Jewish Action Podcast: Rabbi Moshe Elefant on 9/11
Twenty-five years after 9/11, Rabbi Moshe Elefant, newly appointed CEO of OU Kosher, joins Rabbi Gil Student to remember the morning the OU’s downtown offices went dark. A conversation about memory, vulnerability, and what a world that lost its innocence asks of us before Rosh Hashanah.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, the Orthodox Union’s headquarters sat two blocks from the World Trade Center. Rabbi Moshe Elefant was on the train.
Twenty-five years later, Rabbi Elefant, who was named CEO of OU Kosher this year, succeeding Rabbi Menachem Genack, sits down with Rabbi Gil Student to talk about what he saw from the bridge that morning, how the OU ran out of his house for two weeks while downtown Manhattan was closed, the mashgiach stranded in Colombia as Rosh Hashanah approached, and what Rav Belsky zt”l told the staff during the Aseres Yemei Teshuvah that followed: that some days divide the world into before and after.
The conversation also looks back on Rabbi Elefant’s thirty-nine years at the OU, which he joined on October 1, 1987, and closes with a dvar Torah on bi’arti hakodesh min habayis: serving Hashem with fire, and where that fire is built.
This episode accompanies the Fall 2026 (5787) issue of Jewish Action and was sparked by Anne Neuberger’s essay “Twenty-Five Years After 9/11: A Call to Serve,” now available online. Read the article: https://jewishaction.com/reflections/…
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