Community attends funeral for 7 killed in fire
Associated Press
NEW YORK
An ultra-Orthodox Jewish community shattered by the deaths of seven siblings in a house fire carried out their funerals Sunday, a day after a hot plate left on for the Sabbath is believed to have sparked the fire that killed them.
The tragedy had some neighborhood Jews reconsidering the practice of keeping hot plates on for the Sabbath, a common modern method of obeying tradition prohibiting use of fire on the holy day.
The bodies of the children from the Sassoon family, age 5 to 16, were to be flown to Israel after the funeral for a prompt burial. Flames engulfed their two-story, brick-and-wood home in Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood early Saturday, likely after a hot plate left on a kitchen counter set off the fire that trapped the children and badly injured their mother and another sibling, investigators said.
The service began with prayers in Hebrew, and shrieks could be heard trough speakers that broadcast it outside to several hundred people who gathered inside and on the streets.
“They were so pure,” the children’s father, Gabriel Sassoon, said during a eulogy Sunday. “My wife, she came out fighting.”
Both his surviving wife and a daughter — Gayle Sassoon and 14-year-old Siporah Sassoon — remained in critical condition on respirators.