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The attack also was a deep and painful blow to the Jewish community in the United States, and came just days after George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist and major donor to Democratic candidates, who is Jewish and who survived Nazi occupation in Hungary, received a pipe bomb in the mail. Also in the past week, a Senate campaign sign for Josh Hawley, attorney general of Missouri, was sprayed with a swastika.
On Saturday, the Tree of Life Congregation was holding services for three separate congregations when the gunman stormed in with an AR-15-style assault rifle, a Glock, and two other handguns, and began shooting.
Police dispatchers received the first emergency calls at 9:54 a.m., Mr. Jones of the F.B.I. said, and police officers, including a SWAT team, were dispatched a minute later. Mr. Bowers had already shot and killed 11 people and was on his way out of the synagogue, Mr. Jones said, when he encountered police officers and shot at them.
He went back into the synagogue to hide from SWAT officers who were moving in, Mr. Jones said. He was in the synagogue for about 20 minutes, law enforcement officials said.
“By the time I got there they were already starting to extract people,” said Chief Scott Schubert of the Pittsburgh Police. “Watching those officers running into the dangers to remove people and get them to safety was unbelievable.”
Residents near the synagogue were told to stay inside their homes. Ben Opie, 55, who can see the synagogue from his backyard, said his wife was about to leave their house to do some volunteer work when SWAT officers approached their home and said there was a gunman in the synagogue.
“They chased my wife inside,” he said. “They just said get in the house.”
On Saturday night, the authorities were still piecing together a portrait of Mr. Bowers, and had searched his apartment with a robotic bomb detector and police dogs. His apartment is in a neighborhood dotted with mostly small to medium brick homes, about a 25-minute drive south of Pittsburgh in the suburb of Baldwin Borough.
Representative Mike Doyle, who represents Pennsylvania’s 14th district, where the synagogue is, said that Mr. Bowers had 21 guns registered to his name.
“I don’t think anybody really knows this guy, other than he was a hateful anti-Semite who had posted anti-Semitic views,” Mr. Doyle said. “We’re all kind of numb, kind of in shock, it’s not really something that happens much here.”
A spokesman for the A.D.L. said that before Saturday’s shooting the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in recent United States history was in 1985, when a man killed a family of four in Seattle. He had mistakenly thought that they were Jewish. More recently, in 2014, a white supremacist opened fire outside a Jewish Community Center in a suburb of Kansas City, Mo., killing three people.
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