blinky- I hate made up stories like that one.
This story first reached the snopes.com inbox in June 2006. While it would be somewhat heartening to believe one of those otherwise fated to die on September 11 escaped being murdered by the terrorists who used commercial aircraft as weapons through his stubborn refusal to compromise his piety by leaving his tefillin behind, this tale does not seem to pass scrutiny.
At 8:14 a.m. on 11 September 2001, United Airlines Flight 175 left Boston’s Logan Airport for Los Angeles with 65 people aboard. Terrorists who were on that flight hijacked the plane and crashed it into the south tower of World Trade Center at 9:06 a.m.,18 minutes after American Airlines Flight 11 (with 92 people aboard) was flown into the north tower of World Trade Center at 8:48 a.m.
None of the news accounts or official investigations we’ve examined of the events of that day mention anyone’s insisting to be let off Flight 175 at the last moment (to retrieve religious items or for any other purpose) or suddenly exiting the plane after the doors had been closed. Also, accommodating a passenger who had changed his mind about flying would not merely have been a matter of letting that person off the plane even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, an exiting passenger’s checked luggage would have had to have been retrieved from the airplane’s cargo hold.
Moreover, even if a passenger on that plane had created a last-minute fuss, such an event doesn’t appear to be connectible to the flight’s delay in taking off. While Flight 175 was 16 minutes late getting airborne, finally taking off at 8:14 AM, it did push back from Gate 19 at Logan within a minute of its regularly scheduled departure time and therefore did not spend that 16-minute interval sitting at the gate. The intervening period before the plane’s eventual take-off was expended on the tarmac, presumably a result of routine tie-up in morning taxiing times. Once the flight had pushed back from the gate and entered traffic on the runways at Logan, it could not have disgorged a passenger, no matter how insistent he might have been, without returning to the gate. And United Flight 175 did not return to the gate it took to the air just as American Flight 11 was being hijacked.
The account of a pious Jew who disembarked from Flight 175 because he would not be parted from his sacred objects and by so doing delayed the second plane’s hitting the World Trade Center for 18 minutes, thereby giving countless others a chance to flee the south tower, is found in Even in the Darkest Moments, a 2002 collection of September 11 stories compiled by Zeev Breier. It appears in that anthology as “Beloved Mitzvah” by Rabbi Israel Feinhandler, a writer of many instructional books on marriage and child rearing who is described by The Weekly Parsha as a “Rabbi of a community in the Romema section of Jerusalem, a renowned posek, and a lecturer in various yeshivos and kollelim in Jerusalem.”
While the story appears to be more fable than truth, it perhaps more fairly should be regarded as an object lesson on the importance of maintaining one’s religious convictions even when it would be far more convenient to set them aside.
Barbara “soul survivor” Mikkelson