Jews Among Victims of Pan Am Crash; Several Missed Flight and Are Safe

Joseph Miller, treasurer of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, is not coming home from London.

Nor will his business associate, Jerry Weston, or Alex Lowenstein, Theodora Cohen, or Amy Shapiro, Syracuse University exchange students in London coming home for the holiday break.

Or Michael Bernstein, assistant deputy director at the Office of Special Investigations, who was returning from Vienna, where he was working on deportation of Nazi criminals.

They were among the 258 passengers and crew aboard Pan Am Flight 103 who were blown out of the sky over Scotland on Wednesday.

The names of two Israelis appeared on a passenger list released Wednesday by Pan American World Airways. They were D. Brownerbeer and D. Dornstein.

Nobody aboard the airliner survived.

Forty kosher meals were ordered for that flight, according to Rabbi Pinchas Stolper, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union.

The Jewish death toll could easily be higher than 40, since there were likely Jewish passengers who did not order kosher meals.

Stolper said he had spoken three times with British Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovitz, as well as to the rabbi of Gateshead, near the Scottish border, and the dayan of Glasgow, who sent men from their hevrei kadisha (burial societies) to try to retrieve Jewish bodies.

Stolper said they were also “working through the Senate, State Department and British government in order to achieve the release of bodies.”

AT LEAST THREE FROM SYRACUSE

The reason for the intensive effort to claim Jewish bodies for immediate burial is that “the British government is concerned it was a terror attack, is conducting an inquest and is speaking of a long period of delay, and that’s just untenable in Jewish law,” said Stolper.

“Those families cannot sit shiva, cannot begin the official mourning period and are placed in a situation of suspended animation,” he said.

Miller, 56, a resident of Woodmere, N.Y., was a founding member of the board of directors of Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women. He had four children, who all attended Yeshiva.

For 25 years a senior partner in the Manhattan accounting firm of Miller-Ellin and Co., Miller flew to London on Tuesday night to attend a business meeting Wednesday that lasted no more than four hours, after which he turned around to come home.

Miller, who also chaired the board of S and S Industries, a Manhattan clothing manufacturing firm, traveled with the company’s executive vice president, Jerry Weston, who also died in the air disaster. Weston, 45, of Baldwin, N.Y., leaves a wife and two teen-age sons.

At Syracuse University in upstate New York, where 36 of its students had been passengers on the plane, Rabbi Charles Sherman of Temple Adath Yeshurun took part in an ecumenical service Wednesday night and held a Jewish memorial service Thursday afternoon.

The school would not release a list of the victims’ names. But the rabbi said he had confirmed the deaths of Lowenstein, Cohen and Shapiro.

Sherman, citing reports that a terrorist bomb may have been responsible for the plane crash, said, “There’s a sense of anger here within the community that this whole terrorism thing plays out this way.”

SEVERAL SWITCHED FLIGHTS

But miraculously, the news was not all tragic. There was, for some, a “miracle” Wednesday, according to Isaac Abraham, a spokesman for the Hasidic community in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood.

Abraham was asked Wednesday to check into the whereabouts of 15 Jews who were supposed to be on Flight 103. Of these, seven Hasidim had inexplicably decided at the last minute to change their flights, he said.

Five of them were already back home in Brooklyn’s Boro Park neighborhood, unbeknownst to people inquiring about them.

In Monsey, N.Y., a representative of the Vishnitz Hasidic community also reported that members of that group had for some unknown reason switched to a different flight.

“A miracle happened here,” said Abraham. “The people who switched didn’t know why they switched. Then, the previous Pan Am flight had a three-hour delay, and so people took that plane, instead.”

One Jew from Williamsburg, Jacob Gold, arrived too late at London’s Heathrow Airport to board Flight 103 and pulled his sister and son from the flight. He instead flew to New York on a British Airways flight that arrived only about an hour later.

Abraham, who went to Kennedy International Airport in New York on Wednesday night with another community representative, Solomon Schnitzler, reported that he was still inquiring into the status of “a yeshiva bocher, but I don’t know his name yet.”