Ed Asner made his mark in Pittsburgh with 'The Soap Myth'

Ed Asner was no stranger to Pittsburgh.

The seven-time Emmy winning actor, who died Sunday at the age of 91, appeared in the Steel City just over two years ago in a staged reading of Jeff Cohen’s play “The Soap Myth.” Asner played a cantankerous Holocaust survivor named Milton Saltzman who insists that the Nazis used soap from human corpses.

While it is a work of fiction, “The Soap Myth” was inspired by historical evidence that the Nazi regime had a program in 1944 to develop a process for the mass-production of soap from the fat of Jews being murdered in Nazi extermination camps.

Cohen and the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh brought the play, and Asner, to Rodef Shalom Sanctuary in Shadyside in early May of 2019, six months after the Tree of Life Synagogue shootings.

The performances, including a free student matinee, were the culmination of the Holocaust Center’s annual Yom HaShoah Week of Remembrance.

In an interview with the Tribune-Review prior to the first performance, Asner, himself a Jew, talked about what it meant to be performing this play in Pittsburgh so soon after the Tree of Life massacre.

“I hope it’s a tribute. I hope it’s a reminder of what happened and that we must fight to prevent it happening elsewhere,” he said.

When asked why he would want to take on a role like this at the age of 89, Asner said he found the script to be irresistibly compelling.

“I am not a practicing Jew. This is my contribution to retaining my identification as a Jew and empowering the people, so to speak, rather than necessarily the religion,” he said. “It’s a beautiful setting we have here, a beautiful synagogue and I look forward to reminding people of the martyrs from the Tree of Life.”