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.”

Kids Giving Back co-founder Carole Schlessinger was nine months pregnant and living on the Upper West Side. Her husband David – now a teacher at Moriah College – had left for work at Merrill Lynch at 7am.

“I was watching Sesame Street with my son Ricky, who was two at the time, and then he called suddenly,” she said.

“He said turn on the TV, so I switched it over … I saw the second plane go into the towers. He worked in the World Financial Centre, which was across the road, and then he said ‘we’re evacuating’, then all the lines went dead. It took over three hours for him to walk back.

“What was so heartbreaking were all the signs everywhere, on the windows and bus stops, of ‘have you seen’, ‘missing’ – and there were just no survivors,” she said. Her daughter was born in New York on September 26. Within months the family decided to return to Australia.

Having lived through 9/11, Schlessinger said Bondi was, sadly, not unexpected.

“I would say the world changed after September 11. It really did … and there’s still such a huge threat. I don’t think it ended with that.

“It’s certainly not the community we grew up in, in the ’70s and ’80s, that carefree life. And Bondi really hit home how it isn’t.”

Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Peter Wertheim reflected this week that the optimism of the 1990s – the fall of communism, the end of the Cold War and the triumph of liberal democracy – had given way to something darker.

“Then came the evil insanity of 9/11, which has set the tone for the 21st century,” he said. “Twenty-five years later, liberal democracy is everywhere beset by new and even darker forces that are pulling it apart.

“The twin towers have been replaced by twin evils: groups who wish to dominate the world in the name of totalitarian ideologies based on religion or race, and nihilists who simply wish to burn the world to the ground. The future seems full of foreboding.”