While hundreds of hostages from the “Black September” hijacked planes in the Jordanian desert have recounted their stories of hope and salvation in the four decades since 1970 Yosef and Tzippy two children traveling alone owe their safety to two bochurim who hovered over them like hawks

For King Hussein of Jordan, September 1970 — Black September — meant the relief of squashing the Palestinian revolt that threatened the stability of his Hashemite monarchy. For the PLO and George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, it meant the shame of a failed revolution, thousands of Palestinian deaths, and the expulsion of the PLO and other militants to Lebanon. And for dozens of innocent hijacked hostages, it meant sitting for weeks in the hot Jordanian desert waiting for salvation.

It was Sunday, September 6 — 5 Elul — 1970, when terrorists from the PFLP went on a hijacking spree, running through the isles of four international aircraft brandishing guns and grenades and taking over the planes: TWA flight 741 from Frankfurt to New York originating in Tel Aviv, and Swissair flight 100 from Zurich to New York were diverted to Zarka, a hot, sandy, out-of-use military airfield in the Jordanian desert; Pan Am flight 93 from Amsterdam was diverted to Beirut and then to Cairo; El Al officials thwarted an attempted hijacking on their flight from Amsterdam; and three days later, the PFLP seized a British Overseas Airways Corporation flight in Bahrain and brought it down in Zarka as well. The PFLP, under the leadership of George Habash, claimed responsibility for the multiple hijackings.

Ten weeks before, Rabbi and Mrs. Yitzchak Trachtman of Chicago had escorted their ten-year-old son, Yosef, to the gate, putting him onto a TWA flight to Israel. It wasn’t easy sending a young kid halfway around the world alone, but Yosef earned it. Rabbi Trachtman, a yeshivah rebbi, wanted to encourage his son to learn, and paid him for every chapter of Tanach or Rambam he completed. With matching funds from his father (“Well, I think it was a little more than that,” Yosef Trachtman admits today), Yosef earned a summer trip to Israel. “Maybe we’ll get hijacked,” Yosef, an imaginative youngster, said to his parents as he was about to board the plane. In 1970, it seemed like every other week, some militant would hijack a plane to Cuba — a 727 was hijacked from Chicago to Cuba just the week before. Yosef never dreamed it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Two months later, as the two giant airplanes sat alone on that giant stretch of Jordanian sand known as Dawson Field and renamed Revolution Airport by the PFLP — really no more than parched mud flats hardened under the desert sun — the terrorists began collecting passports and interrogating passengers, especially those they identified as Jews. Among the passengers on the TWA plane were the venerated rosh yeshivah Rav Yitzchak Hutner of Yeshivas Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin and his wife zichronam l’vrachah, and yblch”t his only daughter Rebbetzin Bruria David of the BJJ seminary and her husband, Rav Yonasan David shlita, rosh yeshivah of Pachad Yitzchak in Jerusalem. Two of Rav Hutner’s young students, Yaakov Drillman and Meir Fund, were also on the flight. So were the Sephardic gedolim Chacham Rav Yosef and his brother Rav Avraham Harari-Raful of Brooklyn.

And a few rows back were two young kids traveling all alone, ten-year-old Yosef Trachtman and eight-year-old Tzipporah Moran, facing down a bunch of terrorists — the nightmare of every parent who sends their children on a plane by themselves. As soon as passengers realized the plane was being hijacked, Rav Hutner’s two talmidim moved from their own seats to sit next to the two unaccompanied children.

Eight-year-old Tzipporah was carrying documents from both the US and Israel. Yaakov Drillman was a young bochur at the time, but he knew that signs of Israeli citizenship would put the girl in danger, and so he took her Israeli documents, ripped them into tiny shreds, and swallowed them.

It wasn’t such a far-fetched thought. For among the documents that the hijackers discovered were precious handwritten manuscripts of seforim that Rav Yitzchak Hutner had painstakingly compiled over years. The terrorists confiscated the manuscripts, claiming they contained secret plans for espionage. Years of efforts to retrieve those manuscripts proved fruitless — they were probably incinerated when the planes were blown up. The terrorists also discovered in his possession documents relating to the purchase of two apartments in north Jerusalem, one for him and one for his daughter. The terrorists were enraged by his plans to buy apartments in territory that had been “stolen” from them. “It’s ours! It’s ours!” they shouted repeatedly.

It’s possible that this was why the terrorists decided to subject Rav Hutner to “special treatment” and removed him from the plane one day before the other Jewish passengers were taken off the aircraft, on Thursday night of that week, the evening of the tenth of Elul. As Rav Hutner was brought down from the plane, he assumed they were planning to kill him, and he shouted “Shema Yisrael!” on the steps. Rav Hutner was kept separate from the rest of the group and was only reunited with them after their second week in captivity.

Meanwhile, by the end of the week the terrorists had already released many women and children — none of them Jews — and transferred them to the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman. The hijackers were demanding the release of terrorists imprisoned in Switzerland and Germany, as well as thousands of terrorists imprisoned in Israel.

For a week, close to a hundred of the remaining Jewish captives lived and slept in the hot, stench-filled airplane cabins. On Friday night a group of men, including the yeshivah boys and rabbis, were removed from the plane, and the next day the rest of the hostages were moved — after which all the aircraft were ceremoniously blown up. Women and children were released and sent to Cyprus for their return home, but for the Jewish men and others, the ordeal was to last until the end of the month.

For years, Tzipporah thought about those anonymous bochurim who acted so heroically. Thirty years later, married to an IDF Air force officer, with a family of her own, and living in a Tel Aviv suburb, Tzipporah was listening to a popular call-in radio program where listeners could ask for assistance in locating lost relatives or friends. The program was credited with reuniting many family members separated in the Holocaust. Tzippy called into the program and related that she was among the airplane passengers who had been held prisoner in Zarka. She was only eight years old at the time and had been visiting her aunt in Israel; she was flying back to America alone. As soon as the plane was hijacked, two chareidi youths approached her and placed her under their charge.

“Most of the time I was not afraid, mostly because of the two young men who calmed me and the other boy down,” she reported on the airwaves, but didn’t know their names. Would anyone be able to track them down thirty years later? The following day, her request was published in the daily Yediot Achronot. And Mishpacha solved her mystery.

While putting together a story for the thirtieth anniversary of the hijacking in 2000, Mishpacha’s Hebrew edition contacted Rabbi Yosef Trachtman, the ten-year-old traveling alone on the flight, who had made aliyah and was living in Tzfas. Did he remember the girl? Certainly, he said. Her parents were family friends from Chicago and the two children were assigned to travel together on the same flight.

And the bochurim? They were none other than Rav Meir Fund, now rav of Beis Medrash Sheves Achim (the “Flatbush minyan”) and Rav Yaakov Drillman, rosh yeshivas Beis Yosef Novardok and former maggid shiur in Yeshivas Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin. Yosef Trachtman has remained close to Rav Drillman all these years.

The two rabbis were contacted and were happy to know they still had hero status after so many years. “I knew if I could conceal the little girl’s Israeli connection, it would be to her advantage, and we didn’t know what the terrorists were capable of doing,” Rav Drillman told Mishpacha when he was contacted after the radio program. “So I took her documents, ripped them into tiny shreds, and swallowed them, one after another.”

“I was a little girl, and I remember very little. I do remember that they took my passport, as well as an Israeli check that I had,” Tzipporah remembers more than four decades later. “The bochurim were removed from the plane on Friday night, and we were left there until the morning. So I never had a chance to thank them. It was fascinating learning who they were after all those years.”

How did an eight-year-old, all alone on a transatlantic flight, keep her emotional equilibrium while facing the possibility of execution by a band of terrorists? “I remember them going through the isles with guns, but I don’t think I felt like my life was in danger. I just thought they were really mean. They went through our luggage [a Swissair flight attendant later reported that the terrorists looted three million Swiss francs before blowing up the planes], and they took away my toys. I was devastated. How could they be so mean to a little girl and take away her toys? I think I was aware that the Jordanians were around, making sure the terrorists didn’t kill us.”

Tzipporah asserts that she has no residual trauma from the event, and says she was totally calm when she visited Jordan many years later as a tourist. “I called my father, and said, ‘Here I am in Jordan, and no one is holding a gun to me.’ But I honestly don’t think the event has ruled my life in any way. I think it’s because I was so young and really didn’t understand that my life was in danger. And those boys deflected the tension and protected us. I remember being really filthy, and worried that maybe we wouldn’t have any more food, or that I couldn’t use the bathroom because the toilets were all stopped up — but that we might be blown up? It was true, but I guess that’s the blessing of being a little kid — I don’t remember feeling that threat.”