antisemitism might happen in America — the nation his household had come to looking for freedom as Jews.

Mr. Libeskind would quickly be taught that the gunman had apparently chosen Tree of Life as a result of one of many three congregations that worshiped there, Dor Hadash, had participated in a program for refugees with the charity HIAS. That group, below its authentic title, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, had given Mr. Libeskind’s relations monetary help and helped them lease a house in Bronx public housing once they arrived as immigrants in 1959.

“That struck in my heart,” he mentioned.

Many overlapping circles of individuals felt a stake within the determination to reopen Tree of Life: the victims’ households, the members of the three congregations that worshiped on the synagogue, the Pittsburgh Jewish group, the town at giant, the nation as a complete and folks, Jewish and non-Jewish, everywhere in the world.

Two of the congregations that had been within the constructing in the course of the assault — New Light and Dor Hadash — have discovered new properties inside close by synagogues. But Jeffrey Myers, the rabbi of the Tree of Life congregation, mentioned a consensus had ultimately shaped amongst his members that they needed to come back again.

“As time went on, it became clearer through all of these conversations,” he mentioned, “that the predominance was: We must return. If we don’t, we give the message that evil won, because it chased us out of our building.”