Barnegat To Hold 9/11 Remembrance Ceremony Saturday Morning

BARNEGAT, NJ — Barnegat Township will commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9/11 on Saturday beginning at 8 a.m. at the high school football field.

“We’re asking people to assemble at 7:45,” coordinator Fred Rubenstein told Patch.

Rubenstein organized the ceremony after he was appointed by Mayor Albert Bille as chair of Barnegat's September 11th Commemoration Committee.

During the ceremony, members of the police and fire departments will serve as a color guard. All of Barnegat’s emergency services will be in attendance alongside representatives from the Barnegat American Legion and VFW.

Choral groups from the high school will sing the national anthem and "God Bless America."

Speakers at the ceremony include Rubenstein, Mayor Bille and Steve Tatur, a retired Barnegat police officer who was one of the thousands of first responders who rushed to Ground Zero.

At the time of the attacks, Rubenstein was a member of a Mayoral Task Force for transportation, led by then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The group had a meeting scheduled for 9 a.m. at 7 World Trade Center.

Rubenstein said he would have been inside the building during the attacks had his subway train been on time that day.

For the next six months, he worked at Ground Zero during the rescue and recovery operations.

“I remember seeing people either propelled or jumping hundreds of stories in the air and watching the tours implode. It’s things that you don’t forget,” he said. “We have it planned that at 8:46 a.m. precisely, which is the time the first plane struck, we’re going to have a helicopter fly-over. We think it’s going to be symbolic.”

Rubenstein hopes the ceremony will be especially educational for people who were too young to remember the day or not yet born when the attacks happened 20 years ago.

“We’ll be speaking about what we saw. We want people to know from first hand accounts what took place,” Rubenstein said.

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