Jewish Australians reflect on 9/11 experiences

Twenty-five years after 9/11, Australian Jews who lived through the attack say it permanently altered their sense of safety – a feeling brought home again by the Bondi terrorist attack in December.

St Kilda Shule’s Rabbi Yaakov Glasman, then a rabbinical student, was at LaGuardia Airport waiting to fly to Melbourne for Rosh Hashanah. His 8.45am flight was nearing take-off when passengers were told there was a fire in one of the Twin Towers. The airport was evacuated.

A taxi driver offered him a ride to Brooklyn. As details came over the radio, they saw smoke billowing from the North Tower shortly before it collapsed.

“Everything became terribly real,” Rabbi Glasman told The AJN. He never made it home for the festival, spending it in America “witnessing a nation united in grief”.

“Days later, in shule on Rosh Hashanah, the words of Unetaneh Tokef – ‘Who will live and who will die? Who by water and who by fire?’ – had an unbearable immediacy,” he wrote. “That day was to me an awakening to the preciousness of human life, the depth of evil to which humanity can descend, and the shining brilliance of mankind when it responds to hate with love and to adversity with solidarity.”