By Jeff Lipton
Residents packed the synagogue on Sept. 10 in a program called Remembrance and Healing: Sources of Strength and Courage in the Face of Adversity and Trauma. Survivors of the twin towers' attacks told their stories and offered hope to those assembled for the services.
Four candles were lit during the service, one by Sheri Iskenderian, in memory of her husband who was lost on Sept. 11; Ruth Weinreich, a twin towers' survivor, lit a second candle; Cheryl Shames lit a third in memory of her brother, Andrew Steven Zucker, who died in the attacks; and a fourth was lit by Mark Sokolow, who survived the WTC attacks only to be thrust into and survive another terrorist strike in Jerusalem four months later.
Sokolow was sitting at his desk on the 38th floor of Tower Two of the WTC on 9/11. When I heard the sound of the first plane crashing into the North Tower, I like so many others in the South Tower, had no idea what happened, he told the congregation.
I am most thankful to a young woman named Marion, who, after seeing the North Tower in flames, courageously and unselfishly ran down the hallways of our office and urged us to evacuate our building.
He and his family also escaped from the suicide bombing attack on Yaffe Street in Jerusalem four months later.
This evening and tomorrow my thoughts are primarily on the people of Israel, on this nation and our world and on how the events of 9/11 have affected us all, Sokolow said. Remembering is an integral part of Jewish tradition, so we remember the innocent victims of terror, we remember the heroism of the rescuers...
He said one of the effects of 9/11 was to show the rest of the world the evil that we, the Jewish nation, have been experiencing for generations.
Rabbi Basil Herring of the Orthodox Caucus opened the ceremony by stating the purpose of last Tuesday's gathering: to remember the victims, bring comfort to the injured and the surviving families, to salute the heroes on the planes and on the ground who gave their lives in those fateful hours in order to protect all of us in the face of evil and depravity.
The keynote speaker, Rabbi Binny Freedman, an officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and a survivor in the suicide bombing in the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem last summer, struggled to come to terms with the question of why.
Freedman, who is also the educational director of Israelite, said one of his students came to America and worked on the 81st floor of the twin towers. He didn't make it down, Freedman said. One of the longest phone calls I can ever remember is talking to his sister trying to struggle with
