Alice Greenwald figures to experience an emotional and meaningful day on the second Friday of this month.
She’ll be at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue that evening for prayer services ushering in Rosh Hashanah. Greenwald is to head there from a memorial ceremony downtown that’s held annually for the victims of the September 11, 2001, catastrophe.
This September 11 will mark 25 years since 19 Muslim terrorists, primarily from Saudi Arabia, hijacked four American civilian airplanes and crashed them into the World Trade Center, in New York City; the Pentagon, just outside Washington, D.C.; and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The attacks killed 2,977 people, including five Israelis, who were citizens of more than 70 countries.
Greenwald worked from 2017 to 2022 as the director of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, located precisely where the Twin Towers stood.
This is only the second time since the attacks that Rosh Hashanah falls on September 11, a synchronism that Greenwald called “extremely meaningful,” given the themes of reflection and remembrance characterizing the High Holy Days season, along with the tradition of visiting loved ones’ graves.
“Rosh Hashanah is that moment of the year that the cycle starts again. It’s the start of the Days of Awe, and Yizkor [a memorial prayer] is a big part of Yom Kippur,” she said. “There’s a great overlap between the observance of 9/11 and thinking about renewal. … You can’t have renewal without remembering.”
The public recitation of all victims’ names at the ceremony at the World Trade Center site will take approximately four hours. For the first time, the event will memorialize those who died in the intervening years of health effects that include inhaling carcinogens released when the planes crashed and the buildings fell.
As it is each year, a commemoration also will be held at the Twin Towers Memorial, in the Ha’arazim Valley west of Jerusalem. (Because of Rosh Hashanah, it was moved to September 9.) Israeli government officials and foreign ambassadors, along with relatives of September 11 victims, will be attending. A spokesperson for the site said that the event will note the 25-year anniversary and the United States’ 250th birthday. As in New York, the names of all those murdered that day are etched into the Israeli memorial.
“I don’t know where the time has gone. I don’t know how it’s possible that 25 years [have elapsed] — it’s impossible,” said Shiya Ribowsky, who worked for New York City’s medical examiner’s office on a team tasked with identifying body parts recovered from the downtown site.
The experience was so intense, Ribowsky said, that he’s long avoided September 11 commemorations and, prior to being interviewed for this article, had gone a decade without speaking publicly on the topic.
Said Greenwald: “This was an event both shocking and a moment of collective trauma that’s still with people.”
The attack was so calamitous that American Jewish philanthropic federations immediately cancelled a national demonstration in New York set for September 23, 2001, to support Israel following terrorist attacks against the Jewish state.
“After the events yesterday, this is a time we have to come together as a nation and heal. It should be our priority, rather than our No. 1 priority as American Jews, which is solidarity with Israel,” the head of a Jewish organization in Florida said on September 12, 2001, in an article in Louisville, Kentucky’s Community newspaper, published by the local Jewish federation.
For this year’s anniversary, a new exhibition at the September 11 museum, In Their Honor: 25 Years of 9/11-Inspired Service, will be opening, highlighting the support organizations formed following the attacks and honoring children who went on to become police officers and firefighters after suffering the loss of parents in those roles that day.
One such organization, Voices Center for Resilience, was established by Mary Fetchet, a Connecticut woman whose son, Bradley, worked as an equities trader and was killed that morning in his office in the south tower.
The upcoming commemoration carries additional weight because Bradley, who was 24, “will have been dead longer than he was alive,” Fetchet said.
Her organization continues to help families affected by the September 11 attacks and shares its expertise, including counseling, with trauma victims elsewhere.
“We’ve seen, with the 25th anniversary, a real increase — 3,000 people — in the number of new people who have reached out to us to connect them with resources and support,” said Fetchet, who is a social worker. “The spotlight of the 25th anniversary also is making people more cognizant if they were there that day and escaped but … don’t feel lucky because they lost hundreds of colleagues.”
Fetchet has assisted experts from Israel who, since shortly after Hamas’s invasion of October 7, 2023, have documented the terrorist group’s massacre of 1,200 people across the northern Negev.
Fetchet said her heart “absolutely broke” when meeting an Israeli delegation in New York last year. The group included a woman whose son was among those murdered.
“I was so honored to meet them, and any way we can be of assistance, we’re happy to do that,” she said. “Unfortunately, we’re all connected in all of these tragedies.”
Amy Weinstein, the September 11 museum’s vice president of collections, also has been consulted by the Israelis, some of whom are working to establish a national museum or memorial to the October 7 attack.
Such cross-pollination is becoming common amongst professionals who memorialize national calamities. The interview with Weinstein occurred as she was about to fly to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. For an oral-history project, she is compiling the stories of Baptist ministers in Oklahoma who, soon after the September 11 attacks, went to New York to offer mental-health counseling to victims’ families and first responders.
The ministers know all too well the value of their service. They had extended such aid following the terrorist bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, that killed 168 people.
Scott Miller, a Washingtonian who, like Greenwald, advises clients planning memorial museums, has met those involved in the New York and Israel projects.
“In very broad strokes, there are similarities and lessons learned,” he said. “Each community has victims and survivors. In each case, there’s the people. It’s the humanity of it.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler may be reached at [email protected]
