Children killed in Brooklyn blaze to be buried in Jerusalem

NEW YORK — The tight-knit Orthodox Jewish New York City community where seven siblings perished in a deadly Shabbat fire was still reeling Sunday as funeral services for the children were being prepared.

“I call this not a tragedy but an absolute disaster,” said state Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who represents the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn where the fire broke out early Saturday. The blaze killed three girls and four boys ages 5 to 16, leaving their mother and another child critically injured.

“Everyone’s in utter shock,” Hikind said.

According to the Hebrew media Ynet website, a memorial ceremony was to be held on Sunday in the US after which the children were to be flown to Israel for burial in Jerusalem the next day.

The site quoted a family rabbi who lives in Jerusalem.

The family had moved to New York from Israel two years earlier, according to The New York Times, which quoted a neighbor and relative.

According to Israeli daily Israel Hayom, the family had lived in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Nof.

Authorities identified the Sassoon family victims as girls Eliane, 16, Rivkah, 11, and Sara, 6, and boys David, 12, Yeshua, 10, Moshe, 8 and Yaakob, 5.

Their father Gabi Sassoon was away at a conference at the time of the fire. His wife Gayle Sassoon  managed to escape the blaze with daughter Sipporah, 15.

Investigators believe a hot plate left on a kitchen counter set off the blaze that sent flames up the stairs, trapping the children in their second-floor bedrooms as they slept. Many religious Jews who observe the Sabbath refrain from working, in all forms, from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday — including using electricity.

“They were beautiful little children,” said a tearful neighbor, Rose Insel, remembering how she rewarded the kids with lollipops after they voluntarily shoveled her walk. “It’s unbelievable. It doesn’t seem possible.”

Another neighbor, Agit Abeckaser, called them an “amazing family.”

“It’s very hard,” she said as her husband prayed for the Sassoons at a nearby synagogue Saturday night.

Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro called it the city’s worst fatal fire in recent memory and Mayor Bill de Blasio, after touring the charred home, called the deadly blaze a tragedy for the family, the community and for the city.

A neighbor, Karen Rosenblatt, said she called 911 after seeing flames and smoke billowing from the home. Her husband said he heard “what seemed like a young girl scream, ‘Help me! Help me!'” she said.

Firefighters arrived less than four minutes after the 911 call and discovered the badly burned and distraught mother pleading for help. When they broke in the door, firefighters encountered a hopeless situation — a raging fire that had already spread through the kitchen, dining room, common hall, stairway leading upstairs and the rear bedrooms.

The last residential blaze with a similar death toll happened in 2007, when eight children and an adult were killed in a fire in a 100-year-old building in the Bronx where several African immigrant families lived. Fire officials said an overheated space heater cord sparked that blaze.