New York Jewish Week via JTA — “Today is the birthday of the world. It is also the end of shiva. Sept. 11 7.” That’s how Rabbi Joshua Hammerman of Temple Beth El in Stamford, Connecticut, began his Rosh Hashanah sermon on September 18, 2001 — 1 Tishrei 5762.

When I’d left New York City for Stamford the day before, Grand Central Terminal was covered in missing-person posters. All around were photos of those who went to work on a cloudless Tuesday morning and never made it home. Downtown, the fires at Ground Zero were still burning. They wouldn’t be fully extinguished for another three months.

While many of us had been sitting in front of the TV, rabbis were comforting grieving and fearful congregants and scrambling to rewrite their High Holiday sermons. Before 9/11, many of them had planned to speak about the violence that had engulfed Israel over the previous year. Just a month earlier, a Palestinian suicide bomber had blown himself up in a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem, killing 16 people and injuring more than 100. But then, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported at the time, attacks closer to home “forced an abrupt shift in tack and created new, pressing questions: How do you comfort a nation in mourning and bring in the New Year in the shadow of the worst terror attack in United States history? How do you discuss God, forgiveness and repentance in the face of evil?”

Rabbi Hammerman, who for more than three decades led the Conservative synagogue where my mother and stepfather are members, rewrote his Rosh Hashanah sermons that year. In his remarks, he acknowledged widespread fear but urged congregants to choose hope, to rise from shiva and begin the process of lifting themselves “up off the ash heap.” The crowd that day included many people who had been downtown on 9/11.

This year, the birthday of the world — as Rosh Hashanah is known — begins at sunset 25 years to the day after a series of coordinated attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and ushered in two decades of war overseas. September 11 25 years. 1 Tishrei 5787.

During these High Holidays, I’ll be sitting across the country from Stamford, at Temple Israel of Hollywood in Los Angeles, where I am a member. There, on Erev Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Michelle Missaghieh plans to reflect on the scope of 9/11 and the very personal ways it affected her family.

Ahead of this grim anniversary, I surveyed American rabbis about what they remember from 9/11 and the High Holidays that began just days later. Here’s what they told me. (The following oral histories have been lightly condensed and edited for length and clarity.)

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Rabbi Andy Bachman was on his way to a mikveh, or Jewish ritual bath, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. There, he was scheduled to officiate at the Jewish conversion of two New York University students. At the time, Bachman was the executive director of the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life at NYU. The center is situated about a mile and a half north of the World Trade Center site.

‘I found out about the attacks when I got out of the train at 72nd Street, and there was a kind of shock and hysteria. Then I went straight to the mikveh, worked on contacting my family, proceeding with the conversions and walking downtown to campus afterward in order to find missing students and start the process of setting up volunteers and humanitarian aid.

In the immediate days surrounding the attacks, we were delivering food and water to volunteers at Ground Zero, dealing with students having major breakdowns and helping maintain the social fabric of caring and safety. Rosh Hashanah followed soon after 9/11, and frankly I........

© The Times of Israel