{"id":613305,"date":"2026-09-11T23:46:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T23:46:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/613305\/"},"modified":"2026-09-11T23:46:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T23:46:09","slug":"us-rabbis-recount-their-september-11-attack-experiences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/613305\/","title":{"rendered":"US rabbis recount their September 11 attack experiences"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cToday is the birthday of the world. It is also the end of Shiva (mourning period). Sept. 11 + 7.\u201d That\u2019s how Rabbi Joshua Hammerman of Temple Beth El in Stamford, Connecticut, began his Rosh Hashanah sermon on Sept. 18, 2001 – 1 Tishrei 5762.<\/p>\n

When I\u2019d left New York City<\/a> for Stamford the day before, Grand Central Terminal was covered in missing-person posters. All around were photos of those who went to work on a cloudless Tuesday morning and never made it home. Downtown, the fires at Ground Zero were still burning. They wouldn\u2019t be fully extinguished for another three months.<\/p>\n

While many of us sat in front of the TV, rabbis comforted grieving and fearful congregants and scrambled to rewrite their High Holiday sermons. Before 9\/11, many of them had planned to speak about the violence that had engulfed Israel over the previous year. Just a month earlier, a Palestinian suicide bomber had blown himself up in a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem,<\/a> killing 16 people and injuring more than 100.<\/p>\n

But then, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported at the time, attacks closer to home \u201cforced an abrupt shift in tack and created new, pressing questions: How do you comfort a nation in mourning and bring in the New Year in the shadow of the worst terror attack in United States history? How do you discuss God, forgiveness, and repentance in the face of evil?\u201d<\/p>\n

Rabbi Hammerman, who for more than three decades led the Conservative synagogue where my mother and stepfather are members, rewrote his Rosh Hashanah sermons that year. In his remarks, he acknowledged widespread fear but urged congregants to choose hope, to rise from shiva and begin the process of lifting themselves \u201cup off the ash heap.\u201d The crowd that day included many people who had been downtown on 9\/11<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"FILEFILE PHOTO: The second tower of the World Trade Center explodes into flames after being hit by a airplane, New York September 11, 2001 with the Brooklyn bridge in the foreground. (credit: REUTERS\/Sara K. Schwittek\/File Photo)<\/p>\n

This year, the birthday of the world – as Rosh Hashanah is known – begins at sunset 25 years to the day after a series of coordinated attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and ushered in two decades of war overseas. Sept. 11 + 25 years. 1 Tishrei 5787.<\/p>\n

During these High Holidays, I\u2019ll be sitting across the country from Stamford, at Temple Israel of Hollywood in Los Angeles, where I am a member. There, on Erev Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Michelle Missaghieh plans to reflect on the scope of 9\/11 and the very personal ways it affected her family.<\/p>\n

Ahead of this grim anniversary, I surveyed American rabbis about what they remember from 9\/11 and the High Holidays that began just days later. Here\u2019s what they told me (the following oral histories have been lightly condensed and edited for length and clarity).<\/p>\n

Rabbi Andy Bachman’s experience on 9\/11<\/p>\n

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Rabbi Andy Bachman was on his way to a mikveh, or Jewish ritual bath, on Manhattan\u2019s Upper West Side. There, he was scheduled to officiate at the Jewish conversion of two New York University students. At the time, Bachman was the executive director of the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life at NYU. The center is situated about a mile and a half north of the World Trade Center site.<\/p>\n

I found out about the attacks when I got out of the train at 72nd Street, and there was a kind of shock and hysteria. Then I went straight to the mikveh, worked on contacting my family, proceeding with the conversions and walking downtown to campus afterward in order to find missing students and start the process of setting up volunteers and humanitarian aid.<\/p>\n

In the immediate days surrounding the attacks, we were delivering food and water to volunteers at Ground Zero, dealing with students having major breakdowns, and helping maintain the social fabric of caring and safety. Rosh Hashanah followed soon after 9\/11, and frankly I don\u2019t remember what I said. But surely we addressed that atmosphere and crisis we were experiencing. I will never forget [Ground Zero<\/a>] volunteers showing up at services covered in ash from their work and doing everything in our power to support them.<\/p>\n

On Sept. 11, 2001, Rabbi Danielle Upbin was a fifth-year rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan. She can still picture the overflow crowd at the seminary\u2019s High Holiday services, as community members \u201cwanted to be together, to feel connected to God, to our people, to each other.\u201d \u00a0In the weeks after 9\/11, Upbin, now of Congregation Beth Shalom, a Conservative congregation in Clearwater, Florida, volunteered through the Red Cross\u2019 spiritual care team, stationed at a pier on New York City\u2019s West Side.<\/p>\n

We were asked to make it clear that we were chaplains, to offer kind words, to say, \u201cDo you need to talk?\u201d It was in this dire time, when people still couldn\u2019t find their loved ones. They were trying to manage their finances and trying to understand what would happen next.<\/p>\n

I would say that was our education, because I was a bit out of my depth then. I would not have known what to do, and I\u2019m grateful to have had resources like the Red Cross and FEMA, and the opportunity as a rabbinical student to learn the tools and how to respond.<\/p>\n

It taught me to show up for people in times of crisis. It taught me that there are times when it\u2019s appropriate and necessary to let people know that you are here for them as a listener, that I can offer prayers with them, that I can sit with them – and I don\u2019t have to do anything more than that. Sometimes it\u2019s enough to let people know I\u2019m available, present, and care about them as a person.<\/p>\n

Rabbi David Weizman recited tehillim as coroners worked<\/p>\n

Rabbi David Weizman – Rabbi Upbin\u2019s husband, who is also a spiritual leader at Congregation Beth Shalom – was only recently out of rabbinical school when the towers fell. When he, too, inquired how he might support relief efforts, the Red Cross placed him in the morgue adjacent to Ground Zero. There, he recited psalms, tehillim in Hebrew, while the coroners worked.<\/p>\n

I was saying tehillim, and they were doing their forensics – trying to identify bodies, or the pieces of bodies, the fragments, the bones\u2026 teeth.<\/p>\n

At first I was like, \u201cIs this doing any good? Did they want me here? Am I bothering them?\u201d One of them pulled me aside one time and said they appreciated me bringing some kind of kedushah (holiness) into it. They weren\u2019t Jewish or anything, those folks, but they knew that the practice was trying to bring some honor to the dead, and it was helpful somehow for the people working in the morgue.<\/p>\n

They\u2019d come in with these black bags that they had the remains in, and they\u2019d put them up on the table in the middle of the room, open them up, and they were like scientists, just trying to identify anybody they possibly could.<\/p>\n

People born after 9\/11 don\u2019t know how dramatically things changed in our country: \u00a0our sense of being vulnerable, being targets. So this year, I\u2019m going to talk about the question: If you lived through it, how did it change you?<\/p>\n

I think it changed me – my vulnerability, but also [realizing] that there are real enemies in the world, and there\u2019s a real source of animosity that we\u2019re all susceptible to. Before 9\/11, it was very easy to put that out of our minds – to say we\u2019re Americans, we\u2019re protected.<\/p>\n

Rabbi Avi Shafran wasn\u2019t at his Lower Manhattan offices on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. The then-director of public affairs for Agudath Israel, a Haredi Orthodox advocacy group, was in Staten Island, at the dentist, with a toothache. He thanks God for that toothache, knowing that \u201con any other day, I would have been mere blocks away,\u201d as he wrote in a piece for Ami Magazine. When he thinks back to that time, he remembers how quickly and dramatically the world changed, and recalls both the sense of patriotism the attacks brought out and the xenophobia that they wrought.<\/p>\n

There was a feeling that a new era of history had dawned, and that at the previous Rosh Hashanah, no one could have imagined what the year would bring. \u2026I remember going to my car mechanic, an Egyptian Copt, and telling him that if he was under any threat, he should know that I stood ready to help in any way, even to shelter him. At the time, no one knew how people would react in the coming days. I hung a large American flag over my balcony and spent time reassuring family and others in different places that I was OK.<\/p>\n

Rabbi Michelle Missaghieh\u2019s father, Hushang, and her brother, Ramin, worked at the Twin Towers. On 9\/11, Hushang was just about to get on the elevator to his 76th-story office at 1 World Trade when a plane struck the building. Outside, he started walking north and saw people jumping to their deaths from the burning buildings. Her brother, on his way to work at the time of the attacks, got home safely. At the High Holiday services that year, Missaghieh, an associate rabbi at Temple Israel of Hollywood, a Reform congregation in Los Angeles, spoke about the Akedah, or the binding of Isaac, the Torah story read on the second day of Rosh Hashanah. In it, God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, only for an angel to intervene at the last moment.<\/p>\n

I used the Akedah as a lesson to speak out against extremism. That just because someone \u00a0– naming God – tells you to take your plane and plow it into the Twin Towers, doesn\u2019t mean you should listen to that voice. That is not a \u201cgodly\u201d voice. That is the danger of extreme religious thinking. That is what Abraham did. It is not how we should strive to love. The Akedah warns us not to act that way.<\/p>\n

Living with this type of existential, constant fear is something the younger generation is growing up with, but it didn\u2019t exist earlier in the same way. So I think it was a real turning point for how Americans are now divided, in terms of foreigners and threat and war. \u2026I want to warn against xenophobia, against the closing of ranks, against the us vs. them mentality. All of that is very dangerous.<\/p>\n

With his pregnant wife\u2019s due date fast approaching, Rabbi Robert Scheinberg had worked ahead on his High Holiday sermons in 2001. But by the time he spoke from the bimah at the United Synagogue of Hoboken, a Conservative congregation in New Jersey, his message had changed dramatically. Smoke from the World Trade Center site, just across the Hudson River, was still visible in Hoboken.<\/p>\n

Our community was traumatized. I was able to incorporate some themes from the sermons I had already prepared, but it would have been inappropriate for any High Holy Day sermon in our community that year to be fundamentally about anything else. But there were so many themes related to what had just happened – the unfairness of lives getting cut short and how this could possibly relate to our High Holy Day theme of the Book of Life; the incredible heroism and self-sacrifice of first responders; moving forward in a fearful world without a sense of stability to anchor us; the reality of people who so despise us and our way of life that they would do such a thing; gratitude for having survived, and sorrow of friends and relatives who were killed; how we process all these extreme emotions – that I spoke about different aspects during each sermon. Sometimes the quality of a sermon is related to the many hours of preparation, but sometimes the quality of a sermon is related to the depth of emotion that it reflects and the ways that it meets the moment, even with much, much less preparation.<\/p>\n

On 9\/11, Rabbi Mari Chernow was a student rabbi at the Jewish Home, an elder care facility in San Francisco. Chernow, who is now the dean of Hebrew Union College, a Reform seminary in Los Angeles, was struck by the \u201cdepth of sorrow\u201d of the elderly residents, Holocaust survivors among them.<\/p>\n

There was a heaviness to their possibility of leaving this earth with such a dismal view of humanity. \u2026If you\u2019re in your 20s, like I was, you can think, OK, this is horrible, and we\u2019re going to do better, and we\u2019re going to fix things. But [for elderly residents] without that runway to make things better for humanity, I think that was in the air. \u00a0It felt different, unlike other places where we were just processing what had happened in America. It was more prevalent. It was in the way that they held their bodies, the looks on their faces.<\/p>\n

For the Holocaust survivors, who had completely rebuilt their lives, it was another trauma – like, humanity is doing this again – and I think it just deepened the despair. Grief is like rivers that flow into each other. It\u2019s impossible to experience grief without recalling past griefs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cToday is the birthday of the world. It is also the end of Shiva (mourning period). Sept. 11…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":613306,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[15373,1903,85,46,1886,5708,43,14868,65962,1032],"class_list":["post-613305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-9-11","tag-diaspora","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-news","tag-rosh-hashanah","tag-september-11","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=613305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613305\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/613306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=613305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=613305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=613305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}