We Remember - 9/11 Ten Years

110911 11th September 2011 Ten years on I was home, watching the television ten years ago, watching the surreal situation as it happened. I felt as if I were watching a movie, it couldn't be real, it surely couldn't be real................. please G-d don't let it be real. After several minutes of traumatised immobility I recognised the horrific reality of what I saw – I had two children on Manhattan. Where were they? Are they OK? Rachel lived on 13th and 1st and travelled each day to Brooklyn, Daniel should have been safely uptown at the hospital but he had Jury Duty and was right next to the Towers in the Court House. I was one of the lucky ones as 8 hours later I spoke to them through Kim in Canada. Thank G-d they were fine, shocked but alive. Rachel watched the whole thing from her office in Brooklyn. The pictures of people jumping, the last minutes of those trapped inside the symbols of Western success, hearing the brave fight of the passengers of another aeroplane that prevented even greater tragedy, taking the lives of those on board in a field in Pennsylvania; yet another hit the Pentagon, the heart of Americas security. Horror and disbelief gradually gave way to anger. Anger that people could take the life blood of a great nation by slaughtering 3,000 of her children in the name of god – not my G-d, He could never condone such hatred in His name. How? How could anyone be so possessed with vile hatred to take a planeload of ordinary people and turn that vehicle into a missile of mass destruction. To plan death. After a series of horrific terror attacks, in December 2001 NY Mayor Rudi Guiliani and Governor George Pataki came to Jerusalem, sharing a stage with their friend Mayor Ehud Olmert, to express their support and solidarity with the people of Israel and stood at Zion Square to light Chanuka candles on Ben Yehuda Street where days before teenagers were blown to pieces. We can never forget that statement of friendship and were so sad when it came to our turn to show you, America, our support for you in your time of need. I went to see my children a few days after the horrors of the eleventh of September, on the first foreign flight into JFK (El Al of course) I walked the streets, suffering the unbearable stench and dust that filled the air, listening to people talking. I searched to find the similarities and differences in the trauma suffered by New Yorkers and Jerusalemites as a result of the unbearable tragedy enforced upon us by an alien hatred and came to one conclusion, the only conclusion; Americas trauma was that of a violently raped virgin – Israels trauma is constant, that of an abused women, a daily occurrence that no-one cares to recognise. We recognise your pain, we share your pain, we honour your pain. Israel honours each and every one of the 2976 victims of that horrific, inhuman attack on America and on freedom at our memorial in the Jerusalem Hills http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRPYTiN5Oso America, Israel stands beside you and weeps with you for the lives taken. We mourn with the children who lost parents and the parents who will never have grandchildren. May the victims rest in peace and may their families and their nation know no more sorrow. We pray you can find solace among the mourners of Zion. G-d bless America