Mike, Jacob, Galina and Joe Leybovich together at a family gathering, photographed a couple of years ago.

Twenty-Five Years: My Family on September 11th

September 11, 2026

My father Mike, my brother Jacob, my mother Galina, and me. This is us a couple of years ago — not from that time.

My parents came to New York a few years before my older brother Jacob was born in '82. My pops — Mikhail, everybody called him Mike — worked construction and eventually started his own elevator repair and installation company with his business partner, another immigrant. We lived in Brooklyn and Queens. Every building we serviced was in Manhattan. That's the shape of my whole childhood right there: home is the outer boroughs, work is the island.

They didn't come alone and they didn't stay alone. Working with the organization that helped them get out, my parents put up something like sixty other Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union in our home. Family, friends, people they'd never met. In one three-month stretch — the same stretch I was born in — there were people sleeping in every room we had. My father picked up a nickname out of that and it stuck for years: Moses.

I was born in 1990. So on September 11, 2001, I was a kid at a grade school yeshiva, and my father and my brother were somewhere in downtown Manhattan with their tools.

The dream

Either the day before or the day after — I genuinely can't place it anymore — I had a dream. I was looking at the skyline from my school. A big metal blimp was drifting, slow, and it crashed into either the towers or the Empire State Building. That's all I've got. It's a hazy memory of a dream, twenty-five years old, and I'm not going to pretend it was a premonition. I'm just telling you it's in there with everything else and I've never been able to get it out.

The classroom

The morning of, my teacher walked into the room and every bit of blood was gone from her face. She told us something bad had happened and that our parents would be coming to pick us up.

That's what scared me. Not the sentence — the timing. It was maybe 9:00, 9:30 in the morning. Nobody's parents come at 9:30.

Then I waited. All day. Longer than a normal school day. The teachers spent it trying to explain to a room of kids what had happened and why, which is a thing I now understand was impossible and they tried anyway. My family worked in Manhattan. I kept telling myself everyone was fine, but I couldn't picture what "fine" would even look like, because I couldn't picture what they'd be doing. Nothing was working. Kids didn't have cell phones. I was eleven and I had no information and no way to get any.

Here's what I found out later.

My mother, Galina

Two years before this, my mother worked in the World Trade Center.

I don't remember the company exactly — an insurance company, I think. What I know is that she was let go about two years before September 11th, 2001, and I have never once in twenty-five years been able to file that firing under "bad thing that happened to our family."

My mom is a programmer, which is its own story. She trained as a music major in Belarus. When my parents left the Soviet Union they couldn't carry credentials out with them, so she got herself hired without the paper and learned COBOL on the job. She wrote code for insurance companies and for Citibank. A woman who came here able to read sheet music taught herself to read a mainframe, because that was the door that was open.

So on the morning of the 11th she was not in that building. She was in Queens, with a minivan.

And my mom spent that day driving people home.

She had our green Nissan minivan and she was carpooling strangers out of Manhattan into Queens and Brooklyn — pulling over for people stranded at bus stops, filling the van, driving them, going back.

Nobody asked her to. I know that because I watched her do the exact same thing every time since. Sandy. Irene. The blackouts. Every time the city broke, my mother got in the van.

She is still the nicest person I know. I try to make her proud of who I turned into, daily. If there's anything of value in me, it came out of the driver's seat of that minivan.

My father, Mikhail, and my brother Jacob

Jacob had dropped out of school by then and was working with my dad. That morning they were on a loft elevator downtown — the kind of old building you find on Broadway or down around Chinatown, where the freight elevators are older than everybody riding them.

Jacob was in the shaft when he heard my father screaming in his broken English:

"Jacob come quick — a plane just flew into the Empire State Building!"

You have to understand my dad. He worked on so many buildings in Manhattan that if a building was tall enough, he just called it the Empire State Building. All of them.

So my brother comes running out, looks north through the loft window at the Empire State Building — fine. Sky around it — fine. Then he turns to face downtown and sees the tower burning.

From their angle they never saw the second plane hit. They thought an engine or the fuel from the first plane had fallen and struck the second tower. That was their understanding of the morning for a while: one accident, spreading.

Eventually they got out of the city and came and got me.

The ride home took two hours. Northern Boulevard to Middle Village. Two hours. That was unheard of, even to an eleven-year-old who didn't know anything about traffic.

I remember the sky. Over the spot where the towers had been, it was black, and the doom of it just hung there and lingered. Apocalyptic is the honest word. That was the exact moment my childhood ended and all of us were made to grow up fast.

The thumb

My father never missed a day of work. I want to explain what that means.

A metal sheet once snapped off a crane and took off the top half of his thumb. He didn't cry and he didn't complain. He went to the doctor, and the doctor told him, "Well, we can cut your toe off and attach it to your hand." My father — who has never in his life passed up a joke — said, "But then my hand will smell like my foot."

He went to work the next day.

Three days in da pit

I can't remember if it was the 12th or the 13th. Elevators in Manhattan still needed service, so my dad, my uncle Alec and my brother were in the van driving into the city to work.

The radio said they were taking volunteers at Ground Zero. They specifically needed welders.

Jacob was nineteen. He argued with my father to let him go, and when the arguing didn't resolve fast enough, he just opened the door and jumped out of the van and started walking toward Ground Zero.

My dad looked at Alec and said: What are you waiting for — go with him!

Alec chased him down the street screaming at him in Belarusian to turn around. He didn't turn around. Alec followed him anyway.

At the volunteer gathering point they were told to wait. They waited for hours. It started to look like they weren't getting in. My brother was afraid he'd be turned away for being too young — but he also knew they needed welders and men who could work.

So he didn't sign the book.

He found a gate nobody was watching and went through it, Alec still on him. They got to the corner of the site and hit a wall: the debris had blocked every land entrance. The only way in was by water, through a dock on the Hudson. There was a ferry boarding — firefighters.

Jacob spotted a man with a fire marshal's badge. He memorized him. Then he got on the boat, Alec in tow.

On the ferry Alec started in on him again, and the argument got loud enough that the firefighters noticed. They surrounded the two of them. Who are you. How did you get here.

And my brother said: "Ahh, there was a guy with a fire marshal's badge, he said he needs two welders on this boat — stat!"

It worked. They let them into Ground Zero. He worked three days in what he has always called da pit.

I'm not going to speak about what he saw there. That's his.

What I will say is that he kept quiet the whole time — deliberately — because the one thing he was afraid of was being identified and sent home. He had FUCK BIN LADEN written across his construction hat in sharpie. That was the amount of talking he did.

There was a Filipino guy down there he worked alongside. They took one photo together. One.

Why I'm telling you about the photo

That photo matters now in a way nobody could have predicted in 2001.

My brother has never been able to prove he was there. Not for the health programs, not for the dust, not for what it did to his head. The way it works, you need somebody who isn't family to state that you were there, or some other form of evidence. And the two things that would have been that evidence — signing the book, being in pictures — are the exact two things a scared nineteen-year-old deliberately avoided so they wouldn't throw him out.

So: if you were down there, or you know someone who was, and you have a photo — especially of or with a Filipino volunteer, or of a guy in a hat that says FUCK BIN LADEN — please get in touch. joe@budcade.com, or through our contact page. Twenty-five years is a long shot. We're taking it anyway.

Coming home

Three days later he came through our door covered head to toe in dust.

A couple of years after that, my brother went to prison. Two and a half years — half his sentence — for running a multimillion-dollar rave and drug operation across four states.

I'm not going to perform shame about that, so let me be straight with you about where I stand. I don't think my brother is a bad man for it. I think the bad thing was a set of laws that decided which substances an adult is allowed to put in their own body and then built cages for everyone on the wrong side of that line. He threw parties and sold people things they wanted. The state called that a crime. I've never been able to.

His service at Ground Zero counted for something in front of the judge — which tells me the judge could see it too.

Cannabis is legal in New York now. I build a business around it in the open, with my name on it. Same thing, different decade. That's the entire difference, and people lost years of their lives inside it.

What they taught me

Galina taught me undying compassion and a fearless determination to help her community — specifically the kind nobody asks you for. Nobody flagged her down. She just went.

She also handed me the two sentences I still run my life on. Whatever you want to be, be a good one. And your best is always good enough. I've never needed a third.

Mike taught me the other half: you show up. Not "you show up when it's convenient" — you show up with half a thumb, you show up on September 12th, you make the joke on the way in so nobody has to feel bad for you, and you do the work. He just never gave any of us an example of doing it differently. I run a business now and I can trace most of what's good about how I run it back to a man for whom "I'm tired" was not a sentence.

Jacob taught me the part nobody puts on a poster: sometimes the rule is in the way of the right thing, and you go around it.

He should not have been on that ferry. He didn't sign the book, he went through a gate nobody was watching, and he said a sentence on a boat that was not strictly true. If he'd followed the process he would have gone home, and three days of a nineteen-year-old welder's hands would not have been down there. I'm not going to stand here twenty-five years later and tell you he should have waited his turn.

But I've also seen the bill. He can't prove he was there, because the exact same instinct that got him in — don't sign, don't be in pictures, don't get noticed — is what left him with no record. Going around the fence works right up until the day you need somebody to confirm you were on the other side of it.

So the lesson I carry isn't "follow the rules" and it isn't "break them." It's that a rule is a thing a person wrote down, and you're allowed to ask who wrote it and what it's actually for. Some fences go up around a disaster site because the paperwork can't move as fast as the disaster. Some fences go up around what a grown adult does with their own body. Neither one of those is the same thing as right and wrong.

You'll pay for going around either one. Decide what you're willing to pay for.

That's my whole family in one sentence, honestly. Galina went around a rule that said you need a piece of paper before you're allowed to be good at something. Mike went around the one that says a man with a bandaged hand stays home. Jacob went around a fence.