For months after September 11, there was a bottle of Coke in my car that I could not bring myself to touch. People riding with me asked why I didn’t throw it away. I told them I couldn’t. It was the last thing I had from my friend.
I met him in 2001 at a business conference in New York, one of those events that runs over several weeks. At one of the breaks a young man came over and started talking with me. He could see I was an Orthodox Jew. Within minutes we discovered we were both from France, and we clicked immediately. He was observant himself, but in the way of many French Jews: nothing outward at the office, no yarmulke at work, but he went to shul to pray. He was so happy to have found an Orthodox Jewish friend in New York.
He had recently moved to America to build a new life. He didn’t have a car yet, so I drove him home after the sessions. Our friendship grew through those drives.
He had just started working at Cantor Fitzgerald in the World Trade Center. His wife was expecting their first child. They knew it was a boy, and we had already planned that I would perform his bris. He was so excited. They were building a future in America and preparing to become parents.
The last time I saw him was the night of September 10, 2001, driving him home. He left that bottle of Coke in my car.
The next morning, as the attacks unfolded, I knew immediately where he worked. I called his phone over and over. No answer. Then I called his wife. She was crying. He had managed to reach her from inside the building. There was heavy smoke, he told her. He was trapped with several others, and they were trying to find a way out. That was the last time she heard his voice.
Cantor Fitzgerald occupied floors 101 through 105 of the North Tower. It lost 658 people that day, more than any other company. My friend never came home.
In the days that followed, the chevra kadisha organizations were working to identify Jewish victims, so that they could be brought to a proper Jewish burial. Tzitzis could identify a man as a Jew. I was trying to help his wife through that process, and there was a question I could barely bring myself to ask her: had he been wearing tzitzis that morning?
He almost never wore them to work, she told me. But on that particular morning, he had them on.
Her answer has never left me. I cannot explain why that day was different. And as far as I know, he was never identified.
His wife went back to Paris, to her parents I believe, and we lost touch. Their son turns 25 this year. I never learned whether his bris ever happened.
Another man from France comes to mind when I think about those tzitzis. He was a successful Wall Street executive, originally from Paris, who had grown up with almost no Jewish education. He knew very little about Yiddishkeit, but he had always known he was Jewish.
Later in life, he began exploring his Jewish roots. When he learned that a Jewish male is meant to have a bris milah, he insisted on doing it immediately. I performed his adult bris.
I give adults reconnecting with Judaism several traditional items, including tzitzis, a siddur and a Chumash. This man was rushing straight back to his Manhattan office. He put the tzitzis on over his clothes.
I gently suggested that he might want to wear them under his shirt while walking through midtown. He answered immediately: “No. I’m proud to be Jewish. I want everyone to see that I’m Jewish.”
Two men from France. One had almost nothing of Judaism growing up and wanted the whole world to see his tzitzis. The other lived his Judaism quietly, the French way, nothing showing at the office, and wore his tzitzis, for a reason I will never know, on the last morning of his life.
People ask me what forty years as a mohel has taught me about the Jewish soul. I think of these two men. A person can carry his Jewishness where no one sees it, and it is there all the same. On the hardest day this city has ever known, it showed itself.
Rabbi Nechemia Markovits, M.B., is a certified mohel in Brooklyn, New York, and has served families since 1986.
