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Former police chaplain Jacob Cohen still feels the pain

By Ed Goldman

Twenty-three years ago today, a tragedy so appalling that all it takes are its month and day to identify it, claimed the lives of more than 3,000 people and changed the lives of uncountable others. It remains a sad irony that 911 is also the combination of numbers we dial in emergencies, though we never say, “Call nine-eleven.”  We say, “Call nine-one-one.”

Twelve years ago I interviewed Folsom-based then-Chaplain Jacob Cohen, who’d been seven miles from the World Trade Center towers when they were brought down. He and his wife Stephanie Rivera Cohen—they’ve now been married 39 years—had been visiting family when Jacob says he heard a plane fly over “very loud and very low. I actually thought it might be a commercial flight making an emergency landing at La Guardia Airport. I said a quick prayer that if the plane was in trouble it wasn’t a commercial jet crammed with people.” 

As I wrote in my Sacramento Business Journal column on August 8, 2012, Cohen “was stretching out on a sofa when Stephanie ran into the room and told him to turn on the television.” The first of the Twin Towers had been rammed by the plane he’d just heard.

The approach of 9/11/2024 prompted me to call Cohen, hoping he was at the same phone number and remembered our chat of more than a decade before. Not only did he greet me warmly in his distinctive New York accent, he also said he’d actually been thinking of contacting me this year. “I’ve just been thinking a lot about everything,” he said.

We meet for lunch at The Sutter Club, the historic Sacramento landmark whose understated lunchtime ambiance allows for candor and camaraderie, both of which were high on our agenda. “Every year around mid-to-late-summer I get anxious,” he says. “It’s been long enough now that I don’t immediately think about nine-eleven but as soon as I glance at a calendar, things start flooding back.” Asked if he thinks it’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, he says, “Oh, yeah, of course. Big-time.” In fact, he volunteers that he’s been in therapy to deal with it, on and off over the years.

In 2001, Cohen, then a police chaplain who counseled cops and crime victims, not inmates, went to the rubble of the Trade Center to do what he could to help survivors and families. But because he’d neglected to take his chaplaincy ID with him on vacation, it took him several days before he was allowed to minister to people in police precincts and fire stations (to give you an idea of communications at the time, his credentials needed to be faxed to the New York authorities). “Every fire station, and I mean every single one I visited,” he told me in 2012, “had lost seven or 10 or more of their team.”

He says he’s still struck by the resiliency of those who, despite palpable grief and fear (as in, What’s going to happen next?), plunged into searching for survivors and identifying the bodies of victims, removing debris and shoring up shaky structures. As for his state of mind, he says he finally came to grips 13 years after nine-eleven with the fact that he could no longer function in a field that required him to constantly view the sometimes-tortured conclusions of human lives: crime, fire and accident victims. “I probably left the chaplaincy two years too late,” he says.

Cohen is tall, trim, bearded and could play Robert de Niro’s much younger brother (he’s 67; de Niro turned 81 last month). Despite the horrible things he’s seen, the heartbreaking stories he’s heard and the acrid things he’s smelled in his career, he’s a remarkably cheerful lunch companion, owing, I’m sure, to his abiding faith in God. He’s a Jew who believes that Jesus Christ was the messiah his (and my) people say they’ve been awaiting for centuries.