When Hurricane Irma menaced Florida last month, Rabbi Isaac Rosenberg was ready: The assistant rabbi at Miami Beach’s Congregation Ohev Shalom is also a pilot and officer with the US Coast Guard (USCG).
The nation’s oldest continuous seafaring service responded to the crisis in the Florida Keys, where “a large community lives on boats and lots of docks and sailboats are just floating around or lying on sand beaches or piled up together,” Rosenberg wrote in an email to The Times of Israel. Overall, he said, there was “no power, downed power lines and trees, not a pretty site to fly over.”
Nevertheless, he and his District 7 colleagues at Air Station Miami in Opa-locka responded to every call of help.
Help has been sorely needed this hurricane season. Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston, followed by Irma’s impact on the Caribbean and Florida and Maria’s destruction in Puerto Rico — all resulting in a Coast Guard response.
Jewish members of the Coast Guard are helping with the rescue efforts — including Rosenberg in Florida and Ensign Kyle Levy in Puerto Rico.
Their efforts are just the latest story of Jewish heroics in the Coast Guard. Recent retiree Chief Warrant Officer James Todd rescued hundreds during 9/11, and Petty Officer Nathan Bruckenthal became the first Coast Guardsman killed in action since the Vietnam War when he died in a suicide attack during the Iraq War.
Sanctifying God’s name
As Irma approached Florida, Rosenberg and his colleagues secured all buildings on their base, commissioned extended food and water supplies, and maintained generators for backup power.
They stored their aircraft at “brotherhood stations” away from the danger zone. This was done “to be able to respond as soon as the hurricane passed by and start the life saving support,” Rosenberg explained.
Flying is something Rosenberg loves dearly, ever since his childhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He fulfilled his dream by becoming a pilot in 2007.
He joined the Coast Guard in May 2011. As he explained, he “wanted to fly and make a difference and give back to my community and as well make a kiddush Hashem [sanctification of God’s name].”
He wrote, “Every time I walk on the base ramp and hear the engines run, you’ll hear me say that’s the ‘sound of freedom.’”
“So far I have not turned down a flight,” he added, “it’s just a great and relaxed feeling if all is planned right.”
Life became more challenging last April, when in addition to a lifelong mobility challenge, Rosenberg sustained a foot injury while vacationing in Israel. It has kept him on crutches for the last year and a half, and meant less flight time, but he hopes to be off the crutches within a few weeks.
Throughout, he has been resilient. He wrote that he loves challenges and would not give up until they are successfully achieved.
“It is no secret that I have a mobility challenge and often work harder than others to accomplish goals, missions,” he wrote, “but I never allow it to bring me down and often when people first meet me they are not sure what to expect or what my limits are so in the [Coast Guard] we have [Messenger] when you can post a status.”
Rosenberg’s status is: “For most people the sky is the limit, for me the sky is home.”
He wrote that the Coast Guard has been very accommodating to his mobility issues, “but with limitations for my safety. And as well I have an assigned golf cart to get around on base.”
Judaism on the high seas
Ensign Levy is now dealing with the same types of hurricane challenges that Rosenberg faced.
A recent graduate of the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, Levy is serving aboard the cutter Forward outside San Juan, assisting with hurricane relief from Maria.
“I think the USCG has done an outstanding job in responding to the recent hurricanes,” Levy wrote in an email. “The Coast Guard has worked with several other organizations to bring relief and aid to the areas and people affected by these disasters.
“USCGC Forward in particular has sent its attached helicopter to the scene of several of the hurricanes to conduct damage assessment as well as sending teams from the crew to assist with the clean-up of debris and as liaisons for the Coast Guard to the Incident Command center.”
In his four months to date, Levy has had to learn quickly. “I am still fairly new to the Coast Guard, so I do not have many experiences at all, but I would have to say the most challenging part of my job so far has been transitioning from academy life to being on a boat,” he wrote.
“The two are very different worlds, and there are a lot of things that I had to learn and still have to learn in order to be successful,” he added.
Levy was deployed during the High Holidays, but was able to celebrate them on his own time.
“The command and crew are very sensitive to my needs as a member of the Jewish faith and are always willing to work with me and my schedule to accommodate me,” he wrote.
He noted that, “Being the humanitarian service it is, the Coast Guard is very good at helping people, including its own people.”
The Coast Guard has also provided humanitarian assistance in the wake of terrorism.
Sixteen years ago, James Todd led a crew of just seven people on the cutter Hawser to help rescue hundreds during 9/11. The rescue was initiated after Todd learned that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.
We responded. We did not wait for orders to be told. Now it was a search and rescue case
“We responded,” Todd said. “We did not wait for orders to be told. Now it was a search and rescue case.”
It became more critical after they learned that a second plane had hit the Twin Towers. The Hawser joined a multi-vessel rescue transporting people off Manhattan to Ellis Island.
“People were in shock,” he remembered. “I told them, ‘You’re not going to work today. You get a free pass.’” A federal court judge needed assurance that court would not be in session.
And, Todd recalled, “One guy from the mayor’s office said, ‘I’m commandeering this boat for the City of New York.’ I said, ‘You’re on federal government [property]. We’re not subservient.’ He was physically thrown off.”
Some were simply scared. “They wanted to get off the island,” Todd said. “They were thankful… It was a whole range of human emotions.”
After their rescue work, he and his crew worked into the next morning responding to bomb threats — 72 alone on the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges. Over the next eight days, they dealt with threats at the George Washington and Tappan Zee bridges and the nuclear power plant at Indian Point.
“They rose to the occasion,” Todd said. “I’m very proud of my crew.”
Todd’s own career began serendipitously. Divorced and job-hunting in his native North Carolina, he saw a recruitment announcement while eating a sandwich at a Subway restaurant. He would rise to chief warrant officer over his 30-year career.
For two years, he served as Hillel advisor at the Coast Guard Academy. He told students to appreciate the matzoh-pizza served on Passover and other ways in which the school reached out to its Jewish students. Life at sea, with kosher food stored next to pork bellies in the kitchen, would be much different.
“You make a decision about how you are going to live,” he said. “It’s between you and God. Me, I’m doing this so America remains free” — and so others could practice their religion. And when his time of service would end, “another Jew would stand up to keep America safe, a democratic country.”
You make a decision about how you are going to live. It’s between you and God. Me, I’m doing this so America remains free
He retired on May 5 as a 100 percent disabled veteran, in a ceremony in Louisville, Kentucky, where he lives with his wife Theresa — whom he met in the Coast Guard — and their son Joseph, whom he is preparing for a bar mitzvah at Temple Beth Shalom. The temple’s rabbi, Beth Jacobowitz Chottiner, served as the chaplain for the ceremony.
“I did not spend Thanksgiving at home my first five years in the Coast Guard,” Todd reflected. “I was always deployed somewhere. It’s the same thing with Jewish holidays. … I put some of it off to the side and made that great sacrifice.”
The supreme sacrifice
On April 24, 2004, Petty Officer Nathan Bruckenthal made the supreme sacrifice. “The Coast Guard guys had finished their job for the day,” Bruckenthal’s father, Eric Bruckenthal, said of that day in Khawr Al Amaya, in the northern Arabian Gulf. “They did what they had to do, guarding an oil platform.”
But a suspect vessel had been maneuvering in the area’s no-travel zone, and both Bruckenthal and fellow Coast Guardsman Joe Ruggiero noticed from their rubber boat. As they moved on the vessel, it increased speed.
“Nate, Joe, and six other guys intercepted the boat,” Eric Bruckenthal said. “They saved 110 lives on the USS Firebolt and 250 people on the oil platform. There was a suicide bomber on the vessel. He blew himself up.”
The attack killed Navy Petty Officers Michael Pernaselli and Christopher Watts instantly. While Nathan Bruckenthal made it to a hospital, he succumbed to his wounds.
The attack occurred weeks after he learned that he would become a father. His wife, Pattie Bruckenthal, gave birth to their daughter, Harper Natalie, on November 19, 2004. Mother and daughter now live in Pattie Bruckenthal’s native Sweden.
Bruckenthal was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. “He had never been bar mitzvahed,” his father recalled. “He expressed a desire to be bar mitzvahed. At his funeral, he was bar mitzvahed. He was buried with a tallit and his uniform… There’s a big Jewish star on his tombstone in Arlington. He acknowledged that. It’s the way he wanted to go.”
He was posthumously honored with a Purple Heart and a Gold Star with Valor, as well as a Global War on Terror Expeditionary Medal with oak leaf and a Combat Service Ribbon. Next summer, Eric Bruckenthal anticipates that a new Coast Guard cutter named after his son will be launched.
“We lost a son, but gained 40,000 other surrogate sons and daughters [in the Coast Guard],” he said. “There’s sort of some solace there.”
The future of the Jewish guardsmen
At the Coast Guard Academy, the next generation of Jews in the Coast Guard is looking to make an impact.
“I joined the Coast Guard because I identified with the humanitarian missions,” academy Hillel President and Second Class Cadet Jill Friedman wrote in an email. “I love how we execute the mission we train for [every day] and it has a direct impact on the people we serve.”
Hillel Vice President Quinn Levy, a Third Class Cadet and brother of Ensign Kyle Levy, wrote in a separate email that “I was inspired to come to the Academy because I wanted to serve my country by helping people and doing my part to do something for the greater good.”
As part of the relatively small Jewish population at the Academy, Friedman and Levy are active in Hillel, which meets twice a month for lunches of challah, matzoh ball soup “and other foods depending on the holiday we’re nearing,” Friedman wrote.
And they join the entire student body in following the Coast Guard’s response to the recent hurricanes.
“We have been organizing drives to collect supplies and money to donate to the hurricane relief,” Friedman wrote. “One of my classmates came up with a program to scan social media for people posting they are in need of rescue. Over 100 cadets volunteered to help with this, and we were able to provide information to units working in the affected areas of people in need of rescue and where assistance was needed the most.”
And, as Levy noted, “The Coast Guard trains every day and is very experienced in these efforts. Even so, it was still awe-inspiring.”