S.F. rabbi aids New York wounded, takes long road home

Walking out of Hebrew Union College's New York campus, Rabbi Martin Weiner watched the smoke billowing out of the World Trade Center. Shortly thereafter, he decided he "didn't want to sit around and watch TV."

Weiner, the senior rabbi at San Francisco's Reform Congregation Sherith Israel, motored over to nearby Beth Israel Hospital to do whatever he could to comfort the injured in the aftermath of two terrorist attacks. And though he managed to aid several traumatized patients, he wished there had been more to help.

"The sad thing is, quite frankly, while there were a few people overcome by smoke or minor injuries, the world-class trauma teams that had come down from Columbia [Hospital] were standing around," recalled Weiner, the president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, in New York for a meeting of Reform leaders.

"Our thought was Beth Israel isn't a major trauma center, so we guessed everyone went to NYU or Bellevue. So we went up there to see if we could help. When we found nobody there either, we thought they'd gone to St. Vincent's. But on a bus going uptown, the guy sitting next to me was a doctor from St. Vincent's. I had an awful, sinking feeling when he said, 'We didn't have anybody either.'

"It confirmed my worst fear, which was that everybody died and perished from either the fire or the building collapsing with maybe only a few hundred getting out."

Weiner talked with those fortunate enough to make it to the emergency rooms, many of whom he described as being in a state of shock. A New York policeman calmly described the towers collapsing above him, killing his fellow police officers and firefighters and crushing buses set up as emergency medical treatment centers.

"I know of post-traumatic stress disorder in principle, but I'd never really seen it," recalled Weiner. "Imagine what it's like to see hundreds of your colleagues destroyed in a single second."

When Weiner could, he did more.

A Vietnamese man who escaped the towers desperately wanted to contact his pregnant wife and tell her he was all right. So Weiner got the wife's phone number at work and went off to make the call. Unfortunately, the man was so shaken up that he gave the rabbi the wrong number.

"So I phoned another media company in Nassau County, not the media company where the woman worked, and asked the man who picked up the phone to go online and get the phone number," said Weiner. "I felt so relieved when I could reach the man's wife. He was relieved too. It was one of the few good things I could do."

After commandeering a phone, Weiner was also able to reach the family of a distraught, soot-covered woman named Sonia, informing them of her safety and discovering that Sonia's son, Frank, had escaped from his office in the World Trade Center. Later, Weiner coincidentally ran into Frank in the emergency room and led him to his mother.

Weiner's escape from New York turned out to be no easy task. His United Airlines flight out of Newark -- for over an hour, Weiner's family worried he had been on the ill-fated United Flight 93 -- was canceled, as were all flights. His zig-zagging trek back to his wife's arms in San Francisco took the better part of three days.

The day after the attack, the rabbi hopped aboard an afternoon train to Chicago, renting a car when he reached the Windy City 20 hours later. He drove 500 miles through the night to Omaha, Neb. From there, he managed to book a flight, "thanks to a very friendly travel agent in Denver," landing in Phoenix, Ariz., before catching a connector to San Jose on Friday.

Weiner recounted many of his experiences in his Rosh Hashanah sermon and a speech during Monday's San Francisco Day of Remembrance service at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, where he and others, including Gov. Gray Davis and former Secretary of State George Shultz, addressed a crowd of several thousand.

In both speeches, Weiner likened the attackers of New York and Washington, D.C. to those who are "killing people on the streets of Jerusalem." He also accused Yasser Arafat of conspiring with Hamas and Hezbollah, which are tied to Osama bin Laden.

"That was something I gave a lot of thought to, the phrasing of this in the setting of this Day of Remembrance," he said. "It's very important that I said what I said to the community Monday. Some of them may not have been happy about it, but I think they understand what I wanted to say."

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