WASHINGTON — As he walked toward home, Dan Melman’s only thought was that he had to get as far away from the Pentagon as possible. Then he wondered why he hadn’t said the Sh’ma when he realized his life was in danger that morning.
Should he say it then, walking home? He asked himself: “Is it OK to say the Sh’ma if I don’t have a yarmulke on?” He gave himself permission to do so.
The Alexandria, Va., resident, a software development contractor, had been in his office when he learned that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center. Then he learned the second tower had been hit.
He found a streaming video of the event on the Internet, then heard a loud bang and the lights went out.
“I dove under my desk,” Melman, 55, said. “Someone grabbed my arm and said, ‘let’s get out here.'”
His office was pitch black and he had a hard time finding the doorway. He crawled around amid the debris until he was able to find a hallway.
He made his way to the Pentagon’s center court, wondering how other people he knew were faring. And he thought, “If two planes went into the World Trade Center, how do we know another plane won’t hit the Pentagon?”
He began his four-mile walk home, stopping first at his synagogue, Agudas Achim Congregation in Alexandria, since it was on his way and he was tired and thirsty.
From there, Melman called his parents in Florida; his daughter had already reached him on his cell phone.
He came home to scores of e-mail and phone messages from people who wanted to know if he was all right. That evening, the synagogue had an extended Ma’ariv service.
The congregation was wonderful, he said, with people coming up to him, hugging him and saying how glad they were to see him.
“Having been so close to so many people who died, I stopped shaving and am saying Kaddish everyday,” he said.
The first two days after the attack, Melman was numb. By Thursday morning, he found himself quivering.
“I’ve been sitting here off and on sobbing,” he said last week. “It’s a strange feeling.”
The day America was attacked was a long one for families and friends waiting to learn the fate of loved ones such as Melman.
For five hours, “I thought my husband was dead,” said Marlena Thompson of Falls Church, Va.
From reports, she was certain the plane hit near his office and that “somebody had murdered my husband.”
At 1 p.m., she finally heard from her husband, Steven Patrick Thompson, 58, an auditor at the Pentagon.
He came home after 3, describing how he and his colleagues had formed a human link to make their way through the black smoke. He cried for hours.
Many of his colleagues had died in the attack.
Marlena Thompson, a frequent book reviewer for Washington Jewish Week, said her husband has coped with cancer, a stroke and the difficulties of raising an autistic daughter. But in 20 years, she said, she’s never seen him so distraught.
“I feel like I’m in somebody else’s nightmare,” said Thompson, who has lived in both Israel and Northern Ireland. “I know that Jews don’t believe in evil incarnate, but this was evil incarnate.”.
The couple’s autistic daughter, 19, asks her, “Mommy, what’s an evil person?” Thompson wonders how to respond.
When Gilah Goldsmith told friends she was visiting Israel on a Reform movement mission this summer, they told her it was dangerous.
Now, the Arlington, Va., resident wonders if they’d tell her it was dangerous to go to work.
A personnel attorney at the Pentagon, Goldsmith was riding a shuttle bus to work on Tuesday, Sept. 11, when she learned of the attack on the World Trade Center.
When she got to her office sometime around 9, she phoned her daughter and heard “an incredible whomp noise.”
It didn’t seem so unusual since her office is situated near a narrow area where trucks sometimes come by and hit the wall.
Moments later, her husband called. He’d received a phone call from a friend in Cleveland, saying there had been an explosion at the Pentagon.
Goldsmith was told to evacuate.
“We saw a huge black cloud of smoke,” she said, saying it smelled like cordite, or gun smoke.
She left the building and eventually made her way home on foot.
“I was not at all fearful. There’s not a whole lot I can do,” she said, later noting, “I wasn’t frightened in Israel, I wasn’t frightened here.”
Risa Frank, a contractor at the Pentagon and retired Air Force officer, had just left the building for a meeting. She was driving in her car when she heard a radio report that the Pentagon had been hit. She looked in her rearview mirror and saw a pillar of black smoke.
From the first report, she thought her office in the Pentagon had been hit.
“I thought I had just escaped death,” said the Fairfax Station, Va., resident.
She later learned those initial reports had been erroneous, and her brush with death had not been as close as she thought.
For Frank, the treasurer at Temple Rodef Shalom in Falls Church, Va., the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center demonstrate why Israel has taken some of the actions for which it has been criticized, such as targeted assassinations and military strikes.
“We always got mad at the Israelis, saying they’re overreacting. They’re not overreacting, they’re reacting,” she said. The United States “has to react to the governments who harbor these criminals.”
The attacks constituted “a declaration of war,” she said. “We just have to find out who we’re fighting.”