User-Agent: Microsoft-Outlook-Express-Macintosh-Edition/5.02.2022
Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2001 15:04:41 +0300
Subject: not-html version of story, rough cut
From: Schelly Talalay Dardashti <dardasht@jpost.co.il>
To: <david90@alumni.princeton.edu>
Message-ID: <B7D3AA89.1C23%dardasht@jpost.co.il>
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Status: U

Dear David;
didn't know if your alumni.princeton email received html also, so here is
the regular format as well
Schelly

-------------------------------------

MY world is still upside-down. My office is a wreck,=B2 says David Simon
Bendory of New Jersey. =B3The windows were blown in by the shock wave from th=
e
South Tower collapse. Everything is covered with dust and debris.=B2
When he finally got home to Livingston on  Tuesday, September 11, following
the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, he posted the
following to JewishGen:
=B3I work across the street from the World Trade Center in One Liberty Plaza
... Thank God I was already on my way home. Thank God I made it home safely
today, without a scratch ...,=B2 wrote the Goldman Sachs vice president.
=B3Locked in my desk sits my great-grandmother=B9s siddur [prayerbook],
published in Vienna in 1878. I had an appointment to meet with a book
conservator tomorrow [Wednesday] to have it properly preserved. Inside the
cover, my great-grandmother, then my grandmother, listed the births,
marriages, and deaths in our family from the death of my
great-great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather in 1893 through the
marriage of Uncle Charlie in1932 ...
=B3This siddur survived pogroms in Hungary, the journey to America, and three
generations. I won=B9t know if it survived today=B9s tragedy until I can get
back into my office, and I don=B9t know when that will be. Thank God I have a
scan of the writing inside the cover.

DAVID thought the siddur was lost forever.
One Liberty Plaza, immediately adjacent to the WTC, remained standing and,
in his Goldman Sachs office on the 33rd floor, David=B9s office credenza
remained intact, protecting the old brown prayerbook, which would be
returned to him erev Rosh Hashana.
Earlier, David had said that he had no words to describe the catastrophe
from which he narrowly escaped, =B3I now have no words to describe the miracl=
e
which has emerged from that same catastrophe. God willing, there are more
miracles to come, in the form of survivors who emerge from the debris.=B2
The siddur survived Hungarian pogroms. It survived the journey to America i=
n
1904. And it survived September 11. It is a survivor.

THE German-Hebrew siddur arrived in America in 1904 with David=B9s
great-grandmother Helen Kohn, who arrived with daughter Franziska (Fanny),
age 2. They travelled with $1 from Anina, (then Hungary, now Romania), via
Hamburg, Germany, on the Patricia to Ellis Island to join their husband and
father Aron Kohn on Morris Avenue, in New York.
Fanny (David=B9s grandmother) gave the siddur to her oldest daughter, Kay
Simon, who gave it to David. It records =AD in Hungarian =AD the births, deaths
and marriages from the death of Aron and Helen=B9s parents in 1893 and 1895
through the marriage of Uncle Charlie in 1932.
David plans on inscribing his story inside to add a literal page to its
history.


HIS family had been secular for so long that =B3everyone called this book the
family Bible,=B2 says David, who is the first observant Jew in four
generations on both sides of his family. When he received it, he realized i=
t
was a prayerbook, not a Bible.
=B3I davened from it on the day of my son=B9s bris,=B2 he says, and he brings it
each time he visits his Uncle Leo, who is sick, to say a prayer for good
health with him.
Fluent in Hebrew, both his undergraduate AB (Princeton 1990) and his MA
(Jewish Theological Seminary, NY 1994) are in Jewish Studies. He has lived
in Israel for a total of about three years on trips of from three to 15
months. He and his wife Yafitte have been married for seven years, are the
parents of a son and a daughter, and were last in Israel for a wedding at
Passover.
Always interested in his roots, David has tape recordings and notes of
interviews with his grandparents, great-aunts and uncles going back two
decades.=20

DAVID asked his grandmother and her generation where they came from in
Hungary, and no one knew.
One day, when his Alzheimer=B9s-stricken grandmother was 89 ... when she
didn=B9t know who David was ... when she called his father by her brother=B9s
name ... and asked where her husband was (dead for 20 years) ... David aske=
d
her once more where the family was from in Hungary. =B3She blurted out, clear
as day, =B3Resciza =AD R-E-S-C-I-Z-A. It=B9s near Temesvar =AD T-E-M-E-S-V-A-R. It
was a mining town in Hungary.=B2
He now has wedding pictures of her parents in Temesvar, (today Timisoara,
Romania); Resita (Resicabanya) is nearby. Great-grandmother Helen=B9s father,
Rabbi Philip Brauch, was supposedly the rabbi in Temesvar, but David has no=
t
yet been able to find a record of him.
=B3I have some 400 relatives in my family tree now,=B2 he says, of whom 99 are
direct descendents or married to direct descendents of Helen and Aron.
Today, 84 are alive.

DAVID=B9S great-grandparents on the other side, Leib and Ruchel Schwartz, wer=
e
clearly religious when they arrived in 1902 from Romania with their
children, Avraham (=B3my grandfather) and Itzchok. Like many
turn-of-the-century immigrants, says David, they worked to assimilate into
their new country, throwing off much of their Jewish identity in the
process.=20
Their children (=B3my grandfather=B9s generation=B2) married Jews and rarely went
to synagogue; their children (=B3my parent=B9s generation=B2) married Jews and
transmitted little beyond basic Jewish values; and their children (=B3my
generation=B2) entirely intermarried.
=B3Except me. I am the first observant Jew in four generations on both sides
of my family,=B2 he says. As an observant Jew, it troubled him for years that
his parents never gave him a Hebrew name and didn=B9t name him after anyone.
So as an adult, 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, the only safe day to visit the historic Grove Street Cemetery in
Newark was September 16  =AD there are plenty of police, and many older peopl=
e
go before the holidays to visit family graves.
=B3As a genealogist, I ventured out to see my great-grandparents on both side=
s
of the family to see what I could learn,=B2 says David. =B3As a Jew, I went to
pay appropriate respect before the holidays.=B2
=B3Imagine my surprise and joy to find Leib=B9s Hebrew name on his tombstone:
Leib ben Dovid.=20
In their efforts to assimilate, to give their son a nice American Jewish
name, unknown to anyone alive, after four generations, David=B9s parents gave
him the name of his great-great-grandfather.
=B3I will no longer say I was not named after anyone,=B2 says David. =B3God works
in mysterious ways.=B2


For a scan of the front cover inscription
(Hungarian)http://members.home.net/dbendory/siddur/cover.jpg
http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/s/i/m/David-E-Simon/index.html

----------------------------------------
YAEL please put this in a shaded box:
----------------------------------------
David, 33, was late for work on Sept. 11 because he had taken his car to be
serviced. He decided to make it a late day and go to his gym before going u=
p
to his office at Goldman Sachs where he is a vice president.
He had just finished a five-mile run when someone came in and told them to
turn on CNN, which had reported that a small plane had accidentally flown
into the WTC and it 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 acciden=
t
but a terrorist attack. =B3Self-preservation fight-or-flight kicked in,=B2 he
says. =B3I tried to call my wife to tell her I was coming home, but the phone=
s
were already dead.=B2
The gym was at the basement level so the cell phones weren=B9t working either=
.
He got dressed and headed out to the street to see hundreds of people
milling about. Two people from his floor said their building had been
evacuated and to report to another of the Goldman offices in the financial
district. Would 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 way across.=20
He also realized that being stuck in the financial district was not a good
idea. =B3I ran =AD literally =AD a mile to the ferry ... probably my fastest mile
ever, chanting tehillim (psalms) as I ran,=B2 says David, who passed thousand=
s
of people milling about aimlessly. =B3I 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.=B2
David reached the dock, saw an empty ferry pull out, waited for another one
to pull in. =B3I caught my breath, pulled out my siddur and continued to chan=
t
the psalms,=B2 as the crowd grew. The NY Mercantile Exchange closed and its
hundreds of employees and brokers joined those already at the dock.
=B3We all stood watching the WTC burn and I saw the images that haunted me fo=
r
days: people falling, jumping blown out,=B2 he recalls. =B3Debris was falling
... some of it was burning ... some of it wasn=B9t debris, it was people ...
plummeting through the air.=B2 David believes he saw a dozen people jump in
the few minutes he waited for the ferry, and he asks, =B3What goes through a
person=B9s mind in a 1000 F fire on the 100th floor with no way out?=B2
The crowd boarded the ferry, and David added tefillat ha-derech [prayer for
travellers] to the prayers he recited, as he stood in the crowd of 399 (the
ferry=B9s capacity) onboard, drenched in sweat from the run, from stress, fro=
m
panic.
Those who travel this route know there is a brief minute or two when the
ferry crosses the Hudson, when it passes behind the Statue of Liberty and
the Twin Towers are blocked from view. =B3We saw the Twin Towers standing,=B2
says David, =B3then 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 loud.=B2
The passengers didn=B9t know about the South Tower collapse until the ferry
docked in Hoboken. David got onto a train which quickly filled, and
continued chanting psalms.
=B3When I would pause here and there, everyone around me =AD Jew, Christian,
Indian (I couldn=B9t identify any Muslims on sight), black, white =AD nodded,
thanked me, told me it was beautiful, asked me to pray more. Everyone is
religious in a war.=B2
Some people on the train cried, some read news reports from a pager, one
person got a cell phone call through and we all gave our home numbers so th=
e
person on the land line could call home for us.=B2
=B3I finally arrived home at 11 am, two hours after I learned of the first
attack. =B3Fight or flight ceased, and I collapsed on the floor, hysterically
crying.=B2
David continued crying on and off all day, seeing the images of jumping
people passing before his eyes over and over. He played with his son, tosse=
d
his Barney up in the air and saw people falling. =B3Everyone I know called
that day ... people I hadn=B9t spoken to for months ... all our Israeli
family.=B2 A few nights later, during a thunderstorm, he awoke in a nightmare=
,
seeing the WTC explode again.
-----------------------------------
end of shaded box
___________________