One year ago, as they sat in a New Orleans hotel suite watching floodwaters rise and looters raid the stores on Canal Street, life seemed bleak for the Voiron family — Jocelyn and Guy and their three children.

Although they had evacuated their suburban home in advance of Hurricane Katrina, doctors told them leaving town would be too risky for Jocelyn Voiron. The mother of three required high doses of a drug called Remicade to treat her Crohn’s disease, a painful inflammation of the small intestine. They advised her to stay close to a hospital, not realizing that Katrina would devastate the city’s medical centers and prevent her from receiving her vital medication.

Four days after so many others had either fled New Orleans, become trapped in the Convention Center, or lost their lives when the levees broke, the Voirons lived without water or electricity. Jocelyn’s condition became desperate. Finally they managed to leave town in their SUV, escorted past looters and carjackers by Navy SEALs. The family made contact with Rabbi Geoffrey Spector, who had been their rabbi at the Shir Chadash Conservative Congregation in the suburb of Metairie, La.

Just a few weeks before Katrina hit, Spector had moved to Livingston to assume the pulpit at Temple Beth Shalom.

Within an hour after the Voirons phoned, he managed to find them a temporary home, as well as places for Chloe, Seth, and Remy Voiron at the Solomon Schechter Day School of Essex and Union in West Orange.

The rabbi also helped arrange employment for Guy, and medical care for Jocelyn with specialists at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York.

“We’ll just see how well the year progresses and what the future brings,” said Guy Voiron a year ago as the family gathered for an interview in a temple conference room.

‘We’ve settled’

One year later, as they sat around the dining room table of their Livingston home, the Voirons reflected on the bitter memory that was Katrina and how their lives have changed since the storm and its aftermath drove them from their home.

“A year ago today it was survival mode,” said Guy. “I was playing with the kids and putting up a facade, all the while clamoring for what was going to happen next. I had no clue that we’d be in Jersey. But now that we’re here, we’ve settled.”

“The Jewish Family Service [of MetroWest] was wonderful,” said Jocelyn. “They offered us support immediately when we got here. Because of what the kids witnessed, we were really concerned about any posttraumatic stress. They immediately saw counselors who had dealt with the World Trade Center. All of them said, ‘You’ve got great kids and you don’t have anything to worry about.’”

Welcomed warmly by members of the synagogue, the Voirons said they are coping well with their new community.

Guy, who owned a construction business in New Orleans, is now a project manager with Westminster Communities, a Kushner company that is building a 54-unit housing community on the Livingston-West Orange border.

“I’ve been learning how to work for someone else,” he said.

The children have also adjusted. Seth began the ninth grade at Solomon Schechter last September. “Once I got friends, it was not really hard” to adjust to a new school in a new state, he said.

Remy, about to start the fifth grade, still misses his hometown “a lot,” he said. “But my friends came up here to visit, and that made it better.”

As she enters her junior year in high school, Chloe will be thinking a lot about going to college, and her choice is “maybe Tulane,” the leading university in New Orleans.

Yet Jocelyn’s health still weighs on the family.

“In the past year, I’ve had two major operations,” she said. “It’s been great to be here because of the doctors. Most of my doctors in New Orleans never came back after the hurricane. Now, all my doctors are at Mount Sinai and I’m in and out of there a lot. They’re great. They really know what they’re doing. They’re keeping me status quo. Surgery is going to be a regular event, so being here is comforting.”

Unlike the others in her family, Jocelyn has not been able to return to New Orleans in the past year. Her medical condition and her need to be near Mount Sinai prevented her from joining them.

The others went back in April.

“We did not know what to expect when we got there,” said Guy. “Driving there from the airport really looked like a battle zone, like Beirut looks now. Our whole neighborhood was filled with FEMA trailers. We discovered our house needs quite a bit more repair than the reports we had gotten from friends,” he said. “I felt a great sense of loss, and a sense of joy that it was still there. It was overwhelming.”

And they also shared a sense of gratitude.

“We were not next to the levee when it broke, so we weren’t floating or clinging to a tree for our lives. We were without food for a week, eating crumbs, but we didn’t have to loot stores to eat,” he said.

As she absorbed television’s intense revisiting of Katrina during the days surrounding its anniversary, Jocelyn described it as “all surreal.”

Chloe called it a “reality check. I still want to go home,” she said, “but I want to finish high school up here.”

“In my current situation there’s just no way of going back,” said her mother. “You can get me to New York in 45 minutes, but in New Orleans my doctors are not there anymore.

“It’s long-term temporary up here,” she added. “No matter where I am, New Orleans will definitely be home.”

“New Orleans will always be part of our heart,” said her husband, whose slight accent bespeaks his Cajun heritage. “But the folks up here have really been great. I don’t want to come across as saying this isn’t home and people haven’t been wonderful here. I want to make sure everybody understands that we appreciate what they’ve done. We’re not planning on cutting out. We’re going to be here for several years.”