A standing room crowd totaling about 100 gathered at the Chabad Edelman Jewish Center in Fountain Hills on Sunday afternoon for reflection and prayer in memory of those killed in a mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pa. on Saturday morning.

“The killer’s bullets were aimed at all of us,” Rabbi Mendy Lipskier told those gathered. “We must stop excuses for evil perpetrators’ hate speech, and recognize evil for what it is and stand united against it.”

Eleven people died when a man entered the Tree of Life Synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh Saturday morning and opened fire, saying he would kill all Jews. Among the wounded were four police officers responding to the call for help. The gunman was wounded, but captured alive and is recovering from his injuries.

Lipskier paid tribute to the first responders. “They willingly chose to put their lives in danger,” he said.

Lipskier expressed his heartfelt appreciation to those in the community who responded with sympathy and anger.

“Eleven innocent people – whose only crime was that they are Jewish – were gunned down in front of friends, family and fellow worshipers. They had gathered at the synagogue to celebrate life, a baby naming, and were killed in a most brutal fashion by a savage anti-Semite,” Lipskier said in a prepared statement.

“We have received phone calls and emails from so many local friends in the broader Fountain Hills community, all expressing their sympathy, outrage and horror. This is what Fountain Hills is about, and this is what the real America is.”

He went on to tell the gathering that, “we can shape the world that we live in by the way we live. Every act of darkness must inspire us with more acts of light.

“We must respond to random acts of violence with random acts of kindness.”