New York Mourns at Funerals for 7 Young Victims of Brooklyn Fire - New York Times

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On Sunday, police barriers stand in front of a home in Midwood, Brooklyn, that was ravaged by fire, which killed seven children in one family. Credit Andrew Renneisen for The New York Times

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, aged 5 through 16, were killed in the fire, which tore through their home in Midwood, Brooklyn, just after midnight on 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 stout brick and stucco two-story 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.

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Under a harsh sun and cold wind on Sunday afternoon, thousands of mourners gathered outside Shomrei Hadas Chapels in Borough Park, Brooklyn, rocking back and forth as they listened to the funeral over crackling speakers. Hundreds more craned their necks around the back of the chapel, where another speaker had been placed.

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Mourners outside Shomrei Hadas Chapels in Brooklyn on Sunday before the funeral service for the seven siblings killed in a fire. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

They overwhelmed the funeral home’s largest chapel, which holds 340 people.

The men sobbed, choking on their tears. Gabriel Sassoon, the father of the victims, his voice an anguished wail, began to eulogize seven of his children shortly before 3 p.m., as throngs of mourners continued to fill the street outside.

“My children were wonderful, they were the best,” he said.

Later Mr. Sassoon, who was away at a religious retreat when the fire broke out, added: “I want to ask my children for forgiveness. I did my best and my wife did her best. Please everybody love your children. It’s the only thing that counts.”

Speaking of his surviving wife and daughter, he asked the community, “Give us the strength to continue.”

Outside, shaking women wept into tissues. Stern men, wearing black coats and black hats, blinked out tears.

Another speaker, from the school the children attended, grappled to give perspective to the tragedy.

“A holocaust has hit our city,” said the speaker, whose name was not immediately available.

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 Monday in Har HaMenuchos cemetery in Jerusalem.

Mr. 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.

Ms. Sassoon and her surviving daughter, Siporah, sustained burns and smoke inhalation and were in critical condition on Sunday. Ms. 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 Ms. Sassoon was on a ventilator and appeared to be in worse condition than her daughter.

On Sunday morning, a small crew of contractors in a white van arrived at the family’s burned home in Midwood and began to hammer plywood over the broken windows. Pedestrians walked by while many drivers passed slowly to peer at the hollowed house. The police set up a metal barricade around the front yard, and an officer stood nearby to keep traffic moving. One person left a bouquet of white roses on the curb.

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A police officer stands outside the home in Midwood, Brooklyn, a day after the deadly fire. Credit Andrew Renneisen for The New York Times

“This is a real tragedy,” said a neighbor, Izzy Abade, 89, as he watched from across the street.

Mr. Abade said he had known Ms. Sassoon since she was a girl and thought her “kind, courteous — a perfect person.”

Hinda Levy, a neighbor, came by and stared. “I’m feeling bad, I’m feeling very, very bad,” she said. “I was up last night, couldn’t sleep.”

Centuries-old Jewish tradition will govern the family’s rituals in death as they did in life. Orthodox Jews traditionally hold starkly simple funeral services. The bodies are washed and dressed in unadorned white linen garments. They are placed in caskets of simple wood without any metal hinges. Surviving family members rend their clothes or wear torn black ribbons on their lapels. Psalms and blessings are recited, and brief eulogies delivered.

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 early 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 on Friday to sundown on Saturday.

Killed in the fire at 3371 Bedford Avenue 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 Ms. 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, Mr. Sedaka heard her try to scream: “Save my children, save my children.”

Mr. Sedaka, 46, said Ms. Sassoon had grown up in Midwood 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, and with him she had eight children.

The family moved to Brooklyn from Israel about two years ago because Ms. 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,” Mr. Sedaka said.

David W. Chen, Angela Macropoulos, Benjamin Mueller, Nate Schweber and Kirk Semple contributed reporting.

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