All Dov Blumenthal could think about on that sunny fall morning of September 11 2001 was that he was going to be late for work.

“I’d gone to Selichos and I was late getting back from shul” he says. Still single and in his middle 20s he was living with his parents in their Bedford Avenue home.

A typical yeshivah grad from Flatbush Dovy had attended Toras Emes Yeshiva of South Shore and Merkaz HaTorah before completing an accounting degree at Brooklyn College. After that he took a job working for the Commodities Exchange at the New York Board of Trade on the eighth floor of the World Trade Center. This was high stakes high-adrenaline work. “There were 18 different rings each dealing with a different commodity ” Dov explains. “You know those guys on the trading floor who are jumping up and screaming? That was me. I’d always wanted to do that.” 

Dov had a seat on the exchange and was in the coffee pit. He’d been there since 1997 and loved his job despite the fact that he doesn’t drink coffee and was the only frum person in that particular ring. Given the breakneck speed of the bidding and limited time slot of four hours it was crucial that he be there every morning before the bell went off at 8:45.

That morning he jumped on a Q train and made his usual switch to an N or R. Those lines usually took him directly to the World Trade Center — all he had to do was hop on an elevator right there in the station to get to his job in the North Tower. But then heard the conductor make some unintelligible announcement and the train sailed past World Trade to the following stop at Rector Street. He couldn’t have known that at 8:46 a.m. hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 had just crashed into the North Tower between floors 93-99.

By now Dov was really uptight; missing his stop meant he surely already missed the opening bell. He sprinted up the steps out of the train station; when he emerged the sky looked so dark he thought it must be raining. As he reached a corner across from the World Trade Center he heard a huge bang. Crossing the street he saw chaos: thousands of people running in panic. “I looked up and I saw this huge fireball atop the building ” he says. “I was about ten feet from the door I’d normally use to go in but I couldn’t get in because everyone else was running out.” It was 9:03. United Airlines flight 175 had just crashed into the South Tower.