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

Joel Goldstein received the first phone call containing anti-Semitic slurs weeks after a mass shooter murdered 11 Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life-Or L'Simcha Synagogue on October 27, 2018 – the worst anti-Semitic attack on American soil .

The former executive director had left his position at Squirrel Hill Synagogue a few months earlier.

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

“I’m going to cut your (expletive) head off kike,” the woman said over the phone, referring to the anti-Semitic slur “kike.”

The calls continued. The mystery woman confided more than 240 to Goldstein and his family over the next four years.

The caller made “incessant references” to the 2018 synagogue shooting, according to court documents. She spoke about the murder of Holocaust victim Anne Frank by the Nazis and the return of Jews to Auschwitz.

“Seig Heil, kill the kikers,” she shouted repeatedly during one call.

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

A federal judge in Miami on Friday sentenced appellant 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 for the Southern District of Florida. Prosecutors played the “Seig Heil” appeal in court before sentencing.

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

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

Goldstein told police and the FBI that he did not know Harris, who had hidden his phone number using the *67 feature, prosecutors said. The victim and her family received the calls and voicemails after she moved to Florida.

“Hardly time had passed since the Tree of Life massacre, my husband began receiving horrible calls delighting in the massacre of 11 members of the Tree of Life/Pittsburgh Jewish community,” said the Goldstein's wife, Linda Myers, in a statement submitted to the courts.

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

The Anti-Defamation League, which worked on Goldstein's case, thanked the federal judge who handed down the sentence last week.

“No one should experience this kind of malicious, long-term harassment,” the group said in a press release. “This strong sentence sends a message to those who might engage in this kind of despicable and hateful behavior. We are grateful for the partnership and attention of law enforcement in this case – and for the strength, perseverance and conviction of this family.

Officials with the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, whose security team leads efforts to combat anti-Semitism in the Jewish community, could not be reached for comment, the ADL office in Cleveland said , which records anti-Semitic activity in western Pennsylvania, as well as Ohio and West Virginia. and Kentucky, was also not available.