Rabbi recalls her 9/11 terror

By Gary Rotto

SAN DIEGO – Ten years ago and 2,800 miles away, Rabbi Yael Ridberg emerged from a doctor’s office on East 33rd Street in Manhattan.  She peered downtown and could see smoke billowing into the sky -although the World Trade Center towers were 55 blocks away.  “You could see the smoke – it was impossible to miss and impossible to not smell.”

The day began innocently enough with Rabbi Ridberg headed to a doctor’s appointment and her husband, Mark, planning to attend a midday meeting at the World Trade Center with his cousin Paul.  “At 8:45 as I was running late, I heard on the news that there was some fire at the World Trade Center but I didn’t hear the whole story,” related Rabbi Ridberg.  At that point she suggested that her husband should call to learn if lunch were still on.  And off they went into the day.

Only when she reached her appointment, did she call her husband at the urgent prompting of the medical staff.
“You’re not going to believe this, but a huge airliner flew into the World Trade Center and the whole place is on fire,” stated her husband.  His major concern was that the subways were shut off and that she was stuck underground.

“We had four friends that worked at the World Trade Center.  So while I was at the doctor’s appointment Mark was spending time trying to account for all four of them.  Pretty quickly, we established that three of them were not at work that day.  But the best man at our wedding was at work – he worked at Sun Microsystems which was on the 26th floor of the South Tower,”  Rabbi Ridberg recalled..  Only after many hours had passed, did they
find out that their friend John had left the building.  “Miraculously he got out and witnessed some awful sights and walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to his sister’s house.”

With cell coverage cut off, she could not reach anyone.  At this point, the only way around Manhattan was to walk.  Some 35 blocks later, Rabbi Ridberg walked into her office at the West End Synagogue and spent the next
couple of hours trying to account for congregants who worked in and around the Financial District.   All of the
immediate congregants appeared safe.

“I stayed a while at the synagogue. The building is right next door to the Red Cross.  I offered to give blood, but at that time, they were asking for only ‘O negative’. So I registered as a clergy person available for counseling, available for whatever.  At that point, most people thought that many more people would survive – miraculously – than they did.”

After returning home from an interfaith prayer vigil that night, “I got a phone call from a family in my congregation who told me that their sister had worked in the North Tower on the 101st floor. They were pretty sure that she had died.” Hospitals had been searched, but she could not be found.

The next day, Rabbi Ridberg got a phone call from the Executive Director of the JCC who had several board members or members whose husbands were missing,  “Would I come and meet with the families?”  Describing the encounter with one family, Rabbi Ridberg recounted that ” I went to this apartment, a beautiful home of a young mother with two-year-old son. Her husband had called her and said ‘there’s a terrible fire and I don’t know what is going to happen.  I love you!’  She was absolutely beside herself.”

That night, on September 12th, her own West End Synagogue hosted a prayer vigil. On the enormous windows at the front of the congregation, signs were posted inviting the whole community and neighborhood. The sanctuary sat only 175 people but the outpouring of congregants, non-members and even people who were not Jewish packed and overwhelmed the congregation.  “It was an incredibly emotional, powerful evening.  My cantor and I created a service of song and reading and just reflection.  It was just important to be together,” Rabbi Ridberg recalled.

In immediacy of the day and subsequent days, posters of the missing were up all over the city.  “There was no
escaping the overwhelming excruciating experience of that day.  And the congregants whose sister was not
found had a decision to make. Rabbi Ridberg had to help this family begin the mourning and healing process.  But it was now between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

“When you really come to grip that the fact that there won’t be anything (finding any remains of the
deceased), that’s when you can have a funeral,” retells Rabbi Ridberg.    According to Jewish law, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur cancel Shiva, the traditional seven day Jewish period of mourning.  So whenever they occur, the
formal mourning period ends and does not resume.  “We wanted to have at least three full days of shiva, knowing that people would be coming (from outside of the area) and people would need to mourn.  We held
the funeral on the Monday before Yom Kippur, ” Rabbi Ridberg related.

In the aftermath of the day, other pastoral duties awaited.  But one called for a very personal decision.  “I was newly pregnant so on erev Kol Nidre when I was invited to go down to Ground Zero to do a prayer vigil at St. Paul’s church, I remember calling my doctor and asking if it was okay to go down there,”  as no one really knew what potentially was still hanging in the area at that site.  Rabbi Ridberg received the go ahead from her physician and participated in the service.

One of the most anticipated events for a rabbi is coordinating and leading the congregation through the Yamim Norahim – the Days of Awe, the days from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur, a time of tremendous introspection.  Rabbis prepared and polished their sermons for weeks in anticipation of the High Holidays. Only weeks before, Rabbi Ridberg had ascended from Junior Rabbi to Senior Rabbi at the West End Synagogue.  And now, she had decision – to stick to her original plans or to scrap the sermons and start over.  “I threw everything out … and just wrote from by heart about what I was experiencing.”  And she added, “I was a mourner, too.  And it was
reflected in the sermons that I wrote. It was very clear that I needed to say the things that I said more because I needed to hear them.  As much as anyone else needed to hear them.  If I’m not human, I have no business
being a rabbi.  If I can’t write a sermon or be a leader at a time of crisis in a way that I can also take care of
myself, then I would regret that.”

It takes time for a young rabbi to develop leadership skills and a unique style.  It takes time for a rabbi and a
congregation to build a bond, especially a pastoral bond.  But with the historic events of that September, Rabbi Ridberg built both. “It was totally transformational.”   Similarly, that period was transformational
for each of us in our own, individual way.

Today, Rabbi Yael Ridberg serves at the rabbi of Congregation Dor Hadash.  She, her husband and their four daughters live in La Jolla.

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Rotto is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at gary.rotto@sdjewishworld.com