The bombing of the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation in Atlanta in 1958

On October 12, 1958, 50 sticks of dynamite exploded in the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation, Atlanta’s oldest synagogue. The building sustained major damages, but no one was killed or injured. The attack was one in a series of attacks and attempted attacks on synagogues in the South in 1957 and ’58, spurred on by a rise in anti-Semitic sentiment among white supremacists during the desegregation era. Five men with links to the white-supremacist National States’ Rights Party were arrested and one was tried, but none was convicted.

The attack on Temple Beth-Israel in Gadsden, Alabama, in 1960

Before this weekend, the worst attack in a U.S. synagogue was believed to be the March 1960 attack on Temple Beth-Israel. A 16-year-old threw a bomb into the synagogue; the bomb did not explode, but the bomber shot at congregants as they ran from the scene, injuring two of them.

The 1977 Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel synagogue shooting in St. Louis, Missouri

On October 8, 1977, guests were leaving the synagogue after a bar mitzvah and standing in the parking lot when Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist who fatally attacked a number of Jews and black Americans from 1977 to 1980, opened fire nearby and killed a guest named Gerald Gordon; two others were injured. Franklin reportedly chose the Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel synagogue randomly, out of a phone book. In 2013, Franklin was executed for the murder of Gordon.

The murder of the talk-radio host Alan Berg in 1984

On June 18, 1984, the talk-radio host Alan Berg was shot and killed in the driveway of his home in Denver. Berg was known for his liberal views and for challenging anti-Semites and white supremacists on his radio show. Four members of the white-supremacist group the Order were indicted in his murder, and two were convicted for civil-rights violations against Berg, but not for murder.

The murder of the Goldmark family in 1985

On Christmas Eve 1985, the Seattle lawyer Charles Goldmark, his wife, and their two sons were murdered in their home in what the Anti-Defamation League has called the deadliest attack targeting Jews in the U.S., before Saturday’s shooting. According to a 1986 New York Times report, the family was “bound, chloroformed, beaten with the point of a steam iron and stabbed” by David Lewis Rice, a 27-year-old unemployed steelworker who was a follower of an extremist group called the Duck Club. The New York Times reported that Rice thought the family was Jewish and Communist (they were neither); Rice pleaded guilty and admitted to murdering the family because he thought they were Communists, but denied the reports that he had targeted them because he thought they were Jews.

The murder of Neal S. Rosenblum in 1986

On April 17, 1986, the 24-year-old rabbinical student Neal S. Rosenblum was shot five times on his way home from evening prayers in Squirrel Hill—the same Pittsburgh neighborhood where Saturday’s synagogue shooting took place. There were no suspects for two years after the shooting, but then a prison cellmate of a man named Steven M. Tielsch came forward with claims that Tielsch, who was being held for federal drug-trafficking charges, had been bragging about murdering a Jew. The witness also reported that Tielsch had made anti-Semitic remarks and drawn swastikas on his forehead. Sixteen years later, after four trials, Tielsch was convicted of third-degree murder in 2002.