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Return-Path: Delivered-To: alumni.princeton.edu%david90@alumni.princeton.edu Received: (cpmta 18104 invoked from network); 11 Oct 2001 03:52:20 -0700 Received: from storm.barak.net.il (HELO storm.barak-online.net) (212.150.48.101) by smtp.c007.snv.cp.net (209.228.33.205) with SMTP; 11 Oct 2001 03:52:20 -0700 X-Received: 11 Oct 2001 10:52:20 GMT Received: from barak-online.net ([10.10.11.13]) by storm.barak-online.net (InterMail vK.4.03.00.00 201-232-121 license 42798954b94fcb168b1407e1533853c1) with ESMTP id <20011011105242.HPZB15585.storm@barak-online.net> for ; Thu, 11 Oct 2001 12:52:42 +0200 Message-ID: <3BC584EC.9AB3D073@barak-online.net> Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 13:39:24 +0200 From: Schelly Dardashti X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.73 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en,he MIME-Version: 1.0 To: david90@alumni.princeton.edu Subject: Saving the siddur online at JP X-Priority: 1 (Highest) Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="------------980D0B2EDA96F4142C5521B5" Status: U X-UIDL: O8V55tHkIc1GyAE This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------980D0B2EDA96F4142C5521B5 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Dear David: the story is online, but the internet dept has to clean up some things. Your recountnig of the day was a shaded column as a sidebar and they weren't sure how to do it online. Also there are some empty boxes in some words throughout the story. I have requested that the endnotes (from your email to the end of my contact info) be repositioned at the very end of the article, and that your recounting of your day have a subhead, David's Story. This should be taken care of rather quickly, I hope. They are wonderful on-the-ball people. Best regards, Schelly I will forward the page reference to Bernard Kouchel who will announce it on JewishGen. http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/10/11/JewishWorld/JewishWorld.36015.html --------------980D0B2EDA96F4142C5521B5 Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1; name="JewishWorld.36015.html" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline; filename="JewishWorld.36015.html" Content-Base: "http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/10/ 11/JewishWorld/JewishWorld.36015.ht ml" Content-Location: "http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/10/ 11/JewishWorld/JewishWorld.36015.ht ml" The Jerusalem Post Newspaper : Online News From Israel - Jewish World Art= icle = =

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24 Tishri 5762 09:21Thursday October 11, 2001

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IT'S ALL RELATIVE: Saving the siddur
By = Schelly Talalay Dardashti

= (October 11) - Amid the shock and horror, a minor miracle

'MY world is still upside-down. My office is a wreck," says David Simo= n Bendory of New Jersey. "The windows were blown in by the shock wave fro= m the South Tower collapse. Everything is covered with dust and debris."

When he finally got home to Livingston on Tuesday, Sep=1Ftember 11, fo= llowing the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, he poste= d the following to JewishGen:

"I work across the street from the World Trade Center in One Liberty P= laza ...

Thank God I was already on my way home. Thank God I made it home safel= y today, without a scratch ...," wrote the Goldman Sachs vice president.

"Locked in my desk sits my great-grandmother's siddur [prayer=1Fbook],= published in Vienna in 1878. I had an appointment to meet with a book co= nservator tomorrow [Wednesday] to have it properly preserved.

"Inside the cover, my great-grandmother, then my grandmother, listed t= he births, marriages, and deaths in our family from the death of my great= -great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather in 1893 through the marria= ge of Uncle Charlie in 1932 ...

"This siddur survived persecution in Hungary, the journey to America, = and three generations.

"I won't know if it survived today's tragedy until I can get back into= my office, and I don't know when that will be. Thank God I have a scan o= f the writing inside the cover."

ONE Liberty Plaza, immediately adjacent to the WTC, remained standing = and, in his Goldman Sachs office on the 33rd floor, David's office creden= za remained intact, protecting the old brown prayerbook, which a friend w= ould return to him with hardly a speck of dust on it, erev Rosh Hashana.

Earlier, David had said that he had no words to describe the catastrop= he from which he narrowly escaped, "I now have no words to describe the m= iracle which has emerged from that same catastrophe.

"God willing, there are more miracles to come, in the form of survivor= s who emerge from the debris."

The siddur survived pogroms. It survived the journey to America in 190= 4. And it survived September 11. It is a survivor.

The German-Hebrew siddur arrived in New York in 1904 with David's grea= t-grandmother Helen Kohn, who brought her daughter Fanny, age 2, to join = her husband Aron Kohn.

They originally came from Anina, (then Hungary, now Romania), and trav= elled on the Patricia from Hamburg, Ger=1Fmany, to Ellis Island.

Fanny (David's grandmother) gave the siddur to her oldest daughter, Ka= y Simon Levine, who passed it to David, who plans on inscribing his story= inside to add a literal page to its history.

His family had been secular for so long that "everyone called this boo= k the family Bible," says David.

When he received it, he realized it was a prayerbook, not a Bible.

"I davened [prayed] from it on the day of my son's bris [circumcision]= ," he says, and he brings it each time he visits his Uncle Leo, who is si= ck, to say a prayer for good health with him.

Fluent in Heb=1Frew, his undergra=1Fduate degree is in Near Eastern St= u=1Fdies (Princeton 1990) and his MA (Jewish The=1Fologi=1Fcal Semi=1Fnar= y, NY 1994) is in Jewish Studies. He lived in Israel for about three year= s, and he and his wife Yafitte (whose parents are from Rishon Le=1Fzion) = visit frequen=1Ftly. Married for nearly seven years, they have a daughter= , 5, and a son, 3.

ALWAYS interested in his roots, David has tape recordings and notes of= interviews with his grand=1Fparents, great-aunts and uncles going back t= wo decades. He asked his grandmother and her generation where they came f= rom in Hungary. No one knew.

One day, when his Alzheimer's-stricken grandmother was 89, David asked= her once more where the family was from.

"She blurted out, clear as day, "Resciza - R-E-S-C-I-Z-A. It's near Te= mesvar - T-E-M-E-S-V-A-R. It was a mining town in Hungary."

He now has her parents' wedding pictures in Temesvar, (today Timisoara= , Romania); Resita (Resicabanya) is nearby.

Great-grandmother Helen's father, Rabbi Philip Brauch, was supposedly = the rabbi in Temesvar, but David has not yet been able to find any detail= s.

"I have some 400 relatives in my family tree now," he says, of whom 99= are direct descendents or married to direct descendents of Helen and Aro= n.

DAVID'S great-grandparents on the other side, Leib and Ruchel Schwartz= , were clearly religious when they arrived in 1902 from Romania with thei= r children, Avraham ("my grandfather) and Itzchok.

Like many turn-of-the-century immigrants, says David, they worked to a= ssimilate into their new country, throwing off much of their Jewish ident= ity in the process.

Over the next three generations, Jewish observance decreased until in = David's generation, all the young people intermarried "except me. I am th= e first observant Jew in four generations on both sides of my family," he= says. As an observant Jew, it troubled him for years that his parents ne= ver gave him a Hebrew name and didn't name him after anyone. So as an adu= lt, he took on the Hebrew name Dovid to go with his English name, and he = has gone by the Hebrew version for years.

This year, he decided to visit the historic Grove Street Cemetery in N= ewark on the one day it is safe - September 16 - when older people go to = visit family graves before the holidays, and when there are plenty of pol= ice.

"As a genealogist, I ventured out to see my great-grandparents on both= sides to see what I could learn," says David.

"As a Jew, I went to pay appropriate respect before the holidays. Imag= ine my surprise and joy to find Leib's Hebrew name on his tombstone: Leib= ben Dovid."

In their efforts to assimilate, to give their son a nice American Jewi= sh name, unknown to anyone alive, after four generations, David's parents= gave him the name of his great-great-grandfather.

"I will no longer say I was not named after anyone," says David. "God = works in mysterious ways."

David Simon Bendory: d= avid90@alumni.princeton.edu

For a scan of the siddur's inscription: . For more information on his research, <familytreem= aker.genealogy.com/users/s/i/m/David-E-Simon/index.html>

It's All Relative welcomes readers' inquiries. Write: City Lights/Jeru= salem Post, PO Box 28398, Tel Aviv 61283; fax: 03-639-0277; email: dardasht@jpost.co.il

David, 33, was late for work on Sept. 11 because he had taken h= is car to be serviced. He decided to make it a late day and go to his gym= before going up to his office at Goldman Sachs.

He had just finished a five-mile run when someone came in and told the= m to turn on CNN, which had reported that a small plane had accidentally = flown into the WTC, which was on fire. He called his wife and said there = was an accident, that everything was fine, and he was going to work.

A few minutes later, he saw the second explosion and knew it was no ac= cident but a terrorist attack. "Self-preservation fight-or-flight kicked = in," he says. "I tried to call my wife to tell her I was coming home, but= the phones were already dead."

The gym was at the basement level so the cell phones weren't working.

He dressed and headed up to the street to see hundreds of people milli= ng about. Two people from his floor said their building had been evacuate= d and to report to another Goldman office in the financial district. Woul= d he join them? No thanks, said David, he was going home to New Jersey.

He figured that the ferry at the World Financial Center was the only w= ay across. He also realized that being stuck in the financial district wa= s not a good idea.

"I ran - literally - a mile to the ferry ... probably my fastest mile = ever, chanting tehilim [psalms] as I ran," says David, who passed thousan= ds of people in the streets. "I put my cell phone on autodial to my wife.= Though I had no personal experience, I knew all about cellphone outages = and jammed circuits during attacks in Israel."

David reached the dock, saw an empty ferry pull out, waited for anothe= r to pull in. "I caught my breath, pulled out my siddur and continued to = chant the psalms."

The crowd grew as the NY Mercantile Exchange closed and its hundreds o= f
employees and brokers joined those already at the dock.

"We all stood watching the WTC burn and I saw the images that haunted = me for days: people falling, jumping blown out," he recalls.

"Debris was falling ... some of it was burning ... some of it wasn't d= ebris, it was people ... plummeting through the air." David believes he s= aw a dozen people jump in the few minutes he waited for the ferry, and he= asks, "What goes through a person's mind in a 1000F fire on the 100th fl= oor with no way out?"

Boarding the ferry, David added tefilat ha-derech [prayer for travelle= rs] to the prayers he recited as he stood in the capacity crowd of 399 pa= ssengers - drenched in sweat from the run, from stress, from panic.

Those who travel this route know there is a brief minute or two when t= he ferry crosses the Hudson, as it passes behind the Statue of Liberty an= d the Twin Towers are blocked from view. "We saw the Twin Towers standing= ," says David, "then passed behind Lady Liberty.

We emerged to see one tower and enough smoke to obscure the area where= the second tower should have been. We heard nothing, the ferry was too l= oud."

The passengers didn't know about the South Tower collapse until the fe= rry docked in Hoboken. David got onto a quickly-filled train, still chant= ing psalms.

"When I would pause here and there, everyone around me nodded, thanked= me, told me it was beautiful, asked me to pray more. Everyone is religio= us in a war."

Some people on the train cried, some read news reports from a pager, o= ne person got a cell phone call through and we all gave our home numbers = so the person on the land line could call home for us. I finally arrived = home at 11 am, two hours after I learned of the first attack.

Fight or flight ceased, and I collapsed on the floor, hysterically cry= ing."

David cried on and off all day, seeing the images of jumping people pa= ss before his eyes over and over.

He played with his son, tossed his Barney up in the air and saw people= falling.

"Everyone I know called that day ... people I hadn't spoken to for mon= ths ... all our Israeli family."

A few nights later, during a thunderstorm, he awoke in a nightmare, se= eing the WTC explode again. He has since returned to work in another of h= is company's locations. Life goes on.

Se= arch The Jerusalem Post:

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