Terror survivor now fights for victims
Fifteen years later, Sarri Singer still recalls the unnerving quiet that followed the bomb explosion on the bus she was riding in Israel.
“It’s a deafening silence,” says the New Jersey native. That day, June 11, 2003, Singer, then in her 20s, was headed for dinner in Jerusalem with a friend when a Hamas teenager boarded her public bus and tried to kill them all.
Had she not closed her eyes right before the bomb exploded, Singer says, she might have been blinded. Instead, that explosion opened her eyes to the suffering around her. In 2012, nine years after the blast that nearly killed her, she founded Strength to Strength, an organization to help terror victims around the world — “innocent people who were out to dinner or on their way home from work” — never feel forgotten.
“The goal is to give strength and support to one another — survivor to survivor,” says Singer, the daughter of New Jersey state Sen. Robert Singer (R-District 30), who in the years following her attack was invited to speak at victims’ conferences and inspired to help other victims with their long-term needs.
Her nonprofit gives those affected by terrorism the support and services required for healing with therapeutic programs and weekend retreats.
The program also unites teens from the US and Israel, as well as Northern Ireland, Argentina, Spain and France, whose lives have been touched by trauma. Every spring, the organization brings them together in New York City for group counseling and to tell their stories to the United Nations.
Strength to Strength will have a support staff in London in July to assist those affected by the 2005 bombing of the city’s Underground transit system.
“There’s no rhyme or reason [to] why people all around me didn’t make it, but I’m still here,” says Singer, who moved to the Upper West Side 10 years ago and whose full-time job is director of career services at Manhattan’s Touro College.
Physical therapy helped heal her left shoulder, which was hit by shrapnel, and allowed her to move again after a broken clavicle severely limited her range of motion. Even so, 15 years later, “whenever an attack happens . . . it brings me back to that day,” she says. “An attack happens in an instant, but the impact lasts a lifetime.”