Return-Path: Delivered-To: alumni.princeton.edu%david90@alumni.princeton.edu Received: (cpmta 18396 invoked from network); 23 Sep 2001 06:11:14 -0700 Received: from OriginPrime.jpost.co.il (HELO jpost.co.il) (192.115.189.6) by smtp.c007.snv.cp.net (209.228.33.205) with SMTP; 23 Sep 2001 06:11:14 -0700 X-Received: 23 Sep 2001 13:11:14 GMT Received: (qmail 19722 invoked by uid 7794); 23 Sep 2001 12:23:53 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO ?172.16.8.1?) (172.16.8.1) by failsafe.jpost.co.il with SMTP; 23 Sep 2001 12:23:53 -0000 User-Agent: Microsoft-Outlook-Express-Macintosh-Edition/5.02.2022 Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2001 15:02:23 +0300 Subject: the story, rough cut From: Schelly Talalay Dardashti To: , DARDASHTI Schelly HOME Message-ID: Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: multipart/alternative; boundary="MS_Mac_OE_3084102143_1338354_MIME_Part" Status: U X-UIDL: O63fc9HkIc1H8gE > This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand this format, some or all of this message may not be legible. --MS_Mac_OE_3084102143_1338354_MIME_Part Content-type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable Dear David: Cut-and-pasted, here is a rough cut. I checked your genealogy page also. Am I correct in daughter and son? Also is Yafitt (sp?) Israeli? if so, where does her family live? Would you want your personal email in for people to write to you? If so, le= t me know. Won't put it in without permission. Story is at 50 inches which is upper limit for my page. so will have to do some smooshing (technical term for more judicious editing) to get in the text AND a picture. Will work/decide on picture tomorrow. Please let me know how you feel about it, also facts. Editor has to check it tomorrow as we also have another early deadline for the Oct. 5 issue (because of Succoth, printing on Monday instead of Wednesday night). Please copy to both home and office address so I will have it in both places. At the office we cannot open attachments, so cut-and-paste is best. Best regards, Schelly ---------------------------------------------------------------- =B3MY 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. After a week, it was retrieved and 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 ---------------------- YAEL, bold italic note above column box --------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------- end bold italic note ---------------------- ---------------------------------------- YAEL please put following section 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 ___________________ --MS_Mac_OE_3084102143_1338354_MIME_Part Content-type: text/html; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable the story, rough cut Dear David:
Cut-and-pasted, here is a rough cut. I checked your genealogy page also. Am= I correct in daughter and son? Also is Yafitt (sp?) Israeli? if so, where d= oes her family live?
Would you want your personal email in for people to write to you? If so, le= t me know. Won't put it in without permission.

Story is at 50 inches which is upper limit for my page. so will have to do = some smooshing (technical term for more judicious editing) to get in the tex= t AND a picture. Will work/decide on picture tomorrow.

Please let me know how you feel about it, also facts.
Editor has to check it tomorrow as we also have another early deadline for = the Oct. 5 issue (because of Succoth, printing on Monday instead of Wednesda= y night).

Please copy to both home and office address so I will have it in both place= s. At the office we cannot open attachments, so cut-and-paste is best.

Best regards,
Schelly

----------------------------------------------------------------


=B3MY world is still upside-down. My office is a wreck,=B2 says David Si= mon Bendory of New Jersey. =B3The windows were blown in by the shock wave from= the South Tower collapse. Everything is covered with dust and debris.=B2
When he finally got home to Livingston on  Tuesday, September 11, foll= owing 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], publish= ed in Vienna in 1878. I had an appointment to meet with a book conservator t= omorrow [Wednesday] to have it properly preserved. Inside the cover, my grea= t-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 ba= ck into my office, and I don=B9t know when that will be. Thank God I have a sc= an 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 remai= ned intact, protecting the old brown prayerbook. After a week, it was retrie= ved and returned to him erev Rosh Hashana.
Earlier, David had said that he had no words to describe the catastrophe fr= om which he narrowly escaped, =B3I now have no words to describe the miracle w= hich has emerged from that same catastrophe. God willing, there are more mir= acles 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 gre= at-grandmother Helen Kohn, who arrived with daughter Franziska (Fanny), age = 2. They travelled with $1 from Anina, (then Hungary, now Romania), via Hambu= rg, Germany, on the Patricia to Ellis Island to join their husband and fathe= r Aron Kohn on Morris Avenue, in New York.
Fanny (David=B9s grandmother) gave the siddur to her oldest daughter, Kay Sim= on, 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 throu= gh the marriage of Uncle Charlie in 1932.
David plans on inscribing his story inside to add a literal page to its his= tory.

HIS family had been secular for so long that =B3everyone called this b= ook the family Bible,=B2 says David, who is the first observant Jew in four ge= nerations on both sides of his family. When he received it, he realized it w= as 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 hea= lth with him.
Fluent in Hebrew, both his undergraduate AB (Princeton 1990) and his MA (Je= wish Theological Seminary, NY 1994) are in Jewish Studies. He has lived in I= srael 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 o= f 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 inte= rviews with his grandparents, great-aunts and uncles going back two decades.=

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 asked her o= nce more where the family was from in Hungary. =B3She blurted out, clear as da= y, =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, R= omania); Resita (Resicabanya) is nearby. Great-grandmother Helen=B9s father, R= abbi Philip Brauch, was supposedly the rabbi in Temesvar, but David has not = 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 Schwar= tz, were clearly religious when they arrived in 1902 from Romania with their= children, Avraham (=B3my grandfather) and Itzchok. Like many turn-of-the-cent= ury immigrants, says David, they worked to assimilate into their new country= , throwing off much of their Jewish identity in the process.
Their children (=B3my grandfather=B9s generation=B2) married Jews and rarely went= to synagogue; their children (=B3my parent=B9s generation=B2) married Jews and tr= ansmitted little beyond basic Jewish values; and their children (=B3my generat= ion=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. S= o 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 = people 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: L= eib ben Dovid.
In their efforts to assimilate, to give their son a nice American Jewish na= me, unknown to anyone alive, after four generations, David=B9s parents gave hi= m 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

----------------------
YAEL, bold italic note above column box
---------------------------------------
For a scan of the front cover inscription (Hungarian)http://members.home.ne= t/dbendory/siddur/cover.jpg
http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/s/i/m/David-E-Simon/index.html <= BR> ----------------------
end bold italic note
----------------------


----------------------------------------
YAEL please put following section 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 in= to the WTC and it was on fire. He called his wife and said there was an acci= dent, 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 phones= 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 milli= ng about. Two people from his floor said their building had been evacuated a= nd to report to another of the Goldman offices in the financial district. Wo= uld 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 acros= s.
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 thousands= of people milling about aimlessly. =B3I put my cell phone on autodial to my w= ife. 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 ... p= lummeting 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 pers= on=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 fe= rry 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 D= avid, =B3then passed behind Lady Liberty. We emerged to see one tower and enou= gh smoke to obscure the area where the second tower should have been. We hea= rd nothing, the ferry was too loud.=B2
The passengers didn=B9t know about the South Tower collapse until the ferry d= ocked 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, In= dian (I couldn=B9t identify any Muslims on sight), black, white =AD nodded, than= ked me, told me it was beautiful, asked me to pray more. Everyone is religio= us in a war.=B2
Some people on the train cried, some read news reports from a pager, one pe= rson got a cell phone call through and we all gave our home numbers so the p= erson 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 at= tack. =B3Fight or flight ceased, and I collapsed on the floor, hysterically cr= ying.=B2
David continued crying on and off all day, seeing the images of jumping peo= ple passing before his eyes over and over. He played with his son, tossed hi= s 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
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