Remembering Peter Adam Feidelberg

Peter Adam Feidelberg of Hoboken, NJ was the kind of man who would happily participate in two wedding celebrations with the same woman for the sake of accommodating their mutual friends on different sides of the U.S./Canadian border.

Peter was born in Cote Saint-Luc, Quebec. He graduated from Bialik High School in Montreal, smiling all the way through it. Doing undergraduate work at Concordia University, he made fast friends and a favorable impression on his business school teachers.

Peter was also a Theta Sigma fraternity brother. One imagines that he picked that organization rather than more generic or transnational groups like Tau Kappa Epsilon or the Concordia University Pagan Society because he appreciated its local roots.

Roots mattered enough to Peter for him to find and contact a man in Maryland who shared his unusual name, on the chance that they might be distant relatives. He never made it out to Annapolis to see the man with whom he’d talked, but he did backpack through parts of Germany, Turkey, and Costa Rica when those opportunities arose.

As might be expected from someone fond of adventurous travel, Peter’s zest for life also found athletic expression in mountain biking, skiing, and scuba diving, not to mention team sports like rugby and basketball.

Peter and his wife were both alumni of Concordia University, but they didn’t know each other there. He fell hard in love with Meredith Ewart, the future Mrs. Feidelberg, when both had graduated from college and were working in Montreal. Photos of the two of them invariably show that Peter, for all the “strong and silent” persona he kept behind wire-frame glasses and close-cropped hair, also had a big Dennis Quaid kind of grin. The two of them found jobs as consultants for Aon Corporation, a Fortune 500 insurance brokerage and consulting company that maintained offices on the 104th and several other floors of World Trade Center 2. A year after moving with Meredith to the New York metropolitan area, Peter ran in the New York City Marathon.

Their grieving relatives and friends must be forgiven if they don’t have the emotional distance to see it that way, but each was granted the small mercy of not having to outlive the other. Peter and his beloved wife were both killed in the attacks of September 11, 2001. He was 34.

This seems appropriate:

Magnified and sanctified be God's great name in the world which He has created according to His will. May He establish His kingdom soon, in our lifetime. Let us say: Amen. May His great name be praised to all eternity. Hallowed and honored, extolled and exalted, adored and acclaimed be the name of the Holy One, though He is above all the praises, hymns, and songs of adoration which men can utter. Let us say: Amen. May God grant abundant peace and life to us and to all Israel. Let us say: Amen. May He who ordains harmony in the universe grant peace to us and to all Israel. Let us say: Amen.

And from my own derivative tradition, for Peter, Meredith, and all other non-aggressors who died that day:

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon them.
May their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed
through the mercy of God,
rest in peace. Amen.

This tribute is part of the 2,996 Project. For other such tributes, see these blogs. For the tribute to Meredith Ewart, check with Amka at Testing the Cultural Divide., specifically at this heartfelt and well-researched post of hers.