Those of us of a certain age remember where we were exactly 56 years ago today, on July 20, 1969 when American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (now 95 years old) stepped out of the lunar module Eagle of Apollo 11 and put their feet into the soft dust of the moon and made history.
I was a 19 year-old college student traveling with a friend through Europe. Early in the morning (European time) my buddy and I stood on a sidewalk looking through a large glass window of a shop in Florence, Italy with a crowd of people watching a small black and white television set tuned to an event watched by 650 million people around the world (3.619 billion of the then world population).
The historian Heather Cox Richardson posted today on YouTube the highlights of the moon landing project begun in 1957 when the Soviets sent the first human into space and then in 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced that the United States would put “a [person] on the moon” by the end of the decade, a task that was unimaginable at the time, enormously expensive, and very controversial.
Here is Dr. Richardson’s Youtube. If you were alive then, watched the landing and remember anything about it, please share in the comments.
Rabbi John Rosove's Blog 
John, thanks for bringing back this exciting memory. I was in high school and was attending summer camp in Saratoga CA at what was then Camp Swig. All the campers gathered in the recreation hall to watch the grainy, historic black and white images on a small tv placed atop a tall platform. We were sprawled out across the floor waiting for that first step. As Armstrong spoke those inspiring words, the room erupted into cheers and we all understood we had witnessed history in the making.
Really brought back memories. I was a rising junior traveling