A learning moment for the young
9/11 history lesson for JEC students focuses on unity
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JEC Yeshiva principal Rabbi Shlomo Schwartz discussed 9/11 with his students, challenging them to think of ways to be kind and helpful to one another.
Photos by Elaine Durbach
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September 16, 2009
The Jewish Educational Center Yeshiva in Elizabeth marked the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with a focus not on the horrors of the day, but on the extraordinary coming together in the country that followed.
“When something so catastrophic happens, it has a way of bringing everyone together,” principal Rabbi Shlomo Schwartz told students. “No matter whether Jew or Gentile, Democrat or Republican, what baseball team you root for, what part of the country you come from…many, many people went out of their way to help total strangers with acts of random kindness, gemilut hasadim.”
Students at JEC’s three schools paused Friday for a minute of silence at the time when the second of the Twin Towers came down, and then gathered for an assembly later. While the full impact of the horror could be tackled at the Rav Teitz Mesivta Academy and at Bruriah High School for Girls, with the younger pupils, Schwartz was more guarded.
Students from first to fifth grade classes were gathered in the lunch hall. Climbing up on a bench so he could be heard by everyone in the room, he said he wouldn’t go into the scary details of what happened, but told them, “The events that unfolded that day changed the entire world.”
It was appropriate, he said, that the commemoration comes just before Rosh Hashana, with the emphasis being placed on hesed, kindness. When people treat everyone with such kindness and generosity, no matter who they are, “it makes the world a more peaceful play to live in,” he said.
The students did some of their own research into the events of the day. Sapir Kent, 10, a fifth-grader, was asked to read her report to the gathering.
She described how six firefighters fought their way up to the 73rd floor of the North Tower. Struggling to help an elderly woman get out, they couldn’t get below the fourth floor. The building collapsed around them. Had they gotten to the ground floor, they would surely have been killed, she related. But the stretch of staircase that they were on, by some strange chance, was shielded by the wreckage and they and the woman survived.
Afterward she smiled as she said, “I was just reading about 9/11 on the Internet and I found that story.” Her telling left everyone — the lunchroom staff and the other students — also with smiles on their faces.
Schwartz told the children that human beings are not expected to answer all the questions that a tragedy like this raises. “Our job is to make the world a better place, and God will fill in all the other places,” he said.
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