NEW YORK -- A family and a city mourned on Sunday the heart-wrenching sight of a row of seven child-size coffins as funeral services were held for the victims of the deadliest fire in New York since 2007.
Seven Orthodox Jewish siblings, ages 5 through 16, were killed in the fire, which tore through their home in Brooklyn just after midnight Saturday when a hot plate left on overnight in the kitchen to keep food warm for the Sabbath malfunctioned.
The fire left behind a charred shell on Bedford Avenue in the place of the family's home, and it also left a neighborhood grieving. The mother of the children, Gayle Sassoon, survived, leaping from a second-story window in a shroud of thick smoke, as did her second-oldest daughter, Siporah, 15. The rest of the family's eight children were trapped by fire in the home's second-floor bedrooms and could not escape.
Jewish tradition requires that funerals be held as soon as possible after death, and the funeral services were Sunday afternoon at Shomrei Hadas Chapels in Borough Park, Brooklyn, a sanctuary that serves the Orthodox Jewish community.
The father of the children, Gabriel Sassoon, who was attending a spiritual retreat and was not home during the fire, was expected to deliver a eulogy, as were one or two other leaders of the Sephardic Jewish community. Organizers anticipated the thousands of mourners who easily overwhelmed the funeral home's largest chapel, which can hold 340 people.
To handle the overflow, loudspeakers were set up to broadcast the service to surrounding streets, owners of the funeral home said. After the service, a funeral procession will head to Kennedy International Airport and the coffins will be placed on a flight to Israel, where the family lived until about two years ago. The children, community leaders said, would be buried today in Har HaMenuchos cemetery in Jerusalem.
Gabriel Sassoon and other relatives and friends were to accompany the remains to Israel, community leaders said. But the two survivors of the fire would not be making the trip.
Gayle Sassoon and Siporah sustained burns and smoke inhalation and were in critical condition Sunday. Sassoon was at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, which has a hyperbaric oxygen chamber for burn victims. Siporah was at Staten Island University Hospital North. Two cousins arriving to visit Siporah on Sunday afternoon said that Sassoon was on a ventilator and appeared to be in worse condition than her daughter.
Fire officials said that the fire had been sparked by the hot plate on the first floor of the home, and that the flames had raced up an open stairway to where the family slept. There did not appear to be smoke detectors on the first or second floor of the house, the officials said.
Mayor Bill de Blasio went to the scene Saturday afternoon and walked inside the house with firefighters. "This is a tragedy that has very few examples to look at; it's so painful; it's so difficult," he said.
Keeping an electric hot plate on or a burner on the stove lit on a low flame is common practice in the Orthodox Jewish community to keep food warm for the Sabbath without violating traditional prohibitions on lighting a flame during the day of rest, which lasts from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.
Killed in the fire at 3371 Bedford Ave. were sisters Eliane, 16; Rivkah, 11; and Sara, 6; and brothers David, 12; Yeshua, 10; Moshe, 8; and Yaakob, 5. Gayle Sassoon was separated from her children by the flames. The police said she had stumbled to a cousin's house across the street to plead for help after escaping, and then collapsed.
There, a neighbor and friend of Sassoon, Victor Sedaka, found her "black, charred," he said. "You couldn't even tell who she was."
With a voice so hoarse it was barely audible, Sedaka heard her try to scream: "Save my children, save my children."
Sedaka, 46, said Sassoon had grown up in Brooklyn as a moderately religious girl and later became more religious and moved to Israel. There she met her husband, who is also a Sephardic Jew.
The family moved to Brooklyn from Israel about two years ago because Gayle Sassoon wanted to reconnect with her large extended family, he said. She moved into the house where she grew up, owned by her parents, and socialized mainly with her extended family. Her older children helped care for the younger ones.
"They were a unit," Sedaka said.
Information for this article was contributed by David W. Chen, Angela Macropoulos, Benjamin Mueller, Nate Schweber and Kirk Semple of The New York Times.
A Section on 03/23/2015