9/11 Remembered

9/11 first responders left out of 10th anniversary event
By Claudine Zap


9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero
President Obama will be there. So will former president George W. Bush and former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani. And, of course, the current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, will attend.

But Sept. 11 first responders, the emergency workers who helped with the rescue and recovery efforts 10 years ago, will be denied entry to the 9/11 National Memorial on the 10th anniversary of the attacks.

The 90,000 or so firefighters, police officers, and civilian volunteers who rushed toward the burning twin towers are not invited to the ceremonies on Sept. 11.

Mayor Bloomberg confirmed that the day would be reserved for victims' families. "Family members only will be allowed to walk onto the plaza, look at their loved ones' names, look down into the voids," he said, referring to the reflecting pools in the footprints of the two towers. Bloomberg added, "The first day, it's reserved for those family members who lost somebody on 9/11."


And, in fact, first responders have never been officially invited to the events. But that doesn't make it right, says John Feal, founder of an advocacy group for first responders, many of whom are now battling cancer and other diseases. Feal, a first responder himself, told CNN, "The best of the best that this country offered 10 years ago are being neglected and denied their rightful place."

In fact, as construction of the 9/11 National Memorial continues, passes are required for those who wish to visit the site. The passes, which are free, are for a specified date and time.

When the online reservation system opened, the 5,000 passes for the opening date to the public, Sept. 12, were snapped up within an hour. Since then, the memorial foundation has made more slots available.


9/11 Memorial

 

Even when it overshadows, I think it's important to keep it in remembrance.

It's good that those men showed their support & received it from the community in return.

We had an ugly situation with an Iranian family that owned a local convenience store who were actually celebrating the attacks & the deaths of all of those people. They were very outspoken with their opinion that America got what it deserved. There were many American's around here who couldn't believe what they were hearing & many others who wanted to kill them for saying it. Of course it wasn't long before they went out of business & were run out of town.

Thank you for allowing us to share.

 

Pentagon, scarred by 9/11, adapts to new fight
APBy ROBERT BURNS

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Sept. 11 attacks transformed the Pentagon, ravaging the iconic building itself and setting the stage for two long and costly wars that reordered the way the American military fights.

Compared with a decade ago, the military is bigger, more closely connected to the CIA, more practiced at taking on terrorists and more respected by the American public. But its members also are growing weary from war, committing suicide at an alarming rate and training less for conventional warfare.

The partly gutted Pentagon was restored with remarkable speed after the hijacked American Airlines Boeing 757 slammed through its west side, setting the building ablaze and killing 184 people. But recovering from the strain of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan will take far longer — possibly decades.

The Pentagon's leaders will have to adjust to a new era of austerity after a decade in which the defense budget doubled, to nearly $700 billion this year.

The Army and Marine Corps in particular — both still heavily engaged in Afghanistan — will struggle to retrain, rearm and reinvigorate their badly stretched forces even as budgets begin to shrink. And the troops themselves face an uncertain future; many are scarred by the mental strains of battle, and some face transition to civilian life at a time of economic turmoil and high unemployment. The cost of veterans' care will march higher.

As Robert Gates put it shortly before he stepped down as defense secretary this summer, peace will bring its own problems.

The problem was not peace on 9/11. At the time, the military was focused almost entirely on external threats. Air defenses kept watch for planes and missiles that might strike from afar; there was little attention to the possibility that terrorists might hijack domestic airliners and use them as missiles.

That changed with the creation of U.S. Northern Command in 2002, which now shares responsibility for defending U.S. territory with the Homeland Security Department.

Terrorism was not a new challenge in 2001, but the scale of the 9/11 attacks prompted a shift in the U.S. mindset from defense to offense.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan on Oct. 7 in an unconventional military campaign that was coordinated with the CIA. That heralded one of the most profound effects of 9/11: a shift in the military's emphasis from fighting conventional army-on-army battles to executing more secretive, intelligence-driven hunts for shadowy terrorists. That shift was important, but it came gradually as the military services clung to their Cold War ways.

Still in debate is how the Taliban, which had shielded Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida figures prior to the U.S. invasion and was driven from Kabul within weeks, managed to make a comeback in the years after the U.S. shifted its main focus to Iraq in 2003. That setback in Afghanistan, coupled with the longer-than-expected fight in Iraq, showed the limits of post-9/11 U.S. military power.

It also pointed up one of the other key lessons of the past decade of war: It takes more than military muscle to win the peace. It takes the State Department, with its small army of diplomats and development specialists, and other government agencies working in partnership with the Pentagon.

The military grew larger over the past decade, but the growth was uneven. The Army expanded from about 480,000 in 2001 to 572,000 this year, and the Marine Corps grew from 172,000 to 200,000, although both are to begin scaling back shortly. The Air Force and Navy, by contrast, got smaller. The Air Force lost about 20,000 slots since 2001 and the Navy lost about 50,000.

In percentage terms, the biggest growth in the military has been in the secretive, elite units known as special operations forces. They surged to the forefront of the U.S. military's counter-terror campaign almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, helping rout the Taliban in late 2001 and culminating in May 2011 with the Navy SEAL team's raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan. And even though al-Qaida's global reach has been diminished, the increased role of special operations forces is likely to continue.

"It's the most interesting and important change that's likely to endure," Michael O'Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, said in an interview. "I haven't heard too many people suggest that we can scale back to where we used to be."

The Marines, who had never before fielded forces of this kind, now have 2,600 under U.S. Special Operations Command. The others include the SEALs, the Army Green Berets and Rangers and the Air Force special operators.

In all, those special operations forces grew from 45,600 in 2001 to 61,000 today, according to Special Operations Command.

A decade of war also has produced its military stars. Army Gen. David Petraeus served in command three times in Iraq and once in Afghanistan before accepting President Barack Obama's offer to succeed Leon Panetta as the next CIA director.

Former Iraq commander Army Gen. Raymond Odierno is about to become the Army's top general, and the current Army chief, Gen. Martin Dempsey, who served twice in command in Iraq, is due to replace Navy Adm. Mike Mullen as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The military as a whole is viewed more favorably by the American public. A Gallup poll in June found that the military is the most respected national institution, with 78 percent expressing great confidence in it. That is 11 points higher than its historical Gallup average dating to the early 1970s.

The new technological star is the drone aircraft, like the Predators that surveil the battlefield and fire missiles at discrete targets. Their popularity has spawned an effort to field unmanned aircraft to perform other missions, such as a long-range bomber and even heavy-lift helicopters.

 

Former investment banker returns to school to recover from 9/11 loss
By Jeff Girion

http://news.yahoo.com/former-investment-banker-returns-to-school-to-recover-from-9-11-loss-.html

The collapse of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, reverberated around the world, including one powerful tremor that spread 10 miles away to Brooklyn's Poly Prep Country Day School.

That day Poly Prep lost 10 alumni and one parent--a huge blow to a small school community. Headmaster David Harmon believes Sept. 11 may have been the most significant event for the school, which was founded in 1854.

Poly Prep has responded to tragedy before. The names of alumni who died in wars, beginning with the Civil War, are memorialized at the school. The 11 victims of Sept. 11 have joined them.

That tragic day, Harmon recalls, galvanized the Poly Prep community. It provided overnight shelter for students who couldn't return home to Manhattan because of the attacks.

The response of the school community also proved to be far deeper and longer-lasting.

One alumna, Lisa Della Pietra, who worked at an investment bank on Sept. 11, was drawn back to the school to raise money for the 9/11 Scholarship fund.

Lisa lost her brother, Joseph Della Pietra, another Poly Prep graduate, in the north tower.

"I started coming back to Poly a few days a week," says Lisa, who was devastated and depressed after her brother's death. "I felt such warmth I decided to stay on." Today, Lisa heads Poly Prep's alumni relations.

The memorial garden at Poly Prep.
In the year after Sept. 11, school administrator Robert Aberlin noticed the special character of the school's response. In partnership with PBS, Aberlin produced a documentary film titled, "One School Remembers." It features interviews with families and the school administration as they sought to give meaning to the lives lost.

The 9/11 Scholarship is awarded to candidates who have the personal qualities or interests of the 11 victims. Eleven scholarships are awarded each year.

And every fall, the school holds a brief, yet poignant, ceremony on or near the Sept. 11 date.

On the day of the ceremony, the students gather in the chapel, where photos of the lost Poly Prep "boys" hang in an alcove. Afterward, the students march silently to a memorial garden.
A student reads aloud the 11 names: Andrew A. Abate, Vincent P. Abate, Joseph Della Pietra, Terence Gazzani, Christopher Grady, Joseph Hasson III, Mark Hindy, Joseph Mascali, William R. Peterson, Lars P. Qualben, and Andrew Rosenblum.

"People remark about how we won't forget," notes Lisa Della Pietra. She believes the commitment to keeping the memory alive is extraordinary, particularly since many younger students will inevitably learn what happened on Sept. 11.

"Come back 10 years from now, come back 20 years from now, we'll still be doing it," Della Pietra says.

While any single educational lesson from Sept. 11 is difficult to pinpoint, headmaster Harmon thinks Poly Prep's response has become a powerful school tradition and fits with their mission.

"Our aim is to prepare students for a better world," Harmon says.

 

Surfer witnesses 9/11 attack
By Chris Moody


The view from Sandy Hook.
Ed Hewitt planned to surf all day. The weather reports for the New Jersey coastline called for a blue September sky, warm temperatures, and the right wind for near-perfect surfing conditions.

A 39-year-old watersports enthusiast, Ed woke up early on Sept. 11, 2001.

He would surf a spot called Sandy Hook, a lonely spit of sand on the north end of Gunnison Beach that points like a finger toward Brooklyn and Manhattan, which rise out of the water a few miles away. When conditions are just right, you can ride a wave at Sandy Hook for hundreds of yards with the Empire City skyline as your backdrop.

It was one of those days that promised long rides and clear skies, and Ed, a travel writer taking the day off, was stoked. He loaded a 9-foot surfboard into his white minivan and pulled out of his driveway in Kingston, New Jersey, for the hourlong drive.

In the van, he set his cell phone down in the cup holder and cranked up some tunes on the radio. Halfway into his drive along State Road 36, his phone buzzed. Probably best not to check in this traffic, he thought, and ignored the call as he flew toward the beach. The phone buzzed again, signaling a voicemail. Ed ignored it. He was in the zone and feeling good: The radio was blasting, and he could smell the coconut from the fresh wax on his board. In a few minutes, he'd be cruising down the face of a wave.

Ed Hewitt.
As he pulled into the nearly empty parking lot, he saw a plume of black smoke rising from Manhattan. He called up the voicemail on his phone. It was his wife, Lori. She sounded worried. Something happened in New York. There's a massive fire. The news says a plane crashed into the World Trade Center. It might have been an accident. No one knows anything yet. Be safe.

He pulled his board out of the van, slipped into a wetsuit and began the trek up the beach toward the point, where he joined a group of people watching the smoke. Suddenly, the black cloud turned white. They didn't know it at the time, but the white smoke was the ash and debris coming from the collapse of the South Tower.

"Everything that was in Manhattan changed color," he recalled later. "It was such a chilling thing to have watched."

Like most people throughout the country at that moment, Ed was unaware of the magnitude of the disaster. Fires are tragic, sure, but they happen all the time. Plane crashes are rare, but life goes on.

Ed felt uneasy, but he decided to hop into the water.

Holding the board under his arm, he stepped up to the shoreline, where the waves were crashing hard. He got a running start from the sand toward the water and plopped belly-first onto the board, paddling furiously. He maneuvered his board over and under the unforgiving waves, the water crisp with the coming of fall, and made it beyond the soup. Exhausted, Ed sat up on his board to catch his breath and realized he was alone. There was an uneasy silence as he looked toward the smoke. But there was little time to focus on that with the next set of waves marching directly toward him.

Ed caught the first wave, dropped in, and pulled off the lip for another one. He kept his eyes on the cloud of smoke, which continued to fill the morning sky.

He sat by himself, straddling his board as the nose bobbed in and out of the lonely water in front of him. The cloud grew larger, more menacing.

A few moments later, he watched as boats loaded with people came speeding in his direction from Manhattan. Hundreds of people were fleeing the island. Many were bloodied and injured.

"I'm sitting in the water and just watching this whole thing, and it really just piled up on me," he said.

In his mind, he saw the faces of his friends who lived in Manhattan. He thought of his wife, and he began to feel sick and anxious. What am I doing here? he thought.

He paddled toward the shore and caught a wave that deposited him on the sand. The crowd on the beach had gathered around a man with a radio. Everyone stood transfixed by the smoke coming from Manhattan.

Ed ran to his car, peeled off his wetsuit, threw the board into the van, and called his wife. Pulling onto the main road, he tried to keep his mind focused. On both sides of his van, drivers as shocked and horrified as he was sped past him.

"I remember trying to make sure that I didn't get killed," he said later. "I didn't feel myself, and I could tell that folks around me didn't feel themselves either. I didn't have my head on my shoulders, and I was very aware of it."

The world had changed in the short time since he'd tossed his surfboard into the van on that peaceful morning. Radio stations were no longer playing feel-good jams. Instead, he listened to news announcers tell the story as fast as they could gather the information, their own voices trembling over the airwaves. The World Trade Center had fallen. The Pentagon, in Washington, D.C., was on fire. A plane had gone down in Pennsylvania. Thousands could be dead. America had been attacked.

All this while Ed Hewitt sat alone in the ocean, watching it unfold.

Back in Kingston, he pulled the van into the driveway and ran into the house, where his wife was waiting for him.

"I got home and was very quickly put to work," he said.

His wife was a coach for a Princeton University rowing team, and she and Ed stayed connected to many of the rowers in the area through Row2k.com, which Ed had created for rowing enthusiasts. That morning, they started compiling a list of survivors in the local rowing community. Ed got on the phone, then blasted a mass email to rowers in the area and took down the names that could be accounted for.

Emails and phone calls poured in with stories of narrow escape from the buildings that went down. His closest friends, who worked in the World Trade Center, had made it out alive.

As the days passed, more rowers added their names to the list. But not everyone responded. Families continued to search, and emergency workers stayed up all night, searching for people trapped in the rubble.

"It was a very intense couple of weeks waiting for people to be alive," Ed said. But he kept at it and became the point of contact for rowers in the Northeast who were affected by the attacks.

In the end, Ed helped arrange the funerals of five rowers who never surfaced.

Looking back, it's not the surfing that Ed thinks about first. He thinks of the people he helped and the late nights he spent waiting to hear whether they made it out.

"We were working so hard to find people," he said. "That's the part that really sticks with me."

When the conditions are right, Sandy Hook still breaks, with gorgeous rollers that serve up epic rides along the point. But you won't find Ed Hewitt gliding across the water. He still likes to surf, but not there. Anywhere but there.

"The photos of it, I can't bear to look at them," he said. "There's no way I would go out to Gunnison Beach to go surfing."

Ed is nearly 50 now, and he's spending the 10th anniversary of the tragedy with his wife and their 4-year-old son, Connor. He's also organizing a memorial on Row2k.com.

And someday, when Connor is old enough, Ed may take his son to the place where he sat alone in the ocean and watched the world change.

 

I bet you were freaking out...thank God he was okay.

It's definitely strange & sad for them not to be there. It doesn't look like the same place anymore. Sometimes when I see the towers in movies or on TV, I get emotional. I always think of all of the lost people, & I say a prayer for their families. It sure doesn't feel like it's been almost 10 years since it happened.

 

Flight 93 National Memorial

 

Flight 93



Lorraine Bay, Flight Attendant logbook

 

Remembering Flight 93

 

Statue Made from a World Trade Center beam

 

Fire chief saved by 9/11 good deed, casts light on the fallen

Fire chief saved by 9/11 good deed, casts light on the fallen
By Thomas Kelley




When terrorists crashed jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the majority of survivors fled down countless flights of stairs seeking safety. As they descended, others amazingly went in the opposite direction, up into danger, floor after floor. They were the firefighters of New York City, and Jay Jonas was one of them.

Ten years after he miraculously survived the collapse of the North Tower, Jonas's feelings about 9/11 have changed very little. It still comes down to these words: "A remarkable day."

On that bright morning, Jonas was a captain for Ladder Company 6 in Chinatown. His engine arrived soon after the North Tower was hit by the first plane.

"While we were standing there, we saw a large black shadow on the ground outside and we heard a loud boom," says Jonas, now a deputy fire chief. "We could see flaming pieces of debris falling. And that was the second plane hitting the South Tower."

After receiving orders, the firefighters went into the first tower, running up 27 floors. "We stopped to catch our breath and get a drink of water," he recalls. "And we felt an experience, something nobody had ever experienced before. Our building began to sway back and forth, and it started to shake. The lights went out for 30 seconds, and then they came back on."



Jonas quickly conferred with another captain, Billy Burke of Engine 21. They split up and went to different ends of the floor to see what had happened. Burke returned to tell him that the South Tower was gone. That would be the last time Jonas would talk to Burke, who would be killed shortly after.

"I knew what that meant," Jonas says. "The sister building to the one I was in has just collapsed and my building got hit sooner. So I just started thinking we're not going to make it out alive."

With time running out, they headed back down the stairs. But around the 20th floor they saw a woman standing in the doorway. Her name was Josephine Harris, a bookkeeper for the Port Authority who had been injured in a pedestrian-car accident two weeks earlier. She had made it down from the 73rd floor but couldn't go any farther. She was crying and couldn't walk.

"One of my guys, Tommy Falco, turned around and looked at me, says, 'Hey Cap, what do you want to do with her?'" Jonas recounts, before a long pause, stressing his words. "Keeping in mind that every fiber in my being was telling me we've got to get out of this building, we've got to get out if people are going to live. But I looked at her and I said, 'Well, all right, let's take her with us.'"

So they hoisted Harris onto their shoulders and continued their descent, which was now greatly slowed. People scrambled past them. A couple of times they had to stand aside to let others pass. When they made it to the fourth floor, Harris was in excruciating pain. She dropped to her feet and begged them to abandon her. "She couldn't go on anymore," Jonas says with a sigh of fondness. "We weren't going to leave her."



Jonas went into the fourth floor frantically searching for a chair or other support to carry Harris, but he couldn't find anything. Just as he returned, the building started to fall. He dived for the stairwell.

"The collapse was compressing the air in the building, and it created tornado-like winds," he says. The rushing air was so strong it blew one of his firefighters down two flights of stairs. "All this debris was pelting us, like you're getting punched a hundred different ways at the same time. The noise was incredible. It was a combination of noises, the loud sound of screeching steel."

The "pancake" collapse was heading toward them, crushing each floor as it got closer and closer. "You just cover up and you wait for the big beam or the big piece of concrete to come and get you," he says. "But for us it didn't come."

Encased in rubble and debris, somehow Jonas, Harris, and his crew were alive. Joining them in the twisted stairwell were a few other firefighters and a Port Authority police officer. Banged up and trapped in darkness, they tried to find a way out. They heard distress calls on their radios. One firefighter said he was on the 12th floor, but they learned later that the 12th floor had been wiped out. He didn't make it. They answered the mayday from a fire chief who was lost in the immense destruction, but they couldn't reach him. They talked to him before he went into shock and passed away.

For about 3 1/2 hours they searched for an escape from the fourth floor. They could only get to the half landing between what had been the fifth and sixth floors. Then the smoke and dust began to clear.

"All of a sudden we saw a beam of light hit the stairway," Jonas says. "We were in darkness, and we could hear fires crackling around us and things like that. And I just said, 'Hey guys, there used to be 106 floors over our heads. Now I see sunshine. I think we're on top of the World Trade Center.'"

Emerging from the fourth floor, they saw the sky above them where the towers once stood. They spotted firefighters who came to their aid, helping them climb out with rope. Jonas and his men walked Harris to the rescue teams. Then they made their way across the debris field. Fires were still erupting. A Secret Service ammunition depot at No. 6 World Trade Center ignited with live rounds as they crawled past.

After climbing 30 feet to safety from caved-in subways and subcellars, a few went to the hospital while others headed home to their families to recover. Jonas and his men realized later that Harris saved their lives too. The slower timing of their descent meant they were not in the North Tower lobby when it collapsed, where many perished. They called her their “guardian angel.”

Since 9/11, the group would gather several times a year, including Harris. "Whenever we got together we invited her," Jonas says. "We became close. We all bonded because of what happened. It was a shared experience."

Sadly, in mid-January, Harris died of a heart attack. She was 69 and at home alone. When Jonas and his men found out, they tried to help collect money to pay for her funeral. After a Greenwich Village funeral director read about her death in The New York Times, he offered to pay for her ceremony and burial. Jonas and his men carried her casket at St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani also attended.

"She was a very private person, very off to herself," Jonas says of his friend. "But she was very appreciative of what we did for her and how we continued to protect her and her privacy."

Today, Jonas takes a humble and sober view of 9/11. He notes that it was eight years between the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center and the terrorist attacks of 2001. He worries Osama bin Laden could be replaced by equally bad men.

"These people, they're serious people," he warns. "They could come back. The more we let our guard down, the greater the chances are they will come back. I am fearful of that. As time goes by people will forget, and that's what they thrive on."

On 9/11, 343 firefighters and 60 police officers died. After the terrorists flew planes into the buildings to kill as many people as they could, first responders rushed in to save those same civilians, sacrificing everything for people they'd never met.

"On September 11th, I had 22 years on the fire department," Jonas says. "I was never so proud to be a fireman as I was on that day."

Jonas now works in the Bronx, assigned to FDNY Division 7. He was recently near Ground Zero, a location he has mostly avoided the past 10 years. "I could see the footprints of the old buildings," he says. "It looks nice. I'm anxious to see what the museum looks like and things like that. But it looks completely different."

All of his crew members stayed in the fire department after 9/11, something that made Jonas very proud. A few have since retired. Two are now lieutenants. Only one is still at Ladder Company 6.

"The outpouring of assistance and love for the people who were affected by September 11 is still remarkable to me to this day," he reflects. "I will never forget that. People are still moved by the events of that day, which is nice to see. But there's a lot of stories that will never get out, because those stories died with the collapse. There's a lot of great firemen that were doing tremendous things that day, that the world will never know."

 

:smt023

 

5-year-old behind 9/11 charity grows up, speaks out
By Piper Weiss


Evan and his family after 9/11.


Evan now.

Evan Parness was only 3 years old on Sept. 11, 2001, and he started that day like he had many others: by watching "Sesame Street" with his little brother. Then the news interrupted, showing footage of planes; a worried call came in from a family friend; and Evan, his parents, and their neighbors soon rushed to the roof of their building and looked downtown, toward the plumes of smoke.

"I still remember that to this day," says Evan, who's now almost 13. "I thought there was a fire downtown. I was ignorant to what actually happened."

In the days that followed, firefighters and volunteer aid workers from around the country flooded to Ground Zero to offer relief to New Yorkers in mourning. Evan's father, Jeff, had lost a close friend and business partner in the World Trade Center attacks. For Evan, the outpouring of kindness from total strangers was a bright spot in the city's darkest hours -- one that he and his dad would not forget.

Two years later, Evan, then 5, was fighting with his 3-year-old brother, Josh, about who deserved a new stuffed bear their dad had given them to share. When the argument subsided, Evan sat down with his dad to watch news reports of wildfires in Southern California. "There was this little girl on the news, and her house got burned down -- her whole house wasn't there," says Evan, still sounding shocked by the realization. "I was thinking, 'That girl has nothing and we're fighting over this stupid toy. Why do we even need it?'"

Evan offered to donate his own toys, which only moments before had seemed so important to him, to the young victims of the wildfires. Maybe it was a flicker of the memory of so many people coming from across the country to help New York City right after Sept. 11 that made Evan do it. For Jeff, it was more than a flicker. It was his way of returning a huge favor. A former venture capitalist with a knee-jerk impulse to think big, he enlisted New Yorkers around the city to join in the donations. Four days and almost 100 volunteers later, Jeff was driving a U-Haul truck across the country with a special delivery for victims of the California wildfires. Across the side of the truck he placed a banner that read, "New York Says Thank You."

Eight years later, New York Says Thank You is a volunteer organization 7,000 people strong, offering aid to disaster-stricken communities throughout the country. In a pay-it-forward model, each community NYSTY helps has the chance to return the favor by volunteering in relief efforts for the next community in need.


In 2004, Jeff returned to San Diego with 14 New York volunteers in tow to help rebuild homes that were lost in the fires. In 2005, he recruited 30 New Yorkers and several Californians he met the year before, to help rebuild homes for families in the tornado-stricken town of Utica, Illinois.

Since its inception, the organization has restored homes and shelters in more than 10 struggling communities and spawned an additional community-driven campaign to restore and showcase a tattered flag that flew over the wreckage at Ground Zero in 2001.

As director, Jeff leads the fund-raising and volunteer-organizing efforts for NYSTY's annual rebuilding projects. His family members -- wife Sandy (who's an attorney), Evan, and Josh -- all join the retreats, which are usually set in the two to eight weeks leading up to Sept. 11.


In July, they headed to Ellijay, Georgia, to rebuild a rescue shelter for farm animals; it had been torn apart by a tornado. "Josh is now chairman of the children's building committee, teaching other kids on the trip how to use the tools," Jeff says. "He's been using power tools now since he was 5."

Evan, however, has maintained his role as chief inspiration. He has been interviewed by news channels, had a street named after him in a California town, and was featured in a documentary about the organization that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April.

But for Evan, who seems to understand the gravity of suffering well beyond his years, the work is the real payoff. In 2006, he joined his dad and 600 other volunteers to rebuild a chapel destroyed by a twister in DeGonia Springs, Indiana. Last year, they corralled more than 1,000 people to help rebuild homes in Mena, Arkansas, after a tornado ripped through the town. He's held lemonade stands to raise money for supplies and recruited close friends for weeklong rebuilding projects. On one trip to Slidell, Louisiana, after Hurricane Katrina hit, he helped rebuild a home for a 6-year-old boy with leukemia. "I met him a few times, and I felt really sad for him," says Evan, his voice growing quiet.


On the 10-year anniversary of Sept. 11, Evan, Jeff, and a team of NYSTY volunteers will head to tornado-ravaged Joplin, Missouri, with a unique gift. They'll plant 3,000 Stars of Hope, hand-painted wooden stars emblazoned with messages of encouragement from fellow disaster-stricken survivors in other communities. The stars are meant to add color and spirit to the areas that were hit the hardest.

For Evan, September marks another milestone: his bar mitzvah. He's focused his studies for the Jewish rite of passage on the mistakes of the past and how to learn from them. "If there's another genocide in the world, we have to speak up," Evan says. There's an urgency verging on frustration that lights up his voice.

It's an unexpectedly mature response from a 12-year-old who has just been asked about his birthday. But Evan's natural empathy, nurtured by eight years of helping disaster-stricken kids his own age, has set him apart from many of his classmates. "Some get it, and some don't," he says. "But my best friends appreciate [the organization]. I have one friend who comes on our trip every year."

While Jeff hopes to keep New York Says Thank You going for another 10 years, Evan doesn't plan on taking over as director. When he grows up, he wants to be an archeologist or maybe an architect. When asked if building homes has inspired his interest in architecture, he pauses for a minute to consider it. No, he says, and redirects his answer to a larger, more important question -- the one he should have been asked. "I think what's changed me after 9/11," says Evan, "is just knowing there is always hope, and people out there who care for you."

 

9/11 Memorials Around the Country

 

9/11 Memorials Around the Country

 

9/11 Memorials Around the Country

 

Brother's Loss on 9/11 Sparks National Day of Service and Remembrance
By Jay Winuk


Glenn & Jay.


Glenn Winuk

Somehow, 10 years have come and gone since my brave younger brother was murdered by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001. The shock goes away, I guess, and some of the pain, perhaps, but not really -- especially as this historic milestone approaches.

Glenn was a partner at the law firm Holland & Knight at the time, located just a block from ground zero. A 20-year volunteer firefighter and EMT in our hometown of Jericho, N.Y., Glenn sprang into action when the towers were hit. He helped evacuate his colleagues, and then raced toward the south tower, running into the towering inferno to save lives. Glenn did what firefighters do, and what he had done for two decades.

Just 40 years old when he died, his partial remains were recovered in March 2002, medic bag by his side. A true American hero had perished, along with a horrifying number of others.


Glenn was a remarkable person, as giving a man as I have ever known. He always went out of his way for people, and not just as an attorney and firefighter. Taking care of others and doing good deeds just came naturally to him. It gave him great satisfaction. As brothers, we were very close. We attended the same college, shared many of the same friends and spent many happy times together. Losing Glenn, especially in this way, hurts every day.

How best to honor those lost and, for that matter, those who rose in service to get our nation back on its feet in the aftermath of the attacks? What could we do, many of us wondered then, to ensure they would not be forgotten by future generations?

My friend David Paine called me with an idea soon after the carnage. Let's make 9/11 a national day of service. Let's turn the tables, and make 9/11 about acts of kindness and charity and volunteerism in tribute to those who were killed. It sounded just right to me, and to each and every 9/11 family member we canvassed about it.

We founded the nonprofit MyGoodDeed in 2003, encouraging people to visit our website and register a pledge to honor the victims with acts of kindness toward others, each and every 9/11 anniversary. By 2009, millions of people had participated, helping individuals and communities in need with acts large and small.

That year, after years of lobbying on Capitol Hill by MyGoodDeed and the 9/11 community, President Barack Obama signed into law a measure passed by Congress, formally establishing September 11 as a National Day of Service and Remembrance. Last year, people from all 50 states and 165 nations and territories visited our website, their charitable actions a great and productive tribute, indeed, to the almost 3,000 souls from 93 nations who perished on 9/11.

This year, for the 10th anniversary, our mission is to make 9/11 the largest day of service in our nation's history. A lofty goal, but one surely in reach. This observance answers the oft-asked question - "What should I do on 9/11?" The answer for millions is clear and meaningful: Help someone in need. Give back. Pay tribute with steps of kindness on this path forward out of the ashes of ground zero, Shanksville, Pa., and the Pentagon.

So please join us this September 11. Be heroic. It's as easy as can be, just a few clicks away. Find something to do right in your own neighborhood or from your desktop by visiting our web site, www.911day.org, or our pages at www.facebook.com/911day and www.twitter.com/911day. You'll be making a difference, and the world will be better for it.

Jay S. Winuk is president of the public relations firm Winuk Communications, Inc. and the co-founder and vice president of the nonprofit MyGoodDeed, which successfully advocated for 9/11 to become a National Day of Service and Remembrance. His brother Glenn Winuk, an attorney and volunteer firefighter, died in the line of duty on September 11, 2001.