Relatives cling to hope as survivors relive the terror

NEW YORK -- Tale after tale of courage and heroism are emerging from the wreckage of the worst terrorist attacks on American soil.

Take, for example, the story of Richard Allen Pearlman, who at the age of 18 was one of the tragedy's youngest heroes -- and victims.

Pearlman was dropping off a delivery from his employer to police headquarters in downtown New York, near City Hall.

He heard the explosion when a hijacked airplane hit the World Trade Center, saw the fire, and called his office to tell them he was running over to help, said Pearlman's sister, Lisa.

Pearlman had been a volunteer for the local ambulance crew since the age of 14, was trained in CPR and was a volunteer dispatcher on the weekends for Emergency Medical Services.

"He just felt it was his job to help people, so he was always helping people; that's just how he was," said Lisa Pearlman, 21, Richard's only sibling.

The Pearlmans haven't heard from Richard since, but the family still is clinging to hope. Richard's photo and key details are included on a flier plastered among hundreds of others outside the New York State Armory, a few miles from the twin towers.

Inside the armory -- off-limits to media -- the families of those missing under the wreckage of the World Trade Center are bringing any item that might carry DNA to identify their relatives.

Outside the armory, the mood is at once warm and chilling.

Volunteers roam the somber crowd, politely offering free sandwiches, bagels or granola bars.

But people don't have much appetite. The crowd is composed of relatives posting fliers of their missing loved ones on brick walls, telephone booths, mailboxes, even to a TV station truck. The television media churning out heart-rending interviews with these relatives. Ordinary New Yorkers, sharing their grief and solidarity, peruse each of the thousands of fliers as if they were at an art exhibit.

What's striking about the faces on the fliers is that they are a cross-section of New York, a cross-section of the world. They don't belong only to pinstriped lawyers and bond traders who worked in the Twin Tower. They are a rainbow of colors, of religions, of ethnicities, of nationalities.

Among them, when all is said and done, may be several hundred Jews.

Andrew Zucker, a 27-year-old lawyer working on the 85th floor of Tower No. 2, is listed on a flier near the armory site as 6-feet-1 and "stocky."

"The only reason I'm talking to the media is to get as much information out there as I can, to see if anyone remembers seeing him," his wife of four years, Erica, said by telephone.

In between the two explosions last week, Erica said, she called Andrew.

"He said, 'I'm OK, I'll call you back.' He was last seen in the stairwell" around the 70th floor, "and that was it."

"If anyone has seen him, just tell him that we love him and need for him to come home," she said.

As chaplain for the New York state Division of Parole, Rabbi Jay Rosenbaum has ministered to the families of victims in the armory and at hospitals.

The armory "is like walking into a house during shiva," said Rosenbaum, who also is a pulpit rabbi in Queens and executive vice president of the North American Boards of Rabbis. "They come with hope in their hearts, but they also come with the realization of what the worst may be."

For the Jewish families, their grief is coinciding with the High Holy Days.

For the survivors, the holidays have greater meaning.

Steven Shapiro, a Wall Street lawyer and a board member at Temple Israel of Jamaica, was arriving to work a little late Sept. 11 after voting in the New York City primary -- which was canceled soon after chaos broke out.

As Shapiro was about to ascend from the subway platform to street level, a hyperventilating man charged down the stairs, yelling that both towers had been hit by planes and were on fire.

Shapiro walked up the subway stairs and, with hundreds of other bystanders, gawked at the sight above. From a nearby office, he watched the towers fall

Shapiro expected that holiday sermons at his synagogue would focus on the attacks, causing him to "reflect on luck and fortune and our own mortality."

Suddenly choking with emotion, he said, "Whether it's fate, or luck, or whatever it is that finds you in a certain place at a certain time, there were people who woke up that morning going about their business like I did, and who found themselves in harm's way."

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