Rescuers, chaplains honored in Harrisburg
Emergency medical service responders from across Pennsylvania honored their colleagues who died serving their communities as well as those who lost their lives on 9/11.
The ceremony, postponed from last month, was held in Harrisburg on the day of another ceremony as Christian military chaplains honored interfaith colleagues on the occasion of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
The EMS memorial service was supposed to be held Sept. 11, but was postponed due to flooding from Tropical Storm Lee.
More than 150 men and women of Pennsylvania’s EMS gathered at the Capitol to hear the names and pay respects, once more, to colleagues who died on a run.
“When you get an ambulance call, the old jargon was, it’s a run. Using that as, ‘hey, he runs with’ or ‘he ran with.’ If you’re currently working, then you run with that service. And it’s just the jargon we use to say you belong to some organization or another,” said Barry Albertson Thursday.
Albertson, who serves with Suburban EMS in Northampton County and is president of the Ambulance Association of Pennsylvania, said
42 EMS providers from throughout the country died responding to the terrorist attacks in 2001.
The crowd also heard the names of EMS providers from Pennsylvania who died on duty over the past 20 years.
Christian military chaplains Thursday told the stories of 14 Jewish chaplains who died on active duty.
In a little more than a week, a monument to those chaplains will be complete.
The statue will be on Chaplains Hill in Arlington National Cemetery, according to Col. Gregory D’Emma, a chaplain at U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa.
“From there, but for some of the trees, you can see most of Arlington Cemetery,” D’Emma said. “And so these men, as they did in life, they do in death, they watch over their charges.
Four of the chaplains have connections to Pennsylvania, including Rabbi Alexander Goode, a prominent community and faith leader in York.
He died 1943 while serving as aboard an Army ship that sank after being torpedoed by a German submarine.
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