Where were you on 9/11? ‘Jerusalem Post’ employees weigh in

I was in school and split up with a dozen other students with family in town. After the teachers were given notice that the family members were fine, the students were allowed to leave. I was pulled aside as my aunt was working in the hospital next to the towers. All the students had gathered in the school theater to see this news.
– Anna Ahrönheim, military reporter

I was on a bus going to the Jerusalem Museum on the Seam, where US Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer was scheduled to deliver a speech that day weeks earlier. Just the volume of the radio was turned up all the way so that everyone could hear updated news reports of what had happened. The passengers were in shock. Some were crying. I expected the museum’s program to be cancelled, but this did not happen, and Kurtzer came as arranged, telling us that at this distance there was nothing he could do other than give us the latest updates as he had received it. on his cellphone. He was surprisingly calm, and this transferred itself to his listeners.
– Greer Fay Cashman, reporter and columnist

I covered a press conference that day at the King David Hotel by an unemployed fellow named Benjamin Netanyahu, who wanted the world to know that he had predicted the attacks.

I also broke the bad news for a solidarity mission of the Jewish Federation of the Metrowest of New Jersey, which included former Senator Frank Lautenberg and other dignitaries. He had come to Israel to show solidarity with the people here, at a time when the restaurant was being blown up by terrorists. It became his Israeli friends who showed solidarity with him, proving that the vibrant bridge of US-Israel relations goes both ways.
-Gil Hoffman, Chief Political Correspondent

I was with my newborn son, a few days after his Brit. It didn’t take me long to break my promise not to catch him and watch the news. He is in the army now.
– Liat Collins, Editor of the International Jerusalem Post

I was 30 meters above the ground in a guard tower inside Megiddo prison, overlooking Route 65 to Afula. Tired work, but someone had to do it. At one point a car stopped on the road below and a man came out to change a flat tyre. He spied me upstairs and shouted something about “New York” and “World Trade Center” and stretched out his arms to a bird (a plane, I realized later). I nodded and waved my head.

Only three hours later, when I was released from my post and climbed down the ladder onto solid ground, did I make my way to the hamal (operations room). The rest of the unit gathered around a small TV watching pictures of buildings catching fire and collapsing.

I stared in disbelief for a few minutes, then got ready to eat, shower, and take a nap. Four hours later, I returned to the guard tower, and September 11 turned into September 12.
–David Brin, Managing Editor

I was packing my bags in an empty apartment in Ramat Gan. I went into the living room to talk on the phone nervously watching my mom stare at the TV screen, where you could see pillars of smoke. I asked him what had happened, and he told me we couldn’t fly to the US yet because our flight was cancelled, and no one was allowed in. I didn’t understand what was happening until much later.

We made a second flight into the US two or three days after the attack.
— Tamar Berry, Jpost.com Managing Editor

I was at my job at a start-up here in Israel when my dad called and told me that a plane hit the Twin Towers. I was busy though, and I didn’t have time to think about what he said. A minute later, a man from down the hall broke into our office and shared the news.

I spent the rest of my workday finding news websites that worked. All the big news sites were crashing because everyone in the world was trying to reach them. In the end, I found that the Chicago Sun-Times wasn’t crashing, and I updated every minute we were waiting for updates about the who, what, why. After work I watched more news at a friend’s house. Everyone in the street was stopping to talk about it. It was immediately clear to everyone that the world we knew had changed forever, even though we didn’t yet know all the details of how.
–Zev Stubb, business reporter

I was a graduate student at New York University, not far from the World Trade Center. I woke up that morning at my parents’ house in Queens and clicked through AOL while checking my email (I’m dating myself, but that was the source at the time of breaking news). Apparently, a small tourist plane had crashed into one of the towers it was flying off – no big deal.

After making plans to visit a friend at her master’s event for lunch, I was confused when she anxiously canceled, saying she hoped our classmates were fine. I then went to the gym and was a little unhappy that they were closing early, the receptionist practically in tears.

Only when I returned home – several sirens were heard from afar – and turned on CNN, watched the towers fall, did it begin to kill me. It took weeks to really sink in. I’ve never been to a hole in the horizon.

I’m sorry that as a lifelong New Yorker (until Aliyah), I’ve never been to the top nor visited Windows on the World. I thought it would always be there.

I am stunned that, a few weeks before the attacks, I was walking near Washington Square Park the night after class and looked through the famous arches to see the twinkling towers in the distance. I stopped to look at him for a minute or two. It was the last time I’d ever seen them.
– Erica Schachne, ‘Magazine’ editor

While driving home after my day at work at Comverse (an Israel high-tech flagship venture that has since exploded), I was in New Jersey talking on the phone with my sister-in-law, who told me a plane was World Trade. Crashed in the center building. . I couldn’t believe a pilot could be so incompetent. A few minutes later she said that the news reported that a different plane had hit a second building there, and I remember saying, “What are the odds?”

I didn’t even think it could be terrorism, not incompetence. Eventually, I made it to a TV screen, and eventually, I got it too.

(And yes, I even remember I was in class when our teary-eyed teacher told us that JFK had been shot.)
– Yakir Feldman, copy editor

I woke up on the morning of September 10, 2001, to the news of another terrorist attack in Israel.

It was close to a year after the start of the Second Intifada and a month after the suicide bombing at Sabro Pizzeria in Jerusalem, which killed 15 people.

I lay on a pull-out couch in the book-lined den of my friend’s suburban home in Newton, Massachusetts. I pulled a sheet over my head such that a thin cloth could pass the news of the attack.

It was my birthday and I was grateful to be back in my home state, where a terrorist attack seemed like a Mars landing and the feeling of hazy summer still lingered as it fell. When I landed at Logan International Airport on September 4, I felt the same way, grateful that anyone could escape the violence by boarding an airplane and arrive at a destination continent far from conflict in which so many All Israelis and Palestinians were losing their lives. .

Then I could not imagine that I had entered America at one of the airports chosen by the terrorists, from where two planes were hijacked to take them to the Twin Towers of New York.

When I climbed into a mine in Rockport and later sat down for a birthday dinner with friends, terrorists who were already in Boston were preparing for an attack that killed 3,000 people.

I woke up in a chronological new year, on September 11th and that marked a new era.

I was sitting in my friend’s kitchen drinking coffee and listening to the radio and waiting for the kids to return from school.

It was the most typical American morning scene I could imagine.

Then a newscaster told about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. There was no immediate sense of panic. It appeared as if a small plane had collided with a building due to the pilot’s fault.

It was seconds long before and after. Nothing had changed in the kitchen but we had changed. The enormity of what had happened was kept glued to radio and television throughout the day.

It was like a repeat of an Israeli terror attack, but on a much larger scale and one clearly outlined. The terror was not an isolated incident and there was no real escape. It was foolish to imagine that America was a safe harbor from its global nets.
— Tova Lazaroff, Deputy Managing Editor