California woman sentenced to prison for harassing calls to Squirrel Hill synagogue official

Joel Goldstein received the first phone call laced with antisemitic slurs within weeks of a mass shooter murdering 11 Jewish congregants at Tree of Life-Or L’Simcha synagogue on Oct. 27, 2018 — the worst antisemitic attack on U.S. soil.

The former executive director of the Squirrel Hill synagogue had left his post there months earlier.

“I had never encountered anything like that before in a public setting,” Goldstein told the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle in March. “It took me a minute or two to gather my thoughts.”

“I’ll cut your (expletive) head off ,” the woman on the phone said.

The calls continued. The mystery woman placed more than 240 of them to Goldstein and his family over the four years that followed.

The caller made “incessant references” to the 2018 synagogue shooting, court documents showed. She talked about Holocaust victim Anne Frank being murdered by the Nazis and Jews going back to Auschwitz.

Federal prosecutors in Florida say they have brought the caller to justice.

A federal judge in Miami on Friday sentenced phone-caller Melanie Harris, 59, of Riverside, Calif., to 32 months in prison, followed by three years of probation, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida.

Harris in March pleaded guilty to one count of communicating a threat to injure — or “to knowingly and intentionally transmitting a threatening communication in interstate commerce,” federal prosecutors said.

Two additional counts of communicating a threat to injure, and one count of making and communicating repeated harassing calls were dismissed, court records showed.

Goldstein told police and the FBI he didn’t know Harris, who concealed her phone number using the *67 feature, prosecutors said. The victim and his family received the calls and voicemails after he moved to Florida.

“Time had barely passed from the Tree of Life massacre, when my husband began receiving horrible calls gloating at the slaughter of 11 members of the Tree of Life/Pittsburgh Jewish community,” Goldstein’s wife, Linda Myers, said in an impact statement submitted to the courts.

“The victims were our friends, and our mourning was still very raw,” Myers said. “Your honor, this is no way to live. But, it is our lives now — and we will never be the same.”

The Anti-Defamation League, which had worked on the case with Goldstein, thanked the federal judge who levied the sentence last week.

“No one should endure this sort of long-term, malicious harassment,” the group said in a press statement. “This strong sentence sends a message to others who might engage in this sort of despicable and hateful behavior. We are grateful for law enforcement’s partnership and attention to this case — and for the strength, perseverance and conviction of this family.”

Officials from the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, whose security team leads efforts to fight antisemitism in the Jewish community, couldn’t be reached for comment. The ADL’s Cleveland office, which tallies antisemitic activity in Western Pennsylvania, as well as Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky, also was not available.