The Attacks of September 11
Some three thousand people were killed in New York; the world saw what Israel had long lived with, and an era changed.
On the morning of 23 Elul 5761, a week before Rosh Hashanah, four hijacked aircraft struck the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. About 2,977 people from more than ninety countries were killed. Several hundred were Jews; New York's Jewish organisations buried their dead for months.
For the Jewish world the event carried a double weight. First the human one: New York is the largest Jewish city on earth, and nearly every community lost someone. Second, it changed the conversation about terror. Until then Israeli attacks — buses, cafés, a discotheque — had been widely treated as a private conflict. After 11 September that changed.
A distinctive halachic problem arose over agunot, the wives of men whose bodies were never found. Rabbinical courts in New York, working with Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv in Jerusalem, developed a procedure that permitted these cases to be resolved on circumstantial evidence — security footage, phone calls from the towers, passenger lists. It was among the most demanding halachic efforts of the century, and it was done quickly so that no woman would be left bound for life.
In Israel, meanwhile, the Second Intifada was under way.