Approximately 200 Hatzolah medics responded to the World Trade Center attack.

We know Moishe Lederer’s name. We know Shlomo Zakheim’s. We know Michael Horen and Dr. Michael Guttenberg. We know Morris Faitelewicz survived his Ground Zero service and continued serving his community for another fourteen years.

But there were scores of others, and we now know that the effects of 9/11 followed some of them home.

Community reporting has explicitly stated that multiple Hatzolah members later died after aggressive cancers and respiratory diseases attributed to their service on the Pile, but no comprehensive public roster exists matching every Hatzolah member who served at Ground Zero with the illnesses and deaths that followed.

That means there may be widows and children who know names we do not, Hatzolah divisions that remember members whose stories have not been fully documented, and shuls where someone’s seat became empty years after 9/11 because of an illness connected to what entered his lungs that day.

 

Remembering Them

Twenty-five years have passed.

Children who lost parents have grown older than some of their parents were when they died. The skyline was rebuilt and the smoke disappeared, but the effects of 9/11 remain.

For some families, that meant an empty chair or a final phone call. For others, it was a husband who never came home, a father whose remains were never recovered, the white dust on a Hatzolah volunteer’s feet, a cancer diagnosis ten or fifteen years later, or the Tehillim recited at midnight beside remains that could not yet be identified.

Some of their names are known around the world.

Others are remembered mainly by a family, a shul, a Hatzolah division, or the people whose lives they once helped save.

There may still be names we have not found.

This year, a seventh moment of silence will become part of the official commemoration for those who survived September 11 but later died from 9/11-related illness and injury.

It formally acknowledges something their families have known for years: Some people escaped the towers and the Pile but later died because of what happened there.

Our responsibility is to remember not only how they died, but how they lived, what they did when others needed them, and what they left behind.