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The Day the Dynamic Changed
Netty C. Gross
Here in Israel, we used to cherish our mental escapes to lovely, intifada-free Manhattan...
For the tens of thousands of American Jews living in Israel, and the thousands of Israeli families with relatives in New York, the desperate ritual which follows terror attacks was suddenly reversed at four in the afternoon on September 11. Now we Israelis were rushing to the phones, desperately fighting busy signals and trying to get through to family and friends in Manhattan and Washington D.C. Now our minds raced through mental Rolodexes, trying to remember where exactly in Downtown Manhattan, or on which floors of the World Trade Center, people we knew worked. Now it was we who dropped everything, darting away from computers and kitchen sinks to stare in disbelieving horror at CNN and blink away tears at the sight of Americans dying. We learned how it felt to be thousands of miles away, on the receiving end of awful news, dialing madly, unable to make contact.
"For the first time in my life," said one dazed ex-New Yorker who's lived in Jerusalem for nearly 20 years and whose sister-in-law was evacuated from her Downtown Manhattan office, "I genuinely understood what sort of agonizing worry my family endures each time a bomb goes off in Jerusalem."
Of course it's different. The U.S. attack is of a staggeringly different scale. Unlike what we have come to consider the "routine" suicide attacks in Israel, which sometimes get sandwiched in between the mudslide in Mozambique and the train crash in India, this is going to dominate the air waves, indeed world affairs, for a long time.
But for us in Israel watching Lower Manhattan under smoke and dust and the Pentagon burn, that monumental scale only deepens the anguish: It makes the likelihood that it engulfed people we knew all the more real.
As I write this, 48 hours after the attack, some of us here - U.S. immigrants and Israelis with relatives in America - have yet to hear from family and friends, and word is filtering back about a whole world of missing people who we like to think are part of our personal landscapes: the back-slapping Manhattan stockbroker son of the likeable cousin; the husband of the ages-ago seen but fondly remembered college classmate.
And we cannot offer any comfort. We are marooned here in Jerusalem and Ra'ananah and Efrat, groping to find the right words, while the unspeakable suffering is going on in Manhattan and Long Island and Westchester and Brooklyn. "I feel so incredibly helpless," says a neighbor.
One immigrant couple who at least were spared the added agony of uncertainty were Peggy and Charles Lewin of Jerusalem, both doctors, who came from Denver, Colorado 17 years ago. The eldest of their three sons, Daniel, 31, was on the American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the Twin Towers. Daniel was a graduate of the Technion and MIT who had a meteoric business career in the United States, as a co-founder of the Akamai high-tech company. He was living in Boston with his wife and two children.
The Arab names of the alleged terrorists deepen our involvement in what's going on in New York and Washington. To many here there is a painful irony. For months, notes a friend of mine from suburban Efrat, near Bethlehem, who has lost two neighbors in recent terror shootings, "I've been e-mailing friends in New York about Arab terror. I was never sure they really understood what we are living through, the fear and horror. Now they do."
But there's little sense of vindication; quite the reverse: We U.S. Jews who came on aliyah understood the risks of living in a country in conflict with its neighbors, and took comfort in knowing that, "back home,"
there was a beloved, boring, stable democracy in which we could holiday when we needed the respite. During these intifada days, mental escapes (for New Yorkers anyway) to the lovely Manhattan haunts of our pre-aliyah days were essential. And on real trips, Wall Street friends, concerned how we who had made aliyah were coping with the violence here, might invite us for drinks and dinner at Windows on the World, the tourist-thronged but always-dazzling restaurant atop the World Trade Center. Over a sunset and a glass of Merlot, we were restored. And the questions, spoken in soft voices, eyes filled with worry, were typically big-hearted and American: How can I help? Should I join my shul's solidarity mission?
Who knew that a hideous twist of fate would change this dynamic, and that soon it would be us asking the heartfelt questions. (October 8, 2001)
Israel
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